Jitish Kallat by Mapin Publishing

MAPIN

JITISH KALLAT

Jitish Kallat, the curator of the KochiMuziris Biennale in 2014, is one of South Asiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most compelling artists, with an immersive practice. This monograph commemorates a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, in 2017. Featuring an extensive interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, this volume includes essays and conversations involving curators, art historians and scholars in the fields of social theory and science.

155 photographs

JITISH KALLAT

JITISH KALLAT Edited by NATASHA GINWALA

Mapin Publishing Ahmedabad in association with PRESTEL Munich · London · New York

First published in India in 2018 by Mapin Publishing 706 Kaivanna, Panchvati, Ellisbridge, Ahmedabad 380006 INDIA T: +91 79 40228228 • E: mapin@mapinpub.com www.mapinpub.com in association with Prestel Verlag, Munich • London • New York, a member of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH International Distribution: Prestel Publishing Ltd. 14-17 Wells Street London W1T 3PD UK Prestel Publishing 900 Broadway, Suite 603 New York, NY 10003 USA Gallery Partners: Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai Nature Morte, New Delhi Galerie Templon, Paris Text © respective authors Photographs © Jitish Kallat Studio except those listed under Photograph Credits. All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The moral rights of Natasha Ginwala, Girish Shahane, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Shumon Basar, Dilip Gaonkar, Dilip Chitre, Jyoti Dhar, Suhanya Raffel, Ranjit Hoskote and Bernardo Kastrup to be identified as the authors of this work are asserted. ISBN: 978-93-85360-28-2

Design: Ruchita Madhok, Aditya Palsule / Kahani Designworks Editorial Co-ordination: Rosalyn D’Mello Copyediting: Ateendriya Gupta / Mapin Editorial Editorial Management: Neha Manke / Mapin Editorial Production Management: Gopal Limbad / Mapin Design Studio Printed in Malaysia

Photograph Credits: Anil Rane • B.Huet/Tutti • Chandan Ahuja Isabelle Arthuis • Prakash Rao • Raimo Rumpler Randhir Singh • Arario Gallery, Beijing and Seoul Arndt Berlin • Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Art Institute of Chicago • Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, Mumbai • Bodhi Art Gallery • Bose Pacia, New York • Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai Galerie Templon, Brussels, Paris • Haunch of Venison, London • Havana Biennale • Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne • Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi Nature Morte, New Delhi • Philadelphia Museum of Art San Jose Museum of Art • Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney • Tate Modern, London

Front and back cover: Rain Study (The Hour of the Day of the Month of the Season), 2016 Page 2: Wind Study Hilbert Curve (detail), 2017 Page 5: The Cry of the Gland, 2009, Installation view, Haunch of Venison London

First published in India in 2018 by Mapin Publishing in association with Prestel Verlag, Munich • London • New York, A member of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH Mapin Publishing 706 Kaivanna, Panchvati, Ellisbridge, Ahmedabad 380006 INDIA www.mapinpub.com Prestel Publishing Ltd. 14-17 Wells Street London W1T 3PD UK Prestel Publishing 900 Broadway, Suite 603 New York, NY 10003 USA Gallery Partners: Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai Nature Morte, New Delhi Galerie Templon, Paris Text © respective authors Photographs © Jitish Kallat Studio except those listed under Photograph Credits. All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The moral rights of Natasha Ginwala, Girish Shahane, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Shumon Basar, Dilip Gaonkar, Dilip Chitre, Jyoti Dhar, Suhanya Raffel, Ranjit Hoskote and Bernardo Kastrup to be identified as the authors of this work are asserted. ISBN: 978-3-7913-8475-7 Design: Ruchita Madhok, Aditya Palsule / Kahani Designworks Editorial Co-ordination: Rosalyn D’Mello Copyediting: Ateendriya Gupta / Mapin Editorial Editorial Management: Neha Manke / Mapin Editorial Production Management: Gopal Limbad / Mapin Design Studio Printed in Malaysia

