Amit Kalra is an artist working in video and sculpture. His practice engages performative systems and institutional grammars, examining how symbolic structures operate across opacity and aesthetic legibility. Using slowed movement, found footage, and reduced sound registers, his video works explore the mechanics of persuasion and control. Sculptural works extend these concerns through industrial remnants and ritual materials, often attending to moments structured to pass unnoticed. Kalra holds a graduate degree from the Royal College of Art and teaches in the MFA Communications Design program at Pratt Institute. He has exhibited internationally, held residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Pratt, and has been featured on NTS Radio.

CV
Email
Vimeo

---

You Lie, 2023. Single-channel video and audio, 19 minutes and 12 seconds; recliner chair, 3.5 x 3.5 x 3.5 ft.

A tube television faces a recliner chair in a staged domestic arrangement. On screen, looped scenes from 1930s and 1940s Western films play in sequence: a man signs a document among assembled power; a horse rears, tethered to a stake; a lone man, bound, rides on a buckboard wagon. The original audio is stripped and manipulated, leaving behind a fractured soundscape. The installation stages a choreography of submission and control, where gestures of agreement, resistance, and restraint cycle without resolution.