Piecing together disparate objects and situations on his canvas, Kanishka Raja is not unlike a weaver. This Kolkata-born artist, who now lives and works in New York, makes the most of his trips from the USA to India. The transit lounge of airports, with their dull furnishing and blue neon lights, often become the stage on which Raja plays out the everyday drama of violence. His images are inspired by media blitz, yet they transcend it, creating a world that exists in his mind’s eye.

I Have Seen The Enemy And It Is Eye are a collection of current canvases, an onsite mural and a wallpaper collage of mirror images of buildings. The show opens at the Galerie Mirchandani + Steinreucke, this February 4.

“Travelling allows one to examine aspects of global migration, which is not always under glorious circumstances. However, what is more intriguing is what this transit conceals-moments of conflict,” says the 38-year-old Hampshire College alumnus. “I also react to my environment. The surfeit of news and media beamed at us affects the manner in which I approach the subject of violence,” he mulls.

The experience is almost filmic as viewers enter his world: a painting of a business-class cabin of an airplane has its usual plush sofas, entertainment centre and bar. However, a stack of automatic rifles leaning innocuously against the sideboard is the red herring here.

In another image, a shopping mall and an army camp-site merge into a single landscape within the interiors of an airport lounge. In yet another, the announcing desk for ground staff observes take-off and landings resembles the Assembly Hall in the White House.

Interestingly Raja’s reference to media images and architectural spaces does not manifest as a cut-and-paste job, as is the case with collage. “Painting architectural spaces integrates these incongruities making them look compatible,” says Raja who once contemplated taking up filmmaking. “I’m not closed to new media, but currently I’m enjoying painting. At that time filmmaking was just too expensive. I am glad I chose painting,” says the artist, shaking his shock of white hair.

His Bengali roots have served to sensitise him to art, however he is vehement that, “If—and I’m not sure of this—Bengali art is about nostalgia, I have no use for it.

Nostalgia is a conservative idea and it should have very little place in art,” he says. Indeed there is no nostalgia in his reference to the destruction of a historical monument like the Babri Masjid, in his work Where Were You In 92. “My intention is to demonstrate how the past and the present are interwoven. To quote William Faulkner, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’”