Over the past decade, Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat has risen to international stardom as one of the beacons of Indian contemporary art. Curator Sharmistha Ray engages the artist in a conversation fine-tuned to key developments in his artistic practice, his most significant works and how they have shaped him as a conceptual artist.

SR: Jitish, you have had a somewhat privileged career – it’s not that you had an early advantage, but your artistic potential was recognized early by the likes of Shireen Gandhy, who took you on to Gallery Chemould’s programme right out of J.J. School of art. You had a solo at her gallery in 1997 with ‘P.T.O.’ and since that time, you have travelled a long distance with regards to your career, but also more importantly, as an artist. Your work, from the start, has been concerned with urban space, and more specifically, with Mumbai. The themes of mortality, decay and obsolescence have been prevalent and matured over time. In the beginning, these themes were communicated primarily through painting. The paintings were large format, the surfaces were raw and they appropriated imagery ubiquitous in popular media. The ‘voice’ was depleted of sentimentality, which must have been a shock to audiences at that time, that by-and-large, expected a kind of romanticism from art. Can you talk about the early beginnings with specific regard to your artistic oeuvre at that time? What was the response to the early work both within the art fraternity and from larger audiences?

JK: I think your point about a certain kind of sentimentality being prevalent in painting at that time is largely correct, but of course we had the deeply mischievous, vernacular humour of artists such as Bhupen Khakhar, which was very inspirational. I was however referring to another kind of play the kind that came from big-city graffiti, the stimuli of the flickering television set and the ever-expanding scale of the billboard. All of these greatly impacted my pictorial format. When I look back at the mid-nineties, figurative painting in India largely relied on the format of the window (where images had perspective and depth of field or were occasionally treated like photo-montages); I was making pictures that referred to the format of a wall where images were pinned up, peeled off, superimposed like a decaying palimpsest. I was playing with legibility, the creation and obliteration of meaning. The viewer often performed the role of a detective in front of a shape-shifting image, peeling away the cryptic imagery to unearth meaning. As you rightly point out, the themes of mortality and survival that engaged me then still form the nucleus of my practice today.

When I look back at my work between 1994-97, even during my art-school days my practice embraced the television screen and the evolving manipulations of different mass-media surfaces. I could possibly call it a crosspollination of MTV with the intentions of history painting. This was almost a decade before a certain breed of, what is now often referred to as ‘mediatic realism’, became popular and almost omnipresent in the contemporary Indian art scene around 2003-04.

SR: Today, you are a recognized force within Indian contemporary art, on a global stage. Your stylistic iconography references pop art, but it’s not possible to compartmentalize your work in any one style or genre. Your work resides in a multidisciplinary space and ranges from digital photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and video. In fact, I can’t think of another Indian artist who ‘stretches’ one’s own visual language as much as you do. Looking back, 2005 was a significant year: your solo ‘Rickshawpolis-I’ at Nature Morte in New Delhi introduced photography into your practice in a major way with Artist Making Local Call and Onomatopeia, The Scar Park which in turn have led to an even larger photographic work called 365 Lives (2007) at Arario, Beijing. Also, the stylization of your painting imagery and process consolidated in the manner we now recognize as distinctly your own; that is the flattened planes, localized colour and delineation of form to create abstract floating masses that are made up of ‘constellations’ of traffic jams. Later, these constellations are manifested in portraits of young street urchins, which started with the Carbon Milk and Dawn Chorus (2007) series. Can you extrapolate on that body of work and how those investigations have informed your later conceptual and stylistic preoccupations? Was it a breakthrough or turning point for you? If so, how?

JK: In 2005, the two photoworks Artist Making Local Call and Onomatopoeia (The Scar Park) were key pieces for me, and they still continue to instruct the work I make today. Artist Making Local Call was a simple act of taking a still camera on a street to make a panorama. To make a panorama the camera takes several pictures around a 360-degree rotation so there is over a minute of time enshrined in this still photograph. A rickshaw and a taxi, that happened to be in the same spot, a second apart from each other, register in the picture as a virtual collision. The people walking on either side of this collision are the same; they simply moved across in the time that passed. One observes that the same people appear multiple times creating an urban march across an image of collision; elsewhere people moving in the opposite direction of the camera cast shadows while their bodies remain invisible evoking an image of death.

