Jitish Kallat

Born 1974 in Mumbai, India
Work and lives in Mumbai, India

Jitish Kallat’s practice combines painting, photography, and collage, as well as large-scale sculptures and multi-media installations. Jitish graduated from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, in 1996, part of a group of precocious and ambitious young artists who have been instrumental in globalising Indian contemporary art. Kallat honed his interest in painting through embracing abstraction within the tenants of high modernism, learning to exploit colour to elicite an emotive response. Audacious and self confident, Kallat firmly rejected abstraction and any loyalty to high modernism by the time of his first solo show, within two years out of art school. Entitled PTO, the show was the first in a series of exhibitions which co-opted the allegiance of multiple gallery spaces, in this case spanning north and south Mumbai.

Kallat’s early works incorporated references to the style, form and thematic concerns of urban billboards, which were interwoven with popular culture, news stories, media events and the socio-economic and political anxieties of the citizens of Mumbai. Jitish has since been widely recognised for figurative paintings highlighting the convergences of cultural dualities of Mumbai. Kallat’s pieces are large-scale, ambitious presenting a sleek portrayal of the politics, poverty, dirt and grime of Mumbai. Dystopic narratives of urban life, are portrayed as romantic or heroic to achieve the high gloss of globally acceptable contemporary art.

With his series Rickshawpolis in 2005, Kallat initiated his engagement with vehicles and snarled traffic as metaphors for modern cities like Mumbai, Shanghai and Dubai. For Kallat rickshaws have become a recurring motif for city dwellers and urban dissonance. For his suite of photographs titled 365 Lives, he documented dented skeletal remains of vehicles, each dent corresponding to a wound. His bold, somewhat confrontational style recalls the energy and audacity of his native Mumbai whilst his signature works contain an underlying edge of brutality.

Kallat’s use of lenticular prints began with Death of Distance, 2006, a photographic series that critiques the vast, insatiable twenty four hour news channels broadcast in India. A giant rupee coin stands on edge next to a series of lenticular prints juxtaposing two news reports shifting from one text to another depending on the viewer's position. One reports the launch of a new telecommunications plan, announcing "call anywhere in India for one rupee"; the other recounts the story of a young Indian girl who committed suicide because her mother could not give her one rupee to buy a school meal.

A lenticular print displays a succession of images within a single frame. A change in the viewing angle can convey the illusion of three dimensionality creating a sense of animation. The truth is not in any single image but is situated somewhere in between. In the photo pieces Cenotaph (A Deed Of Transfer), 2007, Kallat documents the demolition of a row of illegally built slum dwellings which were situated on the Tulsi Pipe Road, part of his childhood drive to and from school. The slum dwellers were re-located as a result of widening roads and adding pavements while modernising Mumbai. Cenotaph documents the stages of the removal of the slum-dwellers which when viewed from different angles, extends the narrative. In turn the documentation itself may be viewed as an optimistic part of urban development, better infrastructure, wider and cleaner roads or it may be viewed as an act of brutality and violence against voiceless individuals who are deemed to stand in the way of urban progress.

Savita Apte