Private: RV RV (Ravi Varma Recreational Vehicle) A Moveable Feast at a Table of Discontents

David Dasharath Kalal / Harlem, New York, USA — Okt 24, 2016

Portfolio: Kalal-work-sample-with-links

A body of iconic, ironic objects, animations, clips and fragments in all formats that merge and disperse the relentlessly duplicated and endlessly familiar Raja Ravi Varma paintings, prints and oleographs from the 19th century – presented not as a series but as something more like a magnetic field.

A body of imagery and sound worked over and under till it becomes uncoupled from conventional frameworks that present history and mythos as categories and hierarchies. The works will orbit each other in to build outsider habitats and allow transnational selves to glimmer into being – relying on poetic syntax, beauty (and its consort, ugliness), exchanges of difference, and even inscriptions of the self — no longer as a moving target.

Not data, but coding. Images and noises become inhabited, transformed, played, used up, abandoned. In-between spaces of magic, sex, love and deep narrative – that lie outside languages of fixed meaning and function best when discreet and peripheral.

David Dasharath Kalal’s media work trips the light diasporique: from Noor Jehan to Norah Jones, Marxist Economists to Merle Oberon, Electroclash to Gayatri Mantra mashups. He has been widely exhibited including at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, the National Gallery of Canada, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Allmänna Galleriet, 3LD Art & Technology Center Siddarth Gautam Festival and Nature Morte Gallery in New Delhi.

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