At once dynamic and dysfunctional, the city is a heady mix of languages, castes, religions, and class difference. . . . Contradictions and chaos often procreate culture. The contradictions and chaos of Mumbai become coordinates for me to position the vital themes of my practice . . . hope, survival, and mortality.
Jitish Kallat, in conversation with Nina Miall, Jitish Kallat: Universal Recipient (London: Haunch of Venison, 2008), 49–50.
Ideas find their own forms. It’s a process that artist Jitish Kallat yields to rather than predetermines.1 Though he studied painting, earning his BFA from the Sir J. J. School of Art in Mumbai in 1996, his inquiries into the world around him generate a wide variety of media including sculpture, photography, video, and installation by way of acrylic, mist, dental plaster, roti (flatbread), fruit, and vendor food from the streets of Mumbai. He is an artist-citizen, poetically chronicling everyday urban life. “To me,” he explained, “almost every one of us is a raconteur of the world’s secrets, because each one of us possesses a unique world view.”2 In Kallat’s work, mundane encounters are expansive. The intersection of political and personal histories—like treaties, historical speeches, violent and non-violent activism, and familial ancestry—suggests that the meaning of one’s life stretches beyond the individual.
Jitish Kallat, “Jitish Kallat on His Practice and Works,” lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, posted July 7, 2016, video, 59:56 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=1drZuHsR3ro. ↩︎
Jitish Kallat, in conversation with Nina Miall, Jitish Kallat: Universal Recipient (London: Haunch of Venison, 2008), 53. ↩︎
Jitish Kallat has long looked at the sky to reflect on human biological cycles and circadian rhythms. In his expansive installation Epilogue (2010–11), Kallat honored his late father with a series of photographs that retrace his lifespan through every moon seen between the day he was born in 1936 to his death in 1998. Each frame in the labyrinthine installation features a lunar calendar illustrating the waxing and waning of approximately 22,000 moons in total—each one represented by a progressively eaten roti (flatbread). Epilogue is not only a mediation on the passing of historical and astrological time but also, as the artist explained, “fullness and emptiness, abundance and dearth”1—cycles that shape every human life.
Jitish Kallat, “Jitish Kallat on His Practice and Works,” lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, posted July 7, 2016, video, 59:56 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=1drZuHsR3ro. ↩︎
In 2002 India saw one of its worst sectarian riots against the Muslim community in the post-independence era, leading Jitish Kallat to seriously read and question iconic political speeches that preceded and ultimately established the Indian nation-state in 1947. For the series “Public Notice” (2003–09), Kallat created three large-scale installations that invoke a physical relationship to language. In Public Notice 2 (2007), Mahatma Gandhi’s words on the eve of the Dandi March in 1930—invigorating protest against the colonial British salt tax—are spelled out using an alphabet made of resin-cast bones, as though to exhume his speech. Like other works Kallat has developed from historical texts, language produces an image and, at this scale, encompasses the viewer in a physical experience so that we might embody these words.1 As the artist hopes, “Given the kind of confrontational rhetoric we hear every day in our sort of terror-infected world, voices such as Ghandi’s become carriers of a message that could help us brave the follies of the current world.”2
Jitish Kallat, in conversation with curator Suhanya Raffel at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, posted May 19, 2015, video, 5:01 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=8uO3lNi_GBY. ↩︎
Jitish Kallat, in “Jitish Kallat: Perspectives on Modern Art,” The Economist online, on the occasion of the exhibition The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today at Saatchi Gallery, London, posted February 1, 2010, video, 5:03 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=abrunEB08SA. ↩︎
Time is a recurring theme in Jitish Kallat’s artwork, evoking ancestry, the history of the Indian subcontinent, ideas about survival and mortality, and daily acts of living. Its cycles are expansive and fractal: every breath is a unit that punctuates a lifetime. Kallat’s Event Horizon (the hour of the day of the month of the season) (2014) documents a mundane panoramic cityscape in a rainbow-hued lenticular print. The image shifts as the viewer changes position such that the same figures appear and reappear in different panels. Multiple timeframes are caught in a single image as if to suggest that history replays itself. Kallat’s idea that “embodied cognition,” or the awareness of oneself in space, “is central to really thinking about the world”1 seems at play here, suggesting that one’s position in space places them in both a single moment and an expansive history.
Jitish Kallat, in “Meet Jitish Kallat,” Art Dubai Portraits, Art Dubai channel, posted September 12, 2019, video, 0:59 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=yIdWxAwc47s. ↩︎
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