Contents

8 12

Introduction NATASHA GINWALA

Jitish Kallat in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

102

Jitish Kallat: The Early Years

144

I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t build a city

150

An Actual Occasion

154

Scenes from the Lives of Men, of Nations and of Cities: The Tale of Two (or Three) Kallats

GIRISH SHAHANE

SHUMON BASAR

DILIP GAONKAR

182

Father Returning Home

186

The Shape of Time is a Circle

DILIP CHITRE

JYOTI DHAR

202

Ruminations on the Grammar of a Universe: Back to the Future SUHANYA RAFFEL

234

The Afterlife of the Past, the Mimesis of Climate: Jitish Kallat’s Interventions in the Space and Time of the Museum RANJIT HOSKOTE

272

Artist as Observer: Flower Child Operates the Funeral of a Schedule

326

Meditations on Sleep and Cyclicality

344

Artist Biography Selected Exhibitions & Collections Solo Exhibition Monographs Group Exhibition Catalogues and Other Texts Contributors’ Biographies Acknowledgements

NATASHA GINWALA

BERNARDO KASTRUP

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 8

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 9

our physical perception. This zooming in and panning out, shifting between the microscopic and macroscopic, is a useful lens through which to view Kallat’s wider cultural practice.” In three seminal installation works, Public Notice (2003, 2007, 2010), the artist engages with the use of “official” language and “speechmaking” as public organs that actively construct the image of the modern nation-state and weave the social fabric of a common culture. In Covering Letter (2012), a letter written by Mahatma Gandhi and addressed to Adolf Hitler is retrieved as a vital fragment of anti-war communiqué preceding the Second World War. In the slow unveiling of structural violence and colonial repression, the letter form has often been a strategic figure in announcing dissidence. Suhanya Raffel engages with these works, which “intensify the power and value of words by increasing their aesthetic agency”. In large-scale solo exhibitions held at Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, Mumbai, and at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, Kallat proceeds to destabilize museological frameworks while undertaking archaeological exercises that subvert taxonomies of display, building new relationships with antiquated dioramas and vitrine presentations, while also opening a dialogue with the “unseen” objects that live surreptitiously in storage units. As Ranjit Hoskote embarks upon providing a conjoined reading of these two exhibitions, he reminds us, “The impulse of the individual imagination is to lean towards the poetic: on this account, a museum’s exhibits are spolia, residues that should summon forth a forensic engagement, that invite a reconstruction of events and contexts.” 10

This book is a beast that is agile and cunning, but it too must surrender to a state of repose: and so, the cycle of sleep fills some of these pages, not as a pause but through investigating the queue of sleeping animals in Infinite Episode. Kallat calls this arrangement “a cosmic dormitory”. As the folded bodies alter the scale and formidable character of the resting creatures, there is equanimity and equivalence found between the monkey and the elephant. Scientist and artificial intelligence expert Bernardo Kastrup dwells upon the passage from slumber into wakefulness thus: “What is this elusive background into which mental events fade during deep sleep? Conversely, what is it that stirs in disquiet in the transition to wakefulness? These questions are important, for it appears that I am this elusive background, and my life is the excitations of it.” In discussing the artist as observer, I address how the role of doubt and building of hypotheses have remained key in Kallat’s artistic approach. Moving beyond the scope of conjecture, his dynamic process has deployed the experiment as a chief source of aesthetic study and material inquiry. Social theorist Dilip Gaonkar sums up: “Endgame is at hand, but it is of a long duration. In the meantime, we go on living and keep prolonging the endgame of nations and cities with a little help from friends like Kallat and from the kindness of strangers in the street (who dent our cars) and in the sky (who prompt our epiphanies).”

••• 11

Jitish Kallat in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist: This is not the first time we speak and do a recording, but since this is a retrospective book, let us start from the beginning. How did you come to art, or how did art come to you?

