Passions unleashed
7 Sept 2014 4:18 AM IST
Through his first show, Kalita wishes to confront the viewer with the prosaic reality of human relationships in this era of unapologetic individualism, reckless consumerism, and overbearing technology. In Amour Fou, the evolving socio-economic structures and the accompanying breakdown of traditional systems of values and beliefs have resulted in a new stage where relationships become areas of intense power struggle.
‘Love’ and ‘Power’ were seen as antithetical forces, but today they seem to have become nearly synonymous with each other; the ‘power of love’ has become overshadowed by the ‘love of power’. Thus our relationships become battlegrounds, and we are reduced to a conflation of the contradictory roles of enemy and friend - asserting one’s domination and consenting to, but also demanding the other's subjugation. Human selfishness has become the presiding deity of our time, replacing the metaphysical ideal of a pure and selfless love.
While Lachrymoscope is a work that indirectly encompasses a number of these considerations, Often I miss you is a dreamlike masturbatory fantasy which points to solitary sexual pleasure, but also functions as its object-cause in its evocation of the fragile, evanescent moment of the imagined or recalled sexual encounter itself and the material or psychic residue or trace that it leaves behind.
Kalita tries to delineate the existence of a human dilemma, the one that subdues the unconscious desire of longing-ness by a blanket of self-gratifying ego in the work Beneath His Room Lies a Cell. I never promised you a rose garden exemplifies this in a fashion by running the actual sequence of events in a loop, where the object is continually haunted and undermined by the very real threat of its immanent dissolution, but where the promise of wholeness still holds, as a distant possibility that is also its impossible horizon.
Inevitably of life leads Kalita to question the credibility of the possibility of (sexual) love and relationships in our time.
‘Love’ and ‘Power’ were seen as antithetical forces, but today they seem to have become nearly synonymous with each other; the ‘power of love’ has become overshadowed by the ‘love of power’. Thus our relationships become battlegrounds, and we are reduced to a conflation of the contradictory roles of enemy and friend - asserting one’s domination and consenting to, but also demanding the other's subjugation. Human selfishness has become the presiding deity of our time, replacing the metaphysical ideal of a pure and selfless love.
While Lachrymoscope is a work that indirectly encompasses a number of these considerations, Often I miss you is a dreamlike masturbatory fantasy which points to solitary sexual pleasure, but also functions as its object-cause in its evocation of the fragile, evanescent moment of the imagined or recalled sexual encounter itself and the material or psychic residue or trace that it leaves behind.
Kalita tries to delineate the existence of a human dilemma, the one that subdues the unconscious desire of longing-ness by a blanket of self-gratifying ego in the work Beneath His Room Lies a Cell. I never promised you a rose garden exemplifies this in a fashion by running the actual sequence of events in a loop, where the object is continually haunted and undermined by the very real threat of its immanent dissolution, but where the promise of wholeness still holds, as a distant possibility that is also its impossible horizon.
Inevitably of life leads Kalita to question the credibility of the possibility of (sexual) love and relationships in our time.
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