Circle of Stories: Narrative Loops in Ranbir Kaleka’s Art

Written by Dr. Rahul Dev

 Entering Ranbir Kaleka’s exhibition always captivates viewers. Kaleka, a Patiala-born artist based in Delhi, returns to Vadehra Gallery in New Delhi for a solo show after a long break. His video-paintings, shaped by ‘dream-logic,’ avoid clear narratives and blend surrealism with psychological depth. As an immersive video artist, he works beyond traditional canvases. Each visit to the gallery adds a new dimension to the viewing experience. On the ground floor, Circle of Stories (2025)—a multi-screen installation—welcomes visitors. Other notable works, including Abstruse Revelries of a Repast (2013) and Man with Tiffin Turbulence Veiled, Unveiled (2018), are on the upper floor. Thinking about the ‘circle’ in the title prompts reflection on how circles and spheres appear both visually and thematically. Roundness signifies divine perfection and the ideal. It also evokes ideas from Plato and Parmenides. Circle of Stories also draws on Islamic design, such as mosaics in architectural devices, seen throughout the video, to show unity in diversity. The mosaic pattern, with no real center, softens the idea of centrality.

 The circle symbolizes wholeness and unity in the universe, representing an ideal expressed through circular mosaic patterns that best convey unity in diversity by evoking harmony within variety. This idea is endorsed in the work of Laleh Bakhtiyar (1938-2020), a renowned Iranian scholar of Sufi and Islamic architecture. While traditional societies follow Divine Law, those with a special calling seek Truth through inner knowledge, linking the circle to both collective and individual journeys. People, considered the universe’s center, embody creativity, sensitivity, and intellect, and circles and spheres depict our existence between the physical and mental worlds. These shapes spark imagination, hint at endless possibilities, and invite reflection on Delhi’s social and spiritual life. Through moving stories, the project creates a space for sharing, connection, and honoring each narrative, as emphasized in the gallery’s exhibition note. By focusing on art, memory, and identity, the show strengthens community bonds.

  Circle of Stories, working with actors such as Lokesh Jain, Sunil Mehra, Palav Mishra, and Enab Khizra, explores time and the certainty of change. In Delhi, known as the city of Djinn, change persists. The city becomes the main character as actors move, revealing the storyteller’s presence across eras and places. The project blends two forms of storytelling. Jain represents street theater—he is known for the experimental film Ghode ko Jalebi Khila Raha Hun (2018). The other style is Dastangoi, which originated in Persian courts, evolved during Mughal rule, and was revived in 2005 by Shamsher Rahman Farooqi and Mehmood Farooqui. Projected images and stage sets build an emotional setting. The city, shown mutating into different shapes, memories, and languages, edited by Raj Mohanty, further develops the experience in the video work. The project extends Kaleka’s investigation of space and interaction in modern and contemporary art, grounded in the ongoing practices of listening, imagining, and storytelling.

  This truth, both frightening and freeing, reminds us that all good things end, either naturally or through our actions. No situation is permanent: even oppressive ideologies and violence pass with time. This brings hope that poverty, casteism, and sectarian ideas may also fade. India is home to many positive religious and social movements that support constitutional morality. These movements help gradually remove extreme ideologies. In the video, Lokesh Jain recites the couplet “Kuch Baat Hai Ki Hasti Mitti Nahi Hamari (something special about us that never let our reputation fade)” from ‘Tarana-e-Hind’ by Allama Iqbal. This makes the idea clear. The line reflects India’s ancient, enduring culture, which has survived challenges and foreign attacks. It also means change is constant—time only moves forward. In the installation, Kaleka combines immersive media, theater, and storytelling to show how time shapes us. Projected poetry, dialogue, protest scenes, cinematic imagery, and stories on buildings—brought to life by characters—let viewers feel the passage of time. At the same time, their participation completes the circular loop, at least symbolically. Over time, the experience becomes meditative and connects back to the exhibition’s main themes.

   While catching up with college students at a show, Kaleka shares his childhood experiences growing up in a small village in Punjab. He describes his time at the family mansion (haveli) as quiet and aloof, with silence filling the premises. For him, solitude was not boring. Instead, his senses absorbed the village’s quiet magic—a memory from the era before electricity. The sounds from outside the window amazed him and awakened his senses. Each beam of light revealed minute details of insects, ants, and other objects around him. Artworks like Man with Tiffin (2018) evoke his childhood angsts, depicting a man with a broad head and protruding eyes, standing still with his tiffin box, a symbol of middle-class life. The non-performing man peers out through a bizarre doorway or a surrealist mirror; beyond it, the view becomes hallucinatory, with the susurration of the sea. The flaring sounds of a sailing ship evoke a sense of drowning or even an apocalypse, reflecting the fear and anxiety of middle-class life in India (at present), especially as living costs rise and the economy declines amid war mongering by global powers worldwide. This sinking-ship imagery mirrors the broader economic situation of our times. Through the mise-en-scene of a simple kitchen, the artwork prompts viewers to determine the man’s social class. While watching the video closely, one might wonder why a vibrant blinking parrot is placed next to the kitchen utensils. Is it a real parrot or a toy-like figure? As sacred in Indian culture, from the Vedas to the Puranas to the popular epics, parrots are celebrated as messengers, storytellers, and fortune-tellers. So, this video leaves behind many predictions or social messages in favor of an allegorical representation of a parrot, broadening Kaleka’s narration through the moving image as a method of covert visual communication. 

