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House of opaque water recreates the drama of life and loss in the Sundarbans

Ranbir Kaleka's 'House of Opaque Water', part narrative documentary and part installation, recreates the drama of life and loss in the Sundarbans delta that is facing the brunt of climate change, says Gargi Gupta

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Contemporary artist Ranbir Kaleka
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A boat bobs in the water, its triangular bow filling the middle screen of the three-channel video. The two screens on either side are filled with shots of water, a wide expanse extending up to the horizon. A man dressed in a lungi and long white shirt, Sheikh Lalmohan, the voiceover identifies, is sitting at the bow's head and says, "This is my home; 50-60 bighas, the river swallowed it up in one night... my grandfather lost everything in the flood. This used to be agricultural land; can you believe it?" Except there's nothing to see where he points to just water, its surface glinting in the sun and rippling with waves.

In the next shot, Lalmohan is drawing a circle on the wet clay on the bank, with several smaller circles inside topped with daubs of wet clay. "Masjid", "banyan tree where the cows grazed", "tree which fell in a storm", "school" and "path that leads to our friend's house"— the subtitles alongside identify each circle as the soundtrack plays sounds of playing children.

Contemporary artist Ranbir Kaleka's House of Opaque Water is a work of video art, part narrative documentary and part installation, about the people who live in the low-lying islands in the Sundarbans delta which are being eroded and swallowed by the rising water in the surrounding seas as a result of climate change. It has been chosen as one of the finalists for the Signature Art Prize, awarded once every three years by the Asia Pacific Brewery Foundation and Singapore Art Museum to "compelling visual artworks" from the region.

The three-channel video made quite an impact when it was first shown at the Kochi Muziris Biennale in 2012. Projected on a 40-ft wall at the picturesque Aspinwall House, an old Dutch property, it was an immersive viewing experience, recreating the drama of life and loss, of memory and attempts to reclaim the past. At one point, Kaleka gets the villagers to reconstruct miniature clay sculptures of their homes. These rudimentary shapes, lit from within, are then immersed in water — reminiscent of the visarjan, or ritual immersion, of the idols at the end of Durga Puja festivities. But unlike the deity who returns every year, there's no coming back for these people who have shifted to a nearby island.

Kaleka, among the top rung of artists today, combines fine draughstmanship with conceptual/critical acuity — rare in the practice of today's generation, where you generally find one to the exclusion of the other. If he isn't as well known as some of his contemporaries, it is only because he exhibits so little of his work, and even less in India. The 61-year-old artist has had only seven solo shows through his nearly 40-year-long career — though he's been part of several important shows at museums from Guangdong to Tel Aviv, Shanghai, and biennales from Vancouver to Sydney.

In the last 10 years, mixed media has become the mainstay of Kaleka's practice. A number of these are digital photographs, altered to open a space of ambiguity that lies beneath their transparent realism. Better-known yet are his "projections" on paintings, where the still image seems to magically "move", an effect Kaleka creates by projecting moving images on it.

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