In Onomatopoeia (The Scar Park) and 365 Lives scarred surfaces of dented automobiles appear like colour swatches; on a closer viewing one finds that they appear like an inventory of wounds, as if one was making a seismographic record of the city’s erratic heartbeat through an image of collision. With the ‘Rickshawpolis’ paintings, I moved away from the kind of painting I was doing where the individual was lost in an expansive peoplescape. These paintings became collision portraits of the thumping, claustrophobic city-street wherein cars, buses, scooters, cycles, cats, cows and humans, collide and coalesce to form mega-explosions. The paintings themselves are mounted on bronze sculptures, re-creations of gargoyles that are found atop the 120 year old Victoria Terminus Building in the centre of Mumbai.

In the Dawn Chorus and Universal Recipient paintings, this crumbling cascade of narratives get interlaced with the mane of an individual. The painting itself becomes a double portrait; the portrait of the person who inhabits the city but equally, the portrait of the city itself. In some later paintings such as Sweatopia this brimming debris of images form a linkage between the heads of people as if they were all conjoined by a common overlapping reality. Formally speaking, the paintings lie somewhere in between the brimful format of the pop billboard and the fierce economy of agitprop posters.

SR: One has to keep an open mind when approaching your work. I remember seeing Autosaurus Tripous (2007) for the first time at ShContemporary in September 2007, the art fair in Shanghai. If I’m correct, that was the first work constructed of human bones fabricated in fiberglass; and it was both jovially ‘carnivalesque’ and macabre at the same time. The ‘face’ of the auto has this comic sneer; but the work is a commentary on the onslaught of Modernity in India that will render many of these urban emblems obsolete. In my opinion, the urban critique of your previous works really coalesced with your own artistic instincts with Autosaurus. That display at ShContemporary along with your massive solo exhibition at Arario Beijing at the same time really put you on the international playing field. I would say 2007 was also an important breakthrough year for you in your use of material and investigation of new artistic forms to express a complex and intricate system of ideas. Works like Conditions Apply (2007) of a lunar eclipse that is actually an Indian style roti is a key work in which the idea of consumption is explored through the use of food. You employ the consumption of food, its digestion and eventual waste as metaphors for a disembodied society, biting off more than it can chew. Petromorphine (2007), a gooey orange in colour and shaped like a wheel spoke, looks like it’s made of jam-jelly: in fact it’s made up of miniature cars and buses all – forgive the pun – jammed together; again, alluding to the bustling traffic of the urban streets. The cast resin sculptural process of this work was also employed in a large-scale installation work 8:47 (2007); works like these launched your sculptural practice in a big way. This exhibition was ample proof that you were an artist who could take on material and size and scale it! In retrospect, how do you view this cycle of works?

JK: As an artist I enjoy the process of seeing an image take shape, and transform not just its contour but its context in the very act of making work. Autosaurus Tripous – and other sculptures that look like a morph between a vehicle and a prehistoric vertebrate – emerged from a small archive of images of vehicles that had been torched or violated in riots. I was drawn to them as mindless images of human folly, wherein public fury gets externalised in peculiar absurd ways by breaking windshields and burning vehicles. The charred body of a fully burnt vehicle begins to appear like the fossilised endoskeleton of an animal. I agree with what you say about the mixing of the jovial with the macabre; I often describe these pieces as ‘grotesque, burlesque and arabesque’ depending on how one sees it. The display of these pieces often resembles a cross between a creature in a Natural History Museum, a brand new vehicle in an auto-expo or an oversized toy in a child’s dream.

It’s interesting that you mention 2007 as a key year in my work. The large solo show in Beijing allowed me to work out several of my ideas; also it was interesting to end the year with my solo titled ‘Sweatopia’ at Chemould Prescott Road and Bodhi in Mumbai with works made between 2005-07. ‘Sweatopia’ allowed me to look back and bring together pieces made across two years and interweave them into a single project.

SR: Since Autosaurus Tripous (2007), the fiberglass bones have become a signature for you. The installation of public Notice-2 (2007) in ‘Urban Manners’, an exhibition curated by Adelina von Fürstenberg at the hangar Bicocca in Milan was an extremely important moment within your own oeuvre as well as in Indian contemporary art, for sheer scale for a single work, and of course, the artistic ambition behind it. It was a monumental artistic enterprise, not to mention a laborious undertaking. The same work was just installed in its entirety at Saatchi Gallery’s ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ in January 2010. Public Notice-2 was also installed at Bodhi Art, Singapore in September 2008. Can you talk about the Public Notice series and how it’s contextualized within your own oeuvre? Do you foresee these works taking up residence in either short-term or permanent displays in India? Given their political voice, don’t you think it’s a necessity for the Indian public to bear witness to such works?

