If you are familiar with the Indian way of life, you would know what this means – deewaron ke bhi kaan hotey hain (walls too have ears). It’s a phrase used to warn people discussing things of vital importance, to tell them that they really cannot take even a vacant room for granted. That’s just to indicate that cultures, indeed, give walls an importance that may not seem obvious on the surface. After all, when everything fades away, walls remain as repositories of evidence of all that took place. All one has to do is scratch the surface, or may be just look behind the peeling wall paint, and stories hitherto hidden will start revealing themselves.This surface – a seemingly unimportant entity – along with the passage of time, is the subject of Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s solo exhibition at Kolkata’s Experimenter gallery, on view through the end of April. With this new enquiry, the Berlin-based artist departs from her printmaking activity to go behind the metaphysics of intangible concepts of surface and time. Considering the fact that Kaabi-Linke has had an atypical upbringing, I’m tempted to ask her if her own life’s experiences reflect in her work somehow. “Probably... a very large part of my work is biographical, it may talk about me indirectly,” she says. It’s not difficult to understand why. Because, Kaabi-Linke cannot be pigeon-holed into one water-tight identity that the world may easily understand. She was born in 1978 in Tunis, to a Tunisian father and a Russian mother. She studied in Tunis, Dubai and Paris, has exhibited all over the world, is married to a German and now lives in Berlin. Obviously, to get to her core, one would need to go beyond the surface, one would need to peel a bit. “Since I finished my PhD in France (from Sorbonne University, Paris, 2008), and finally got down to work, I’ve been largely concerned with ‘the surface.’ I need to go to the depths,” she says.And precisely because of her rich experience as a global citizen, Kaabi-Linke feels drawn to the issues and crises of people who move across cultures, such as the recent large-scale immigrations from Syria into Europe. “Perhaps, because of my different background, I feel drawn to study the issues of immigrants, I very well understand their concerns. However, my enquiry does not concern with just the local surface. It is global and therefore, anybody can understand my work. For instance, the workers helping me instal my works at Experimenter could understand it totally, which was so heartening. I always hope my work concerns tout le monde (the entire world) and is not restricted just to specialists from the art world. It has to be free of categories, to be able to speak to everyone,” she elaborates. Kaabi-Linke’s desire to make her work “talk to many people” may also be subconsciously born out of the experience that pigeon-holing has not really worked in her case. That can be quite a personal crisis if one is not mature enough to process it. As she says, “I’m not considered from Russia, and I’m a problematic Tunisian. They just can’t seem to fit me simply from one region. That’s why Mr & Mrs Everyone understand my work better than specialists,” she laughs.The artist takes the phrase ‘scratching the surface’ quite literally in her work “Color of Time.” This comprises canvases painted with unique pigments created by the grinding of paint chips collected by scraping paint from old walls that have been painted and repainted over time, from all over the world. It literally is a reflection of how time has been colored, chipped away, restored and re-chipped away over walls through paint. While scratching the surface has helped Kaabi-Linke reveal many stories for her audiences, the metaphysics of time has helped her enquire into its passage and how silently it changes everything, absolutely everything. It is beautifully expressed at the Experimenter show through her work “Salt and Sand,” 2016 where the duration of her exhibition is used as the defining tool. A weighing scale is balanced exactly with salt on one side and sand on the other, and hangs from the ceiling in the gallery. Over the course of the exhibition, the set-up changes its balance with the salt absorbing water through the humid air and becomes heavier. Through this simple piece, Kaabi-Linke talks about the passage of time, the shifts and imbalances that occur over the period, making it a nuanced reflection of what is ephemeral and what is not. Another intereseting work that will develop during the course of the Kolkata exhibition is “Laissez le temps au temps (Kolkata, March 2016)”. The painting – a continuation of another work by the same name made in Tunis – is being created by letting dust settle on the canvas, and fixed everyday for the duration of the exhibition. In translation, the title means, “Let time take its own course.” It lies exposed in Kolkata, and by acquiring dust particles it is taking impressions of time as it moves from one hour to the other, and the final shape will depend on how chance played its role on this canvas. What makes Kaabi-Linke’s work so cutting-edge is that it is deeply entrenched in her thoughts, defying all attempts to classify it on the basis of material used. That makes her a truly global contemporary artist as the freedom to go beyond the boundaries of a material also indicate that she has the freedom to let her thoughts breach whatever boundaries there may be.“Lost and Found” is on view at Experimenter, 2/1, Hindustan Road, Kolkata, through April 30. Follow@ARTINFOIndia
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