‘Desh Pardesh’: An exhibition about finding a home in the world

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Viewing He was a Good Man, a multimedia work by artist Ranbir Kaleka, is like embarking on a journey through sound and time. The artist has created an immersive experience by projecting a single-channel video onto an earlier oil painting, titled Man Threading Needle, which showed a middle-aged man completely focused on the needle in his hand.Even though the image of the man remains fixed, you feel like the visual has transformed and evolved as the videoscapes projected on it change.

In one scene, shadows engage with the figure; in another, as bridges come into view in the video, it feels like the man in the painting has traveled a hundred miles. Such works form a part of Kaleka’s micro solo, Fear of the New Dawn, on view at Stir Gallery. As the term denotes, a micro solo features a selection of an artist’s works, focused on the exploration of a specific medium and material.

Kaleka’s selection is part of a broader show, Desh Pardesh, At Home in the World, the Epilogue, and shares space with two other shows—Techne Disruptors 3.0 and Queer as Free. The former is a two-person showcase in which artists Natasha Singh and Harshit Agrawal explore AI as a tool in art making to delve into cultural and historical narratives. The idea is to highlight variation in conceptuality and materiality of AI-generated artwork, which is different from the norm.

The works also look at how technology can imbibe South Asian aesthetics. The second, Queer as Free, is a group show in which ten artists such as Daina Mohapatra, Balbir Kishan, Sawan Taank and Dr Mandakini Devi create a vision of aesthetic possibilities through a “queer feminist postcolonial gaze" centred around the Global South. “Drawing on a diverse