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.