New York-based artist David Dasharath Kalal takes us through selections from his “Ravi Varma Recreational Vehicle”(RVRV) series combining the heavily reproduced work of Raja Ravi Varma, ever-familiar to the Malayali, with present-day South Asian Americans.
David Kalal
I was working as a video artist when I started making these portraits back in the early 2000s, and these were amusements on the side from my ‘main’ work. But as there began to be some outside interest in them, particularly in the writing of art and cultural critic Gayatri Gopinath, I came to see that they shared a kind of identitarian and anti-nationalist joy, tripping the light diasporic. They have evolved from the early purely digital works onto pieces now realized on linen and wood, and more recently have even been animated as NFTs (a new way of owning original digital images that is currently sweeping and restructuring the art world).
This work started with a deportation. A very long deportation story short, I ended up in Sweden with no job, no language skills, and no friends but lots of time on my hands during the endless, beautifully still, long winter nights. I began to make pictures of my friends—fooling around on the computer, sliding them into art historical contexts. It was an amusing way to stay in touch. Portraits are engaging—you are almost always guaranteed that at least the subject will be interested in the work. Make them playful and funny and they can be shared without the thin bat squeak of narcissism that haunts showing a picture of oneself. And I like funny works. They mask and underplay their intent. They are calculating, ambivalent and self-knowing, and in the case of pastiches like these Ravi Varmas, have a rooted tendency to warp the form and alter meaning. Raja Ravi Varma works soon came to dominate this mischievous exercise—partly because of his omnipresence in our popular visual culture, so that the ‘our’ there is writ very large, global and multi-valent in its inclusion of our indenture and migration, of our sense of home and the world. There is also something wry in the way his work elevates and sentimentalizes its subjects that called out to me to come play with them. I like to think these portraits of my friends have a shallowness so thorough and reflective, it almost looks like depth, much like the artist himself.
Note: Please click on an image to start the slideshow and view descriptions.
(All artwork copyright © of David Kalal. The use of any image from this series is prohibited unless prior written permission from the artist is obtained.)
About the Artist: David Kalal’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Canada, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, AHA Fine Art, Carrie Able Gallery, Upstream Gallery, LIC Arts Gallery, 440 Gallery, Allmänna Galleriet, Hong Kong Microwave Festival, Inside/Out Vienna, Grand Casino Luzern, The Frameline Festival, The Mix Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Siddarth Gautam Festival, Artwallah, Robert Flaherty Seminar and Nature Morte Gallery in New Delhi. Kalal lives and works in New York. For Kalal, language is primary. Questions of translation and transformation run throughout his work—part of an ongoing engagement with reconfigurations of other art forms: painting, photography, national cinemas, popular musics. Kalal’s videos and related painted things weave together lyrics, sound samples, digitally reworked images, and technically manufactured abstractions—from Noor Jehan to Norah Jones, Marxist Economists to Merle Oberon, Electroclash to early morning mantras.
Mesmerising, for this Brit who works in Kerala and has read many scholarly discussions of the works. I’m wondering how a naadan Malayali rather than diasporic desi audience receives the work? About to share and hoping to find some of that out.