A Centre for Contemporary Art opens with two shows at Bikaner House, Delhi

Two phonographic records launched into space by NASA in 1977 with messages from earthlings to the aliens who might perhaps discover them one day have helped revive an elegant cultural space in Delhi that went silent about a year ago. These sound files, which are hurling through space some 13 billion miles from earth carrying information about the human species, are the inspiration for Jitish Kallat’s immersive installation currently on display at Bikaner House. 

Located on the India Gate hexagon and spread over an eight-acre plot, this bungalow was once the residence of the maharaja of Bikaner. After its renovation in 2014-15, the Rajasthan government, which owns it, had turned it into a vibrant space for arts and culture. But a change of power in the state towards the end of 2018 stalled all activities.

Two major exhibitions from the Nature Morte gallery — Kallat’s “Terranum Nuncius” and “The Idea of the Acrobat” showcasing the works of 12 artists in different media — mark the reopening of the space. Kallat’s works — the NASA project-inspired photographic and sound installation titled Covering Letter and the 60-foot Ellipsis, his largest painting to date — are displayed in the older building where programming has resumed. The group show can be viewed in a space that once housed offices but has now been renovated as a new Centre for Contemporary Art.

“We were invited some time in 2018 to put up a show here, but then the government in Rajasthan changed and all the work at Bikaner House stopped,” says Nature Morte Director Peter Nagy, who has co-curated the exhibitions with Aparajita Jain. Things got moving again sometime in August last year.

Manish Nai, Untitled, 2017 (used cloth and wood)

The Centre for Contemporary Art is a maze of rooms, each big enough to accommodate artworks of scale. Among them is Bharti Kher’s An Absence of Assignable Cause (2007), a life-size sculpture of a sperm whale’s heart, its surface marked by innumerable moss-green bindis of varying sizes — a Kher trademark. The work, which has been exhibited around the world, is on display in India for the first time.

In the room near the entrance is displayed Dayanita Singh’s series, File Rooms, which tells the story of inheritance and loss, divisions and inequalities, through the lives contained in files: revenue files, court files, income tax files… In a nook not far from it is L N Tallur’s Antilla 5 in bronze, cement and terracotta tiles. A mismatched mix of traditional and modern, it is perhaps a take on one such opulent house in Mumbai.

An elegant wooden staircase leads up to the floor above. In the lobby, a series of photographs by Shilpa Gupta make a comment on the heightened state of fear we live in today. In each portrait, the figure is shown swivelling as though in panic, the source of its fear remaining invisible.

Further down is a powerful work by Reena Saini Kallat — Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso. Using the tie-and-dye method on cloth dyed blue-black, she has reproduced the preambles of countries in conflict: India and Pakistan, US and Cuba; North and South Sudan; North and South Korea… Missing from these preambles are some words — people, liberty, sovereign, equality, human dignity, equal rights, unity, integrity. Written in Braille and rendered in yellow dots, these are illegible to both the sighted and the blind, and act as a metaphor for our collective amnesia.

In the older building, Jitish Kallat’s installation, Covering Letter, which has travelled from Mumbai, is displayed in a dark room. You can hear a soft murmur of people as they walk around it. From above, recorded greetings in 55 languages — the message from earth to the aliens — play. In a circle are arranged 100 photographic transparencies carrying various images of the human race and its activities, of flowers and animals, of scientific and cosmological diagrams. These appear and disappear, then appear again. 

In a divided time, when one section refuses to engage with the other, when the fault lines are deep, this is the artist’s attempt to present us as one — as a collective planetary species to the unknown other that’s perhaps somewhere out there in the cosmos. 

The exhibitions are open at the Centre for Contemporary Art at Bikaner House, Delhi till February 19