Meeting Kalki speculates and reinvents the character of Kalki, the touted last avatar of Vishnu from Hindu mythology, as a cursed information demi god doomed to roam the world till it finds the interface to make itself apparent. 

“Kal-ki” in Hindi connotes both “of tomorrow” and “of the past.” Through it, I reimagine the history of photography and image production as the journey of Kal-ki, trying to find its own image. 

A pinhole camera, intercepts this lingering of Kalki, opening the portal to a genealogical dream. Kalki takes us on its journey, revealing conversations with Odin, Osiris, and other gods, attempting to unearth the true nature of image and similitude and how they govern our material realities. 

A new ontology of the image appears, which requires inhabiting the image on both a planetary and personal scale. A genomic photoshop emerges and probes to think of molecular seepages, where the image becomes bodily at a genomic level. A need to inhabit an editing interface arises, where new definitions of embodiment and registration are marked as the image becomes the interface for furthering frameworks of othering and discrimination.

 

"Interface of the Genealogical Dream", Meeting Kalki, Digital Image created with LiDar Scanner, 2024 

 

 

Meeting Kalki, Lecture performance, 32 minutes at Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art (FICA),  2023.

 

 

Meeting Kalki, Lecture performance, 32 minutes at Studio A68, New Delhi,  2023.

 

 

“Meeting Kalki” , Open Bind book made out of Pinhole Camera, Print on paper with text and image assemblage, 8 x 2 x 12 inches, 60 pages,  2023, Part of FICA TEXTEXT