published in Art India Jan. 2021
see works here
Jitish Kallat’s new show maps the transformation of bodies in relation to cosmic elements and cosmological rhythms as opposed to the industrial clock-time, reveals Anuj Daga.
In his most recent works exhibited at Nature Morte’s virtual viewing room from the 11th of August to the 31st of December 2020, Jitish Kallat continues his long-standing artistic preoccupation of exploring the meaning of time and its effect on the transformation of bodies. Kallat’s attention was held by the shadow constellations of twigs that had fallen in his studio, the changing outlines of which are woven into the rhythms of a new biological universe. Circadian Studies draws several associations together making us dwell upon the cycles of experience and existence and rethink the modes of corporeal and cosmological inhabitation.
The close observation of shifting shadows has been a civilization preoccupation. In the 16th century Europe, Galileo made accurate renderings of shadows he observed on the surface of the moon through his telescope to postulate the centrality of the sun within the solar system. Around the same time in the middle east, sundials were embedded within the architectures of several mosques so that the prayers for the divinity could be attuned to the cosmic alignments. Such obsessions (for finding higher meaning in aligning to the cosmic order) have only left us with fantastic instruments like the astrolabes that inscribe us in the geometry of a proximate galaxy, and at the same time monumental observatories that reflect astronomical cartographies of the visible sky on earth. In India, the time-devices of Jantar Mantar fantastically designed to counter the delineation of shadows bring to us the most subtle yet phenomenal sensation – those that confirm the sublime duality of the fact that the planet that holds us all still, is indeed moving.
Yet, what could be the value of mapping shadows today? At the foremost, Kallat’s invocation of the “circadian” inverts the uninterrogated reliance of the present-day body on the 24-hour time format that was imposed firmly upon humanity historically merely about two centuries ago. It is well understood that the strict scale of 24 hours was invented to manage efficiently the shifts of the working class in the industrial age, a social phenomenon that eventually articulated the notion of the ‘productive’ body and further situated life within the division of labour and leisure. The smudging of day and night, or shall we say the sun and its shadow within the emerging industrial society produced the phenomenon of the modern city and urban life. The biological reclamation of the industrial time in Kallat’s experiment provokes rethinking of the universalising hegemonies of capitalistic society that removed time from the body altogether. Through this realization, the body is liberated to find its own rhythm of being. The anthropocentric gaze is at once redirected to the natural clocks of numerous other life forms that allow us a revised appreciation of our routinized everyday.
The attempt to trace the twig in its shadow (rather than photograph it) may seem rather futile, for the differential passage of the shadow even while the artist draws its outline on paper inevitably distorts the already flattened body of its counterpart. What then, does the study constitute? Shifting gears from the scientific to the artistic, Kallat’s endeavour doesn’t seem to be about mapping the escape of time, rather the transformation of the body. The red and green lines bleed into each other indicating the phototropic dependence of all forms of terrestrial life on the one hand, and the animal-plant reciprocity on the other. The final result is thus a temporal adventure, a compulsive crafting of time into the shadow cast of the body as seen perhaps in the eyes of nature. In its diagrammatic universe, the grafting of the intersecting circles within the representational outline of the deceased plant indicates its impregnation with the seed on one hand and eventual bearing of the flower/fruit on the other. Not only does this intervention confound the fact that biological clocks are found in every tissue of all living organisms, but in doing so, the artist also collapses several spatio-temporal dualities together – the past and the future, the day and the night, the outside and the inside, the terrestrial and the extra-terrestrial. It further poses simultaneous couplings within which life necessarily unfolds: moving and the static, material and immaterial, visible and invisible.
The notion of leakage of time has been further amplified in his untitled works where an hour glass shears itself within the space of an aging graph paper, seemingly struggling to release itself from the web of order. In disrespecting the pre-existent ruled grid of the paper, the drawn forms announce their desire of release and emancipation. In these drawings, time re-germinates into new amorphous shapes that could be read as the distant geography of the black hole or the close anatomy of a bumblebee. In one of these, the grid sheet suggestively peels itself in the centre to unfurl the viewer into new rainbow shades of time. Here, the motifs of the plant or animal cross sections showing rings and reins of age collide into the unity of an expanding universe. The artist thus suspends us in an overlapping spectrum of temporal scales within which life could possibly unfold.
Kallat’s drawings bring us to consider the five elements of sun, wind, water, earth and sky together. However, engaging with these works virtually under the condition of our pandemic-ridden home-boundedness is a timely interrogation of our naturalised relationship with heliocentricism. If indeed circadian cycles are related to our physical, mental, and behavioural changes with respect to its response to light, how do we make sense of our present selves being suspended in the non-space of internet that simulates us in a fundamentally different photo-reality? In our imposed interiorities (often bereft of sufficient exposure to natural light) then, circadian studies bear critical place, bringing us to the cusp of an urgent existential meditation.
Captions
Jitish Kallat. Circadian Studies. Graphite and aquarelle pencil, stained gesso, organic gum. 49cms x 60cms x 4cms. 2020. Images courtesy the gallery.
Jitish Kallat. Untitled. Find the medium. 76 cms x 97 cms x 6cms. 2020.
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