Within my practice, 'Public Notice 2' (2007) links up with two key antecedents, 'Public Notice' (2003) and 'Detergent' (2004), both works wherein a historical speech is summoned as the central armature of the work. Blurred and sometimes forgotten due to the passage of time, the historical speech is fore-grounded and held up as an apparatus to grade our feats and follies as nations, as humankind.
'Public Notice 2' (2007) re-invokes the momentous speech delivered by Mahatma Gandhi on the eve of the historic 400-kilometer 'Dandi March' lasting about 24 days during the Indian Freedom Struggle. On the 11th of March 1930, prior to setting out to break the brutal Salt Act instituted by the British, Gandhi laid out the codes of conduct for his fellow revolutionaries. He called for complete 'Civil Disobedience'; the only fierce restriction being that of maintaining 'total peace' and 'absolute non-violence'.
The speech has within it several themes that may aid our ailing world, plagued as it is with aggression. In today's terror-infected world, where wars against terror are fought at prime television time, voices such as Gandhi's stare back at us like discarded relics. The entire speech will be constructed out of about 4500 recreations of bones shaped like alphabets. Each alphabet in this speech, like a misplaced relic will hold up the image of violence in clinical clarity even as their collective chorus makes a plea for peace.
Within the Indian context as well, we have the worst instance of subversion of Gandhi's words in the year 2002 within his own home state of Gujarat. The historic 'Dandi March' and the speech were delivered not far from the site where India saw one of the worst communal riots and bloodshed since the Indian Independence.
Jitish Kallat
Mumbai

Public Notice 2 recalls the historic speech given by Mahatma Gandhi on the eve of the epic Salt March to Dandi in early 1930, made in protest against the British Raj salt tax and in order to highlight India’s need for greater self-reliance. In Kallat’s work, Gandhi’s ardent speech is dissected and recreated as a haunting installation at a turning point in the nation’s history. Around 4,500 gaunt looking bones have been individually shaped to make up each word of the speech and are positioned on thin coloured shelves. The overall effect is one of a rediscovered artefact, suggesting that Gandhi’s voice returns, like a relic from the past, to call for peace both within India and across the region.

Eruda is colossal in scale and depicts one of the many young boys found selling books at India’s traffic signals. The subject holds tablets of differing sizes in each hand. Dressed in flimsy fabric pants that are cut below the knee, his feet are rooted to the spot by his lead shoes that are shaped to resemble houses. Kallat’s sculpture is a solitary figure, monumentalising the poverty that permeates the Indian population he also expresses the ability to advocate and wish for a better life.

In Death of Distance five lenticular prints bring together contrasting experiences of living in India today. Each panel highlights a news story; in one the launch of ‘one rupee a minute’ telephone rates across India, in another the story of a girl who committed suicide because her mother couldn’t afford the one rupee she wanted for a school lunch. A rigid rupee coin is balanced on the gallery floor as a symbol of the growth of India’s telecommunications industry and of its layered economic realities, from rapidly expanding industries to extreme and widespread poverty.

Annexe also uses sculpture to deliver criticism of India’s immense poverty. Like Eruda, this figure is similarly dressed in a cloth that is tied around his mid-rift. Thrown over his shoulder is what appears to be