When one says art holds a mirror to society, Jitish Kallat’s oeuvre comes to mind. Mumbai, its streets and its people have been the artist’s muse. In fact, Kallat believes that his “art school campus did not end at its boundary wall, but in Mumbai’s distant suburbs.”
Several of his stimuli as well as imagery came from Mumbai’s streets. “In the 90s, the city wall with its weather-beaten surfaces was a reference point for my paintings, imbuing them with a sense of time,” says the artist, whose solo exhibition 'Otherwhile' is on display at the Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, till January 4, 2023.
Incidentally, he debuted at the gallery 25 years ago with his solo, P.T.O, in 1997. Returning to the gallery, says Mumbai-based Kallat, is like coming full circle “as several of the themes and ideas that preoccupy me today can be traced back to P.T.O. In fact, some of the drawings in the recent exhibition come from my sketchbook in 1997”.
This exhibition, like his previous works, deals with the cosmos. For example, there is Elicitation (Cassiopeia A)—a dead star’s remains. It is a three-dimensional visualisation from NASA’s open-source files giving form to a stellar explosion that occurred 11,000 light-years away. Echo Verse, a series of large abstract paintings, talks of the gradual transmutation of nature. The works feel as if one has sliced open the globe on a flat plane, and there are these celestial formations spilling out of it.
Revisiting historical documents is a recurrent element in the contemporary artist’s work, as is his fascination with geometry and the cosmos. “The focal length at which one sees the world often defines the meaning we derive from it. To look at our worldly, earthly, human stories alongside a fleeting pointer to the unfathomable scale of our universe, expanding at an inexplicable pace can bring an enlarged dimension of insight into the stories we tell ourselves. Similarly, historical documents provide pointers that could help us make sense of the present and future,” says the 48-year-old.
The exhibition also comprises his pandemic work Epicycles. It’s a study of meticulous composition. The double-sided, multi-scopic photo series captures an inane image—the cracks on the walls in the artist’s studio. It then merges this with archival images of human solidarity, as also, as pictures from the Family of Man exhibition by photographer Edward Steichen at the MoMA, New York, in 1955.
The artist has often said his diverse choice of medium is defined by his “initial impulse”. Kallat says, “Artworks typically arrive as nebulous intuitions that carry within them a discreet ‘birthing manual’ for their arrival in the world. The complex part of the artistic process is identifying and unearthing that manual of instructions and following it to its logical conclusion with several twists along the way. An external stimulus often unravels an inner monologue which, in time, might materialise as a piece of work.”
The artist is simultaneously keeping busy with his curatorial project, Tangled Hierarchy, to be showcased at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale through the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art from December 12, 2022, to April 10, 2023. “It is a speculative thought experiment with handwritten notes by Mahatma Gandhi at its centre,” he says.
So, how different is Kallat, the curator, from Kallat, the artist? “The curatorial process is an instrument for inquiry just as an artwork is a device for contemplating the world. My project, Whorled Explorations, at the Kochi Biennale in 2014 extended out of my long-standing artistic preoccupations.
The interlacing of the celestial with the terrestrial, the engagement with the historical, with ideas of time and cartography have for long recurred in my work. The processes of course were substantially different—with a total shift in one’s toolbox, the amount of dialogue involved and the ambience within which one operates,” he says.
Finally, what would he say to his 23-year-old self who debuted at Chemould? “I’d say nothing, lest I distract him,” says Kallat.