Jitish Kallat: As far back as I can remember, I was incessantly drawing. When I look back, I recollect this day when my sister, who is eight years older than me, was struggling to make a drawing in her biology book. I must have been around five years old at the time and volunteered to do the drawing for her and sat beside her making the drawing on another sheet of paper. It so appeared that I could do a better drawing, and this got my sister and the family all excited, giving a naĂŻve boost to my juvenile self-worth. When I look back, I think this incredible alchemy happens when you draw, especially when youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re a child; you make a mark and you create space, you add a few lines, and you derive depth. As you add more marks, a world begins to originate on a piece of paper, and you feel incredibly empowered. I think well into my mid-teens I was persistently and obsessively drawing.

HUO: Who were the inspirations for you at the time? I was wondering for you, in India, who were the kind of artists? I was once told by M.F. Husain himself that almost every household in India has a postcard of M.F. Husain. I was wondering if he was someone you came across, and did he inspire you?

JK: I had seen Husain reproductions as a child before I entered the art school. He sort of symbolized the general publicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perception of a modern artist in post-Independence India. I wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really deeply aware of modern art movements until I entered art school, purely drifting from drawing to an interest in billboards and the manner in which data gets both condensed and amplified on them.

HUO: Bollywood billboards?

JK: No, advertisements. And so, I landed up in art school not knowing whether my interest lay in the applied arts or fine arts. I think the epiphany was olfactory. I remember walking through the fine arts department at Sir. J. J. School of Arts, where the smell of paint filled the high-ceilinged corridors lined with plaster casts. I think I subliminally knew that I was in the right place. This, in the year 1990. At the time, the school was deeply oriented towards abstraction, something I too inherited in my very early days. There was a very magnetic teacher, Prabhakar Kolte, whose work and his own affinities with the Bauhaus school had a cast on the aesthetics of the school. By 1992, I began noticing seismic shifts in my relationship with abstraction, wherein, emerging from a field of abstraction would be fragments of texts, notations or imagery. It was as if the external world was emerging from a field of abstraction and seeking coherence as representational form. In the earliest canvases I painted in 1994â&#x20AC;&#x201C;95, the figuration emerged by quarrying layers of paint. The forms were a result of peeling layers of paint as if time was acting upon the pigment, dislodging it and exposing the layers below. Such a process would reveal a self-image and around this autoportrait would proliferate questions about time, ancestry, death, mortality, sustenance and all the themes that still continue to surface in the work.

Flower Child Operates the Funeral of a Schedule, 1996 Mixed media on canvas 152 x 213 cm (60 x 84 in) >> Flower Child Operates the Funeral of a Schedule (detail)

HUO: There is the recurrent idea of time, there is the clock, the selfimage in a clock.

JK: Yes Hans. I think of pieces such as Flower Child Operates the Funeral of a Schedule that I made within weeks of completing art school in 1995. The painting playfully commemorates the death of a six-year routine, ceremoniously depicted as the death of a wristwatch, a renewed pact with time, the self at once entrapped and liberated from time. At one end of the painting, ants rush to devour a watch in a Daliesque banquet; elsewhere, a watch moves from a flute-bearer’s wrist to a case/coffin. At the bottom of the painting, the senses are shut down, enveloping one’s head in a white drape. It’s a question I continue to ask myself today; if we obliterate every external marker of change, could time exist for us, would our breath and heartbeat be the only indicator of time? These inquires may have metaphysical undertones but were always encoded and mischievously cloaked in the guise of the mundane narrative, such as the concluding rite at the end of campus life.

HUO: In the eighties, there was a very dynamic painting scene in India, not returning to figuration but exploring figuration, with artists like Bhupen Khakhar, for instance.

JK: I think I began to discover Bhupen a little late. The presence of Sudhir Patwardhan, Gieve Patel, Nalini Malani or artists who were one generation younger than them, like Atul Dodiya, formed a constellation of figures who began to nourish oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s practice, and it is through some of them that I stumbled into discovering the quirky world of Bhupen Khakhar.

