Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat depicts cosmic constellations and sacred geometries. In a suite of new installations, drawings and sculptures at Paris’ Daniel Templeton Gallery, Kallat brings together a collection of conceptual and sensory propositions on time, sustenance and sleep.
The results come as the celestial goods for The Infinite Episode: an assembly of ‘devices to read the complex forces of nature that inhabit the space and time of the artwork’. Indeed, it seems that the process of creating some of these works has been subject to an intensely complex interaction between the forces of nature. Wind Study (The Hour of the Day of the Month of the Season) was created by overlaying an inflammable liquid on Kallat’s graphite drawings, and setting aflame one line at a time. Kallat’s mediative drawings seem to become part of a conversation between the elements.
Exploring the celestial is not Kallat’s usual cup of tea. He tends to focus on Mumbai’s downtrodden or dispossessed inhabitants, globalisation, caste and communal tensions. In Public Notice 2, the artist created around 4500 individual bone shaped letters and arranged them into the words that made up Mahatma Gandhi’s historic speech Salt March to Dandi. Each alphabet piece was used to hold up Ghandi’s plea for civil disobedience in a way that enabled viewers to zone in and focus on the words, language and power of Ghandi’s message.
In this exhibition, Kallat’s sculpture titled The Infinite Episode is an assembly of ten sleeping vertebrate characters. Crafted from dental plaster, each little creature is curled up in a deep, comfortable sleep. It seems like a cosmic dormitory, or a nice sleepover of equally sized vertebrate friends. The clinical, creamy plaster seems to induce an other worldly mediation on the nature of time and sleep.
Jitish Kallat: The Infinite Episode runs at Galerie Daniel Templon until 31 October
