NATASHA GINWALA

Introduction

I write to share these notes to guide the reader through this artist monograph: a Mobius-strip like circuit of text and image, chronicling two decades of Indian contemporary artist Jitish Kallat’s expansive work and intellectual references. Our endeavour hasn’t been limited to gleaning a chronological analysis, instead inviting a spectrum of authors to voice their relationship with a specific artistic practice that releases multidirectional passages into animated trajectories of the self and the world. We invite you to find your way, not necessarily navigating from beginning to end but hoping that you keep returning, splicing through with your own readings around Kallat’s aesthetic language and its obsessive interweaving of the cosmos and the cosmopolis. The scaling between intimate rituals maintained by the urban swarms and celestial visions that form cardinal points in an imagined cartography.

In an in-depth interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jitish Kallat reveals one of his earliest memories of drawing for his sister’s biology assignment and the ways figuration appeared amidst layers of paint and juxtaposed text, taking inspiration from those saturated and stained public walls of Mumbai, where advertising, Bollywood film posters and political propaganda wrestle for civic attention. Kallat notes: “The paintings at once appeared like a flickering TV screen and a deteriorating public wall where layers were peeled to reveal the under-painting.” These intricacies of drawing and its phenomenal role as diagnostic tool become evident across various phases of his oeuvre, bringing to mind John Berger’s reflection in Bento’s Sketchbook: “When I’m drawing—and here drawing is very different from writing or reasoning—I have the impression at certain moments of

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participating in something like a visceral function, such as digestion or sweating, a function that is independent of the conscious will.”

Modern city life has necessitated an inner battle to define and maintain personal individuality. Girish Shahane addresses Kallat’s earliest exhibitions and an inextricable link to Mumbai (then Bombay) as its perennial resident, chronicling its daily paradoxes while deploying the street as an observatory. He charts the lives of its characters without being swallowed whole by the insatiable appetite of this metropolis. The overburdened local trains form an urbane skeletal axis, and Kallat’s painting Ode to the Spinal Cord, according to Shahane, “hints at a functionalist view of the city as body, a metaphor whose logical extension would be to interpret the nameless multitudes depicted in his paintings as organic components akin to cells”. In two pieces of short fiction, Shumon Basar deftly manoeuvres the dystopia of city planning and its libidinal fantasy that generates a “walkway in the sky”. A tragic end ensues as his unidentified female character transits through a six-lane highway and transmits to us her filtered Instagram snapshots to reveal the self-destructivity programmed into suburban lives.

Dilip Chitre’s poem Father Returning Home (1980) hints at quotidian rhythms of routine commute.

The artist’s father remains a salient protagonist across works such as 22,000 Sunsets and Epilogue, which Jyoti Dhar dedicates her attention to: “Epilogue could be read as the portrait of a man, as well as a metaphor for several celestial aspects of our universe beyond

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Modus Vivendi (1000 People – 1000 Homes), 2002 Mixed media on canvas 244 x 549 cm (96 x 216 in)

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© Mapin Publishing

HUO: Let’s talk about 365 Lives. What triggered 365 Lives?

JK: At the time when I made Artist Making Local Call, I made a smaller piece called Onomatopoeia (The Scar Park) that later evolved into 365 Lives. So, while I had this virtual collision through the dilation and compression of time in Artist Making Local Call, I began to follow actual collisions. I would often step out of my studio and document any car or bus that had collided with any vehicle.

In my case, the residue of accidents would be visible everywhere, as it is not uncommon for vehicles to repeatedly collide on Mumbai’s streets. If you took your camera really close to a scar on a car, you confront the reflection of a city distorted on its surface. In a way, a collection of 365 of these dents became like an inventory of wounds, and it began to evoke the body. 365 Lives initially appears like colour swatches, but on closer viewing, it is almost an account of the city’s arrhythmic heartbeat rendered through an image of collision.

365 Lives, 2007Pigment print on Hahnemuhle photo rag archival paper, polyptych (365 parts) 51 x 74 cm (20 x 29.5 in) each

>>365 Lives (details), 2007

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© Mapin Publishing

© Mapin Publishing

HUO: And then, at a certain point, these vehicles grow out of it. You

have the rickshaw, you have the large water-tanker, and also, your work

becomes more 3-D. It’s kind of interesting… there is a history in your

work where you oscillate between 2-D and 3-D, and in your paintings

there are these three-dimensional elements. And that’s also more or

less the time when we met and you were working on these Autosaurus

Tripous, Aquasaurus, Collidonthus. Can you talk about those and how

you came from painting into the 3-D?

JK: In the early 2000s, I made large paintings such as Tragedienne (Taste Lick Swallow and Speak). Tragedienne was really the image of an unidentified woman protesting; a powerful image from a newspaper that symbolically foregrounded a certain disquiet within the nation in the aftermath of the riots in Gujarat. It was at the same time that I was making a piece such as Public Notice in 2003, while simultaneously making these small drawings of vehicles that had been violated in riots. These were all parallel inter-related processes, and the medium in each instance simply emerged out of the ideas one was exploring or the questions one was asking.

So, the first Public Notice came out of an intense doubt about a disturbing factional spirit that seemed to be gripping the nation in the early 2000s. The riots in Gujarat were clearly not the first major riots in post-Independence India, but these were the first in my adult lifetime that had an immense impact on me. I felt that perhaps one might find answers if one went back to the moment of India’s independence and looked at utterances and foundational texts about the nation from that time.

Public Notice was the re-writing of Nehru’s words spoken at the euphoric midnight of Indian Independence (against the bloody backdrop of Partition) on the surface of a mirror with an inflammable fluid, where each letter is set aflame and cremated. I think my gesture

Public Notice, 2003Burnt adhesive on acrylic mirror, wood, stainless steel, pentaptych 198 x 137 x 15 cm (78 x 54 x 6 in) each

<Working studio shot

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Tragedienne (Taste, Lick, Swallow and Speak), 2002 Mixed media on canvas, 228 x 457 cm (90 x 180 in)

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© Mapin Publishing