136 | MAY/JUN 2017 | ISSUE 103
NEW DELHI
National Gallery of Modern Art“Here After Here” brought the most comprehensive
display yet of Jitish Kallat’s career to the National
Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi. Spread
between the old quarters of the Jaipur House and
the institution’s newest wing, the retrospective
examined Kallat’s practice through six themes—
“time,” “sustenance,” “recursion,” “historical recall,”
“cosmos” and the “cosmopolis”—but without
much elaboration or criticality.
The exhibition got off to an emphatic start in the
Jaipur House with Kallat’s iconic “Public Notice”
trilogy (2003–10). These works—acrylic mirrors
onto which words have been burnt, bones formed
from fiberglass arranged together to create text, and
stairs embedded with LED displays spelling out
statements—highlight the artist’s preoccupation
with the outcomes of spectacular chapters from
India’s cultural, political and social history. The
words and statements are taken from landmark
speeches delivered by three national heroes:
Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Swami
Vivekananda. Overhead projections of India’s
daily bread, the round roti, as revolving moons—
full, half-eaten, eventually diminishing to a new
moon—reminded viewers of the daily struggle for
survival. The works resonated strongly, especially
given their historical contexts, which were only
surpassed by the visual impressiveness of the large-
scale installations.
The narrative branched out to skeletons lurking
in urbanity’s closet, revealed in works inspired
by the charred remains of trucks from the 2002
communal riots in Gujarat. Aquasaurus (2008), a
large “bone vehicle” made of resin and steel, was
presented alongside early small-scale drawings
that inspired it. These rarely exhibited studies
remained the only effective reminder of the artist’s
process in a curatorial exercise that was largely
uninterested in Kallat’s biography and context.
The strong works usually speak for themselves,
but in this section of the exhibition they were
pigeonholed by the curator, Catherine David, to
announce the artist’s sustained preoccupations,
as if the artworks were flash cards.
Huddled together in the left wing of Jaipur
House were several creations that served as
intimate testimonies relaying the artist’s concern
with Mumbai’s complexity. Kallat’s practice thrives
on contradictions: between the cosmos and the
primal, the universal and the intimate, utopian
desire for industrialization and its dystopian
consequences. In the new wing of the NGMA,
Epilogue (2011)—753 prints depicting the 22,889
moons his late father saw in a lifetime—introduced
personal and universal concerns in Kallat’s works.
Thematic focuses reduced the exhibition to a
cluster of smaller shows. This elaboration of the
artist’s practice made for a sparse reading of a body
of work spanning close to 25 years, considering that
the works have consistently evolved from and into
each other. Each series of works relayed a different
measurement of time—historical, astronomical,
emotional, familial, personal and industrial. These
were viewed not as independent elements, but as
interdependent strains.
Though the curator attempted an empirical
breakdown of the artist’s practice without context
or analyses, the six themes designed by David
were best embodied in two of Kallat’s mixed-media
works. Death of Distance (2007) is a multi-part
installation that juxtaposes two found texts—a
news story of a 12-year-old girl who committed
suicide because her mother could not afford
to give her one rupee for food, and another
announcement from the same time where a
telecom service promised to connect all of India
with phone calls that cost just one rupee, heralding
a new, tech-savvy age for the nation. Looming over
these texts is a human-size sculpture of a one-
rupee coin. Pipe dreams of being at the vanguard of
urbanity, and an impoverished majority painfully
sidelined in efforts toward advancement, emerge
simultaneously as incongruent experiences of
history in a single moment. The canvas work
Modus Vivendi (1000 people – 1000 homes) (2002)
uses self-portraiture to situate the artist in his
habitat, the city of Mumbai, as a “juggler of
heart and brain,” as the wall text labels him. I
left “Here After Here” moved by Kallat’s heart
and compelled by his intellect, yet wishing the
curatorial involvement had been less cerebral and
more intuitive.
ANUSHKA RAJENDRANJITISH KALLAT
HERE AFTER HERE