Jitish Kallat. Public Notice

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