JK: Within the Public Notice series a historical speech is evoked as the central armature of the work. In the first piece titled Public Notice (2003) the words of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoken on the midnight of Indian independence, against the backdrop of riots and the bloodshed of partition, were evoked by hand rendering it on mirror using rubber adhesive. The speech was full of hope for the newly formed nation-state touching upon secularism, tolerance and peace, which was very much in contradiction with the violence and sectarianism which has been taking place recently in India. The burning melts the mirror surface; thus the body of the viewer gets split and distorted in and around the text. The reading of the text is at all times intersected by a warped reflection of the viewer.

Four years later I made Public Notice-2 (2007) where approximately 4500 recreations of bones shaped like alphabets stare back at us like discarded relics; together they form the speech Gandhi delivered on the eve of the historic 400-kilometre ‘Dandi March’ calling for complete ‘Civil Disobedience’. The only fierce restriction being that of maintaining ‘total peace’ and ‘absolute non-violence’.

‘Public Notice’ was first shown at the NGMA Mumbai in 2003 following which it has been shown in various parts of the world. Public Notice-2 (2007), as you point out, hasn’t been seen in India yet. As an artist one can’t compel institutions here to show these works.

Often these investigations find their first utterance in varied parts of the world before one has the opportunity to show them in India. In some ways, that is fine too since ‘Public Notice-2’ isn’t really about Indian history, it is about revisiting voices such as Gandhi’s to grade the follies of our ailing world where wars against terror are fought at television prime time.

SR: Another work I feel we should mention is Death of Distance (2006), made up of an enlarged, one-rupee coin made of painted fiberglass coated with lead, and 5 lenticular prints, which was exhibited at Bodhi Mumbai in your solo exhibition ‘Sweatopia’ in 2007. In all your work, there’s a comic absurdity that prevents the work from slipping into the arena of direct political rhetoric. To some, it would appear that you’re a clever Master of Irony. However, this is the only work, in my opinion, where you resist irony completely; the directness of its political message offset by the Spartan use of material and form render this one of the most enduring works made by any Indian contemporary artist. It’s an unflinching critique of the tragic paradox of India Shining. Just like the coin has two faces, so does India’s success story. How do you place this work in the larger context of your oeuvre? In this exhibition, one also saw a greater use of painted and lead-coated fiberglass in both this work and Eruda (2006), the towering sculpture of a street urchin with armfuls of books. Your sculptural process, which has also become distinct, has the feel and presence of carbon, an organic substance that holds as much weight for you as food. It’s interesting because an excess of either can lead to poisoning, in one form or another. It’s the excess you’re concerned with as an artistic concept. Would you agree with this statement?

JK: For a while I was sitting with these two conflicting pieces of information on my desk; one a death of a little girl who committed suicide as her mother couldn’t afford to give her a rupee for the school meal, the other was the state press release stating that we have ‘the death of distance’ in India as a rupee is all it will take to connect one end of India to the other. The telephone call rates were being dropped, signifying the arrival of a new India. In Death of Distance these two stories flip as the viewer moves in front of the piece; the story one reads depends on where one stands but the very next frame will have the other story as the lenticular prints will let both these narratives ghost through each other at all times. I can’t clearly say they are about excess or dearth. I think they are like notations one makes within a self-addressed envelope that might travel the world but the person you are addressing is yourself.

SR: Lastly, you pay a lot of attention to titling; I have always viewed your signature © Jitish Kallat on paintings, as well as your work and exhibition titles like ‘Rickshawpolis’ and ‘Sweatopia’, as an extension of your fascination with modern-day systems of branding, packaging and marketing. Another pun, so to speak. This is obviously a deliberate choice, isn’t it?

JK: Yeah the © sign was a playful gesture that I began in art-school; every action of mine, even a tiny sketch would be copyrighted as an affront to the way art students ransack each other’s ideas. Later I carried this classroom prank to my larger paintings as I would myself rummage through imagery from a wide range of sources largely from the pop-poop of the media. I would ironically cap it with a mock-copyright sign. I think somewhere this connects to the point you raised earlier about sentimentality; even as these pieces connect to classic themes of art, I would like to sift them through a spirit of play.