HUO: Bhupen was one of the most influential artists of that generation. Did you personally encounter him?

JK: Yes, we developed a wonderful friendship, but it was rather late in the day unfortunately.

HUO: In the mid-nineties?

JK: No, sometime around 1999â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2000. We happened to be travelling together to a few countries with other artist friends, but all of this only lasted three years or so, as he passed away in 2003. It was already the phase when he was combating bad health, and it was evident that he had this incredible desire to be active and prolific, but the body wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t cooperate. I remember a trip in Sri Lanka when a group of us artist friends would visit a fortress or an ancient cave, he would stay back in the car, and he would compensate the decline in mobility by filling in books with drawings.

HUO: So, in 1997, there was your first show, titled P.T.O. Where was this show? In these early pictures, there was the autobiographical and there was already the notion of time.

JK: P.T.O. took place at Gallery Chemould, which is currently called Chemould Prescott Road, and at Prithvi Gallery (now non-operational), which used to be an interesting convergence point for people from theatre and the performing arts. These very early pictures were made at a time when I was about 22 years old. It was a time when I was asking myself existential questions like who am I, what am I here for, what is life and death, how do you reconcile moral and ethical ambiguities? And some of those questions really became the central pivot around which those paintings were made. A question that preoccupied me was this whole idea of ancestry, which was at once family ancestry, a larger cultural ancestry but also the specific artistic ancestry that was propelling me to make those pieces. While I was struggling to find a visual language that would help me instrumentalize the act of picture-making as a tool to engage with lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s questions, I was also simultaneously questioning my evolving pictorial language. I think it was less apparent to me at the time, but when I look back, it seems like I was asking myself: What does the manner in which I paint tell me about who I am? And how do I find clues to the co-ordinates of my existence (family, city, nation, planetary) in the piece that I am making? I often think of the pieces in P.T.O. (Please Turn Over) like a series of cryptic diagrams. The pictures were like a weather-beaten public wall, like a communal pin-up board on which private images and ideas were arranged and overlaid, like palimpsests. In the early nineties, one could say that the living room in India was changing. Following the economic liberalization, the television set began to beam a different soundscape, with varied languages and diverse information from across the world. The information was 22

arranged differently on this renewed TV screen, and these codes of how ‘the image’ was configured began to affect the way I painted. The paintings at once appeared like a flickering TV screen and a deteriorating public wall where layers were peeled to reveal the underpainting. It was as if a city wall with layers of information pasted on had degraded with the passage of time and the sun, rain and wind acting upon it. The paintings seemed old at the very moment I would finish painting it, as if the act of painting was an acceleration of time. If Bhupen Khakhar’s paintings were windows with images showing through, mine were walls with images plastered on.

Modus Vivendi (1000 People â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 1000 Homes), 2002 Mixed media on canvas 244 x 549 cm (96 x 216 in)

HUO: And in 2000, something happens because there is your first installation, there is also your showing at the Havana Biennial with Random Access Memory. The year 2000 is already the digital age. Information grows exponentially but that doesn’t actually mean that we have more memory. One could say that amnesia may be somewhere rooted as the very core of the digital age. It’s so interesting that artists protest against forgetting and work with memory…

JK: Yeah Hans, these 108 drawings, made using heat on fax paper, were an intertwining of memory and amnesia, materialization of an image and its subsequent disappearance. Random Access Memory (108 Stopovers for a Pillion Pilgrim), exhibited at the 7th Havana Biennial, were made on exposed thermal fax paper by applying heat; thus, the tools and the medium were the electric iron, the incense stick, the candle stick, hot and cold water, and minimal use of pigment that adhered with heat. Titled Communication in Difficult Times: One Closer to the Other, that edition of the biennial was being realized with little or no budget. I was invited to participate based on my large canvases that the curators had seen. But when I heard about the complex budget scenario and read the curatorial note, I felt I must simply obliterate shipment from this “artistic communication in difficult times”. Such was the trigger to migrate from canvas to a transmission “communication” material such as fax paper, which collectively weighed less than a pack of face tissues but would unfold at the biennial as an enormous double helix of imagery. At the centre of this enormous recital was a self-image posing as a tourist-pilgrim negotiating the massive whirl whose 108 stations were the ancient pilgrimage sites of India, art historical fragments and personal trivia coded as image. The number 108 has numerous connotations in Indian and Asian traditions; it has astronomical significance and is also the number of beads on a seeker’s chanting chain, an analogy one felt while repeatedly returning to the same 28

