ABSTRACT
Jitish Kallat is an internationally recognized contemporary artist, who lives and works in Mumbai, India. As with both Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, who co-founded and curated the fi rst Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kallat studied painting at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Mumbai (graduating in 1996). His works take form in a wide variety of media including painting, sculptural installations, video and photography. Kallat’s visual language is a wide-ranging one, drawing upon numerous sources, which includes various artistic traditions and popular culture, the urban environment, the astronomical chart and the historical document. Kallat has also produced large solo exhibitions in response to museum collections; these include ‘Field Notes (Tomorrow was here yesterday)’ (2011) at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, and ‘Circa’ (2012) at the Ian Potter Museum in Melbourne. In both cases, the exhibitions have been ‘in conversation’ with the museums and their collections, responding to them as both infrastructure and archives of memory, signs and stimulus. In ‘Public Notice 3’, a year-long exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (2010-2011), words spoken on 11th September 1893 at the First World Parliament of Religions were inscribed using LED lights onto the steps of the museum’s Grand Staircase. The installation marked the very location where the words were spoken more than 100 years ago, with the auditorium of the World Parliament having being located in the space where the staircase stands today. The signifi cance of the date of 11 September is of course also highly pertinent, with the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon having taken place on that date 108 years later. In ‘Epilogue’ (2011), Jitish Kallat retraces his father’s life through all the moons seen from the day he was born in 1936 to his death in 1998. Measuring this lifespan with approximately 22,000 moons, each is replaced with a progressively eaten roti, the image of a waxing or waning meal. In recognizing how the historical and the astral frequently recurs in his work, it is possible to see links with how Kallat went on to approach
the curation of the second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, held in Fort Kochi in 2014.
