27 March,2011 08:01 AM IST | | Dhamini Ratnam
Jitish Kallat replaces images of the moon with rotis and depicts the cosmos filled with X-ray scans of food. The idea is to draw a link between life, sustenance, time and the sky
Stations of a pause, an exhibition by contemporary artist Jitish Kallat, opened on Wednesday at Chemould Prescott Road gallery in Fort.
Kallat, who exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and Berlin last year, returns to the city after a span of three years, with what many have called his most private work yet.
Pic/ Prathik Panchamia
The exhibition comprises a video, an eponymous collection of paintings, and a set of 753 photographs that depict the lunar cycles viewed by Kallat's 62 year-old father who died in 1998. Titled Epilogue, the exhibition by the 36 year-old artist has portrayed the waxing and waning of the moon by photographing 22,500 rotis in various stages of being eaten, to point to larger thematic concerns of mortality, sustenance and loss.
An epilogue usually gives the sense of a 'neat tying up' at the end. What are you conveying through the photographs?
Through these 753 lunar cycles, I retrace my father's lifespan marking every moon that he saw from the day he was born in 1936 to the day of his death in 1998. Each of these is replaced by an image of a roti, drawing links between life, sustenance, time and the sky. I began by thinking about my father's life but the piece is equally about time, about the cycle of life oscillating between fullness and emptiness. The last moon he saw was on the night of December 1, 1998 and hence, the last frame remains empty barring that single moon which appears like a full stop.
What does the zipper in Untitled (Stations of a Pause) signify?
While the city often appears in my paintings, the dominant themes remain those of survival, mortality, fatigue, the urban uncanny and notions of time and sustenance. Each painting is layered with several images that connect with each other: for instance, the zipper could evoke the body through the idea of the garment or the journey through the image of a bag, but also, when seen from a distance, it could evoke topographical views, street-maps or even railway tracks. The zipper on the painting also becomes a pictorial means for peeling off one layer to suggest the existence of another.
A video is part of your show.
Yes, the silent video in the exhibition is my work titled, Forensic Trail of the Grand Banquet, isu00a0 played in reverse as if one is 'travelling away' rather than 'moving towards'.
The work simulates a journey through space wherein planetary and stellar formations, galactic clusters and nebulae are replaced by hundreds of X-ray scans of food. This hypnotic space when viewed a little longer can begin to appear like floating cellular forms. The video is seen in conjunction with Epilogue and one can follow the journey of my father's life by looking at this video either before entering or after exiting the maze.
