Forensic Trail of the Grand Banquet, 2009 Single channel video (projection on screen) Duration : 02 min. 20 sec.
Norrtalje Konsthall, Sweden is presenting two concurrent solo exhibitions by Mumbai-based artists Reena Saini Kallat and Jitish Kallat between 19th June – 26th September 2021. Their first institutional solos in Sweden bring together recent bodies of work offering a glimpse into their wide-ranging practices. The exhibitions shift registers between the panoramic and the microscopic, the ecological and the existential, the planetary and the cosmic to reveal the divergent ways in which they survey the world.
In Reena Saini Kallat’s works over the last several years the border, the territory and the map have recurred as potent forms that point to broad historical narratives as well as the manner in which humankind have left the imprint of history on geography. Her own family history overlaps with the partition of the subcontinent into the two entities of India and Pakistan in 1947, an action that resulted in mass migration on both sides of the border. Her approach, both poetic and speculative, explores a confluence of ideas that contest political and social boundaries. Her exhibition titled Deep Rivers Run Quiet, includes a new site-specific wall drawing using electrical cables, a recurring motif in her work. A symbol of contact and a conduit for energy and ideas, the artist weaves the electric cables into the shape of barriers and barbed wires. The resulting permutations of lines give rise to a more familiar, liberating topography where rigid territorial demarcations seamlessly transform into a free-flowing river and outlines resembling natural geographical features.
The exhibition includes the 8-channel video Blind Spots that deploys the preambles of the constitutions of warring nations from around the world as Snellen eye charts used by optometrists to measure vision. In the ten diptychs Leaking Lines, the artist intentionally conflates the ‘line’—a primary artistic tool—with the language of epic territorial delineations. The work juxtaposes the outlines of borders from across the world with images of the landscapes, which they divide and apportion. Also presented will be her new works titled Vortex and Water Book.
Jitish Kallat's exhibition titled Epicycles reveals his longstanding engagement with the ideas of time, transience, sustenance, the ecological and the cosmological. The exhibition is an assembly of conceptual and sensory propositions through a suite of large format paintings, drawings, sculptures and video. The earliest work featured is a single channel video titled Forensic Trail of the Grand Banquet (2009) invoking a journey through space wherein planetary and stellar formations, galactic clusters and nebulae are replaced by hundreds of x-ray scans of food. In the video titled The Eternal Gradient (2015), rotis morph with the waxing and waning images of the moon as if aeons of time were passing through an ever-changing lunar almanac. The sculpture titled The Infinite Episode (2015) is an assembly of ten sleeping vertebrates, a cosmic dormitory wherein their bodily sizes are equalized in a state of sleep. In the Palindrome/ Anagram Paintings (2017-18) abstract gestures seem to crystallize and acquire perceptible form; celestial orbits, geographical coordinate systems, botanical and topographical evocations begin to reveal the signatures of growth, evolution and entropy. Over the last few years Kallat has been developing a “vocabulary of studio rituals” that explore aesthetic questions mediated by nature, systems of self-imposed artistic constraints such as the large elemental drawing titled Wind Study (Hilbert Curve) (2017). The exhibition also features a suite of Untitled (Emergence) drawings (2018). In these works interactions produced by a spurt of air evoke a natural geometry inherent in life-forces, in the growth of plants, our thumb-print, the spin in the oceans and galaxies.
Date 21-06-2021