Titles and text have always been important to me. Works from 1994-1998 would often have multiple mock-pompous titles for one artwork. More recent titles such as ‘Rickshawpolis’ or ‘Sweatopia’ are attempts to abbreviate larger ideas into a single condensed word.

SR: Now coming to your current work. You have just had an expansive solo exhibition ‘Astronomy of the Subway’ with Haunch of Venison at their current space located at the Museum of Mankind in London. With this exhibition, you sought to create a spatial experience from beginning to end; in a way, it was the most comprehensive endeavour you have ever undertaken. It went beyond the bounds of a commercial exhibition; it really felt like a full-scale museum retrospective. Works like Forensic Trail of the Grand Banquet (2009), a 20 foot-long video projection, The Cry of the Gland (2009), a 108 unit photographic work, and Annexation (2009), a painted and lead-coated fiberglass sculpture, continue on from earlier artistic preoccupations and use of stylistic forms, but Anger at the Speed of Fright (2010) is a complete departure. Is this a new stylistic variant we can expect from your sculptural practice? Can you talk about this show, the ideas behind it and how you feel you have evolved?

JK: I wanted to develop ‘Astronomy of the Subway’ in such a way that allowed various strands of my thinking to emerge and be read alongside. The scale of the gallery with several large and small rooms allowed for different bodies of work to be read like chapters within a larger project.

The immersive video projection Forensic Trail of the Grand Banquet 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 dark, cryptic space when viewed a little longer could begin to appear like floating cellular formations, suspended tumours etc., morphing the insides of the body with the dark, indeterminate cosmic space and evoking notions of sustenance, survival and mortality. By contrast, the 108 part work titled The Cry of the Gland has several close shots of people’s pockets taken on the streets, each one bulging like a bodily protrusion, laden with personal possessions loosely attached to the body.

Anger at the Speed of Fright is an elaborate and detailed sculptural installation. It is a constellation of over sixty rioting figures, where each unique sculpture created from newspaper clippings is approximately 15 cm tall, allowing the viewer to get a God’s eye view of human folly. Formally this piece might be a departure from things I’ve done but the references came from my same archive of street riots from which sculptures such as Aquasaurus and Ignitaurus emerged.

Elsewhere was a room with three recent photoworks titled Chlorophyll Park (Mutatis Mutandis); each of these was a random street-scene wherein all traces of asphalt have been replaced by wheatgrass. The grass was grown in the studio, documented like organized studio shots and then composited into random candid pictures of streets. At one level these appear like a sudden invasion of nature, with nourishing wheat grass taking on the black tarmac street; at another level I’m also interested in the threatening and apocalyptic element in these pictures. Seen alongside a light-box with a lunar cycle formed by rotis was the sculpture titled Annexation. Annexation is an oversized black lead kerosene stove that carries around a hundred images on it; each of these are culled from the porch of the Victoria Terminus building in Mumbai where the decorative architectural friezes carry several images of animals devouring each other and clinging onto different things like a pot of food or a bunch of grapes. This is not unlike the daily grind of survival that this porch witnesses every day.

SR: What’s next?

JK: This June at ‘Sculpture at Pilane’ I’ll be showing a large 100 feet long sculpture titled When will you be happy which will be embedded in a vast prehistoric burial site. This sculpture can be seen from up close as well as from the top of a small hillock.

Right now, I’m working on Public Notice-3 that is due to open at the Art Institute of Chicago on 9/11 this year. This work is formed by the speech delivered on 9/11, 1893 by the Indian spiritual leader and reformer Swami Vivekananda calling for an end of all ‘bigotry and fanaticism’, exactly 108 years before the World Trade Center attacks in New York. The text will occupy the 118 step-risers of the Grand-Staircase and will be rendered in the five colours -red, orange, yellow, blue and green- which are designated by the American Homeland Security Advisory System to signify a threat condition each, such that green denotes ‘low’ risk of terror attacks, blue indicates a ‘general’ risk, yellow implies ‘elevated’, orange would stand for ‘high’ and red would mean that one is faced with a ‘severe’ risk of a terror attack.

Interestingly the speech, now refracted through a vocabulary of threat, was delivered from the very site where the museum stands today allowing for these historical words to be revisited in the very building where they were spoken.