COMING FULL CIRCLE

Twenty-five years after his first solo exhibition, Jitish Kallat continues to bend time with his art

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

There’s something poetic, even vague about the word ‘otherwhile’, but having picked it as the title of his new exhibition at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, Jitish Kallat would prefer that we didn’t go looking up its meaning in a nearby dictionary. “That would dismantle the show in ways that may not be most interesting. Otherwhile has to do with temporality and the idea of time. Time remains a central, key theme in the exhibition, but also in my life’s work.” In ‘Otherwhile’, a photographic work on glass, we see people try to hold with their fingers the sun, that daily marker of our days. Like time, the work, too, is fragile. As you gaze harder, your perspective slips, “and the glass itself seems to strip”.

Kallat’s work has always had its own peculiar, beguiling range, and Otherwhile (on display until January 4), too, includes work that takes its inspiration from both the macroscopic and the petri dish of the micro. Take ‘Epicycles’, for instance. Isolating from his family in early 2020, Kallat began noticing small changes in his studio—“a crack in the wall, a fallen leaf”. The artist’s decision to then juxtapose pencil drawings of these with images from MoMA’s 1955 The Family of Man exhibition seems apt, but also brilliant. Organised by photographer Edward Steichen, The Family of Man stressed solidarity in a world that was battered and bruised by World War II. Kallat was doing something similar.