  Installation view of Man with Tiffin; Veiled Turbulence (2018) from Ranbir Kaleka’s solo exhibition titled Circle of Stories at Vadehra Art Gallery

There is an element of repetition in his oeuvre; repetition here must be related to ‘difference’ rather than ‘sameness,’ which often challenges the continuity of the space/time continuum and the diffusion of any beginning or end. It’s a tricky concept used in cinema, both philosophically and poetically, and is more evident in Southeast and East Asian cinema, such as in the films of Wong Kar Wai and Kim Ki duk. What happens when, each time, looking at his videos becomes a test for an erudite spectator: when something repeats, the difference comes to light. Hence, repetition is mainly related to change that comes along with difference; development and transformation, which also means that repetition is the basis of progression.

  In each painting-video, he seeks to introduce something new as an ‘event’; for instance, in Abstruse Revelries of a Repast (2013), he projected video onto a painting. This process led him to integrate video not as a substitute for painting but as a complement to it. The work unfolds in a magical loop of about 9 minutes, with many discerning elements, including theater, painting, the moving image, and cinema. It blends choreography led by Mandip Raikhy and his troupe, in which ornate masked dancers move in a Commedia dell’arte style, alongside a scene from Luchino Visconti’s film The Leopard (1963), one of the greatest films ever made, a rare portrait of aristocracy. It offers a view of how the wealthy live and think, and how they perceive aesthetic appreciation, dignity and reserve, morality, as well as the arrogance and strategic practicality of an aristocrat, all presented alongside one another. This allows us to understand how the notion of freedom is reserved for certain classes and élites, and how women are depicted as rare objects and domesticated. In the moving video, objects are constantly foreshortened by the graceful choreography, such as flickering candle lamps, fruits, pitchers, glasses, perfumes, and unhinged toilet fittings, presented in a still-life setting, juxtaposed with aristocratic, rococo-based elements of still life from the movie. In the middle of the video, a dancer hovering over a citrus tree suggests an erotic charge replete with not actual, but rather performed allegories. In Renaissance art, the lemon tree primarily symbolizes love, fidelity, and prosperity, as illustrated in Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (1480s). In this iconography, citrus fruits—including lemons and oranges—are often linked with the virtues of the Virgin Mary, representing chastity, salvation, and redemption. The orange blossom was considered the bride’s flower, while the lemon, as an emblem of fidelity in love, was similarly associated with nuptial themes. While a donkey metamorphosed into a dancer symbolizes humility, patience, resilience, and hard work, the donkey often symbolizes service and a quiet, unassuming strength as it carries an imperceptible load. Partly, a sense of Caravaggio’s ‘tenebrism’ is rendered with great precision in this video. Even the choreographed dancers are reminiscent of the characters in Caravaggio’s early works, such as Boy with a Basket of Fruit (1593), Sick Bacchus (1593), and Boy Bitten by a Lizard (1596), heavily laden with symbolism regarding the transience of life, beauty, and temptation or Dionysian excess in the performance.

   Certainly, this exhibition confirms that Kaleka renders his art in a hybrid form, mixing all forms of expression without much manipulation of real time and using video art as a medium, not out of any narcissism. Rather, his body of work suggests what Rosalind Krauss (b.1941), art critic and cultural theorist, has already stated generally: that, in the post-medium condition, the medium of video is proclaimed as a means to express ideas boldly and honestly, and that ideas, not a specific medium, are central to the artist. Also, the social meaning is always imbued in Kaleka’s experiments, even though, through the practice of video art, ‘heterogeneous activities’ and a ‘discursive chaos’ are involved that cannot be easily theorized. Some of Kaleka’s video installations engage viewers in an interactive mode, transforming them from passive observers into active participants whose actions directly influence the artwork’s visual or auditory output, as in Circle of Stories, which combines two other art forms: the narrative style of street theatre and Dastangoi. Thus, Kaleka’s art is quite central to making new meanings after meanings and would remain so over the passing of the decades.

Cover Image: Installation view of Abstruse Revelries of a Repast (2013) from Ranbir Kaleka’s solo exhibition titled Circle of Stories at Vadehra Art Gallery

Dr. Rahul Dev is a researcher based in New Delhi and recently served as a Goethe-Institut Fellow at the documenta archiv in Kassel, Germany. He teaches history of art, theory, and German, and his research interests include German studies, discourses on transcultural exhibitions, and subaltern and marginal aesthetics.