| Broadly speaking my works address the classic themes of survival and the endless narratives of human struggle, often oscillating between the playful codes of pop and the high seriousness of agitprop. The city of Mumbai, wherein the enterprise of daily existence is pushed to the extreme, acts as artistic catalyst, and continually percolates my practice. The contradictions here are immense. At once dynamic and dysfunctional, the city is a heady hodgepodge of languages, castes, religions, and class difference. Life goes on, precariously balancing commerce and corruption, affluence and abject poverty, swelling real estate prices and rampant homelessness. |  |
Jitish Kallat
Broadly speaking my works address the classic themes of survival and the endless narratives of human struggle, often oscillating between the playful codes of pop and the high seriousness of agitprop. The city of Mumbai, wherein the enterprise of daily existence is pushed to the extreme, acts as artistic catalyst, and continually percolates my practice. The contradictions here are immense. At once dynamic and dysfunctional, the city is a heady hodgepodge of languages, castes, religions, and class difference. Life goes on, precariously balancing commerce and corruption, affluence and abject poverty, swelling real estate prices and rampant homelessness. Yet this highly polluted metropolis becomes the incubator of national culture and progressive thought, producing films, fashion statements, popular music, and an array of colorful street vernaculars that blend words from all parts of India into the national language Hindi, forming the unique Bambaiya (or Mumbaiya) Hindi.
I work across a wide range of media in various registers of seriousness and play, often absorbing diverse artistic strategies while making my work. For instance, Aquasuarus (2008), the mammoth seven-meter-long sculpture, is a life-size recreation of a water tanker with simulated bones, as if it were the restructured remains of a prehistoric specie and displayed in a natural history museum. Emerging out of my photo archive of vehicles that have been violated during riots, Aquasaurus is perhaps grotesque, burlesque and arabesque in equal measure.
The Universal Recipient (2008) paintings are portraits of security guards at the entrance of gated residential blocks in the city of Mumbai. In many ways these become double portraits. The portrait of the city, rendered as a crumbling cascade of countless narratives, interlaces with the overgrown locks of the security guards as if they were raconteurs of the city’s inner secrets. The portraits are propped on a pair of bronze sculptural supports that are referenced from wall adornments on the 120-year-old Victoria Terminus Building in the center of the city.
In a different yet related index, the Lipid Opus (2008) sculptures, holding up piled, urban detritus, bring to mind the waxy, sterol-like fluids of the body. Simultaneously referencing the city and the fluids of the body, they call to mind the numerous banal tourist paraphernalia that are built around the image of love for the city—the “I Love NY” or the “I Love Mumbai” T-shirts for instance, wherein “I,” the self, and “the city” have the heart in the middle—intercepting it with ominous imagery of chaos and threat. Traumanama (The Cry of the Gland) (2008) is a portfolio of works on paper that opens up the body almost like Rorschach inkblots, the stretched muscles and dripping fluids metaphorically become receptacles of urban trauma.
Contradictions and chaos often procreate culture. The contradictions and chaos of Mumbai become coordinates for me to position the vital themes of my practice around. I use them to navigate artistically the grand themes of life as they get played out on the city street.
