Kalaki 15

Kalaki noun two or more different qualities, things or people; placed, combined, or considered together. verb arouse strong feeling in (someone); disturb or excite. [also a south Indian street dish of unique texture with a mix of eggs and curry.] I found Kalaki at a time when I was struggling to comprehend my relationship with my surroundings in daily life. It was around the same time I was also starting to get bored of my photographs and was wondering how to take my practice forward. I have been making these photographs every day for the past couple of years. But when seen as single images, they couldn’t really express what I was going through; my thoughts, questions and struggles being alive and creating in this time and place (the society and the culture) I was part of. One day when I brought together these scattered single images, I started observing tension build between some of them. The next hour was an experience filled with adrenaline rush. It felt like playing a kind of a memory game, where some these exciting combinations presented themselves to me revealing some mysterious connections. I took some time to reflect on this experience and came back a little later with my peers, to look at the combinations. This is when we started to identify the typologies of tensions that were emerging. We found some basic types like reflections, inversions, extensions, supplements, citations, and that there were combinations of these present in the diptychs. This helped me in creating new combinations with informed intuition, as I progressed with the work; which was sometimes more of a formal exercise (mainly about the shapes and the colors), sometimes organized around social thematics and sometimes, a satire.