<b>Kishore Singh:</b> Urban anxieties

Kallat does not set out to please as much to express his own subaltern voice, dictate his actions

Jitish Kallat’s current prestigious exhibition — it has opened at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, and has been curated by the highly regarded Catherine David — is accompanied by a media blitz entirely in keeping with the artist’s eclectic career. But reading those accounts, most of them made up of lines extrapolated from press notes, makes one wonder: Does anybody get Kallat and his work? Contemporary artists, at the best of times, can be overwhelming with their social messaging and sub-texts, but Kallat is among the more interesting of his generation, not least because of his quiet intelligence. ‘

The catalytic points of Kallat’s career at least are well mapped. For many in India, he burst upon the scene with his iconic series of trucks and autorickshaws shaped skeletally with fibreglass bones. It explored the theme that marks many of his ideas, the relationship of violence and its constructions of lessons alongside explorations of life and death. It was the artist’s attempt to claim public space and attention in India, though chronologically he had started his career with less dramatic outings, even though the subject was consistently similar. Where Subodh Gupta turned the manufactured object into one of fascination and theatre, Atul Dodiya laid claim to a high moral ground with his installations of shutters, Kallat retained an element of surprise. He mocked our way of “seeing” when chappatis were shown to resemble phases of the moon which he knitted into an intensely personal narrative. His subversion of speeches by Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda in his Public Notice series allowed him the opportunity to work in a sweep the more astonishing for its scale, in which the emerging political seemed particularly designed to grab curatorial attention. The result has been shows at Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Jitish Kallat’s Chronology of a Cloud-burst

Jitish Kallat’s own curatorial smarts were put to the test when he handled the second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Given his penchant for the unusual viewpoint, Kallat’s voice for this emerging but important platform helped him create a dialogue that permitted a clamour of individual voices to result in a babble that was the more assuring for its dissonance. 

But what is Kallat’s own art about? To put it into the single sentence demanded of writers proves difficult given the artist’s refusal to stay on any one course. Famously, he has migrated across form without discernible loyalty. Even so, there are a few key clues that sum up his practice so far, and these would include the remembrance of history and memory and his relationship with his city and its environment. He is an urban artist reflecting its anxieties and walking a tightrope between the consumed image of popular discourse and the subverted one of his making, a crossroads hubris that he has referenced as his own. His deviations in form are so diverse that the most amusing way to describe him would be as someone holding a mirror before an increasingly opaque electronic media, pointing to our follies and mocking our ability to look beyond the superficial. 

This does not make him an easy artist to live with. His images (or sculpture, videos, installations) are disconcerting. Kallat does not set out to please as much to express his own subaltern voice and let it dictate his actions. The result is a surprising freedom and escape from the conventional. Not that he seeks out the incendiary purely for provocation. His involvement is heartfelt, a chancing of the socio-political and the creative. The result is there for us to see at NGMA’s ongoing exhibition. I wouldn’t miss it for all the public notices that lead up to it.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated