• Ranbir Kaleka, He Was A Good Man, 2007/08, single-channel video projection with sound on 45 x 60 in acrylic painting, installation view in the 16th Biennale of Sydney 2008 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
  Courtesy the artist. This project was made possible with assistance from Bose Pacia Gallery, New York.
  Photograph: Ben Symons.
  

Since the late 1990s, Indian artist Ranbir Kaleka has been overlaying painting and video on the same plane. His works merge the time and light of the moving image with the constancy and materiality of the painted image. He Was a Good Man (2008) shows a middle-aged man threading a needle. The man is mostly still, intensely focused on the needle which he occasionally attempts to thread, followed by some twitches and jerks in a cycle where the past and the present run into each other in a phantasmagorical flow. At one point the painting on canvas in the installation is lit by the projector light alone, devoid of any video image. In another passage, the illusory depth of the painting is destroyed by the silhouetted flat shadows on the canvas, which confirm its flatness and establish the installation as an artefact before the loop begins again its spell of movement and depth.

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