format of fax paper. At the end of the biennial, the drawings were distributed amongst the numerous volunteers who helped mount the exhibition. Since these pieces were made on fax paper, the thermal stains were deemed to inevitably erase themselves in the homes of the volunteers in the course of six or eight months.

Random Access Memory (108 Stopovers for a Pillion Pilgrim), 2000 Heat, water and colour pigments on 108 thermal fax paper sheets, Installation view: 7th Havana Biennial

HUO: So, they do not exist anymore. At the time, you also did 22,000 Sunsets; what was the trigger for the sunsets?

JK: 22,000 Sunsets was an image of a few people entering and exiting a suburban railway station, each person carrying a speech bubble that has within it a sunset. What appears like a glimpse of the everyday was in retrospect a memorial to the number of sunsets my father saw in the 62 years of his life. Such a coming together of the autobiographical with the outwardly has been a recurrent element in my work. A year earlier, I was working on two paintings simultaneously. One was Maternamortal (Mom’s Mom’s Mom, Mom’s Dad’s Mom), a conjoined image of two of my demised great-grandparents from photographs in my maternal ancestral home in Kerala. The other was the painting Ode to the Spinal Cord that appeared like a restless snapshot of Mumbai’s accelerated life, anchored by a flayed clock-spider whose stretched, tormented limbs appear like the markings of a railway line. My father had passed away a little over a year before I painted 22,000 Sunsets. However, the autobiographical aspect was deeply embedded and indistinguishable on the surface. The painting was made from a picture taken of a railway station where my father and I would travel together for almost five years. The fact that the title was derived from the approximate number of sunsets that my father saw remained a dormant thought for years. My father had passed away in 1999 and it was only in 2010, when I was working on the photo piece Epilogue that I began reflecting on 22,000 Sunsets made in 2001. Epilogue had every moon that my father saw from the day he was born on 2nd April 1936 until he passed away on 2nd December 1999. Each moon was replaced by a roti. These two artworks are a decade apart and have little mediumistic or linguistic overlaps, but I feel that they are intrinsically a single utterance, separated by a decade.

22,000 Sunsets, 2001 Mixed media on canvas 152 x 213 cm (60 x 84 in) Maternamortal (Mom’s Mom’s Mom – Mom’s Dad’s Mom), 2000 Mixed media on canvas 133 x 175 cm (52 x 69 in)

Ode to the Spinal Cord, 2000 Mixed media on canvas 133 x 175 cm (52 x 69 in)

“A vibrant display… Readers can

also feast their eyes on 155 images— sketches, large-format mixed media works, paintings, elemental drawings, sculptures and lenticular photo prints.” —Krutika Behrawala, The Hindu

“The monograph, a marvellously

produced tome, attempts to chronicle [Kallat’s artistic] shifts over time… it is a meditative … rumination on the artist’s journey.” —Anindita Ghose, LiveMint

Natasha Ginwala is a curator and researcher, and writes on contemporary art and visual culture in various publications.

MODERN & CONTEMPORARY ART

JITISH KALLAT

364 pages, 155 photographs 8 x 10.63” (205 x 270 mm), hc with 3-edge printing ISBN: 978-93-85360-28-2 ₹3950 | $49.95 | £39.99 Fall 2018 • World rights

Printed at TPrinted in Malaysia

Edited by Natasha Ginwala

www.mapinpub.com

ISBN 978-93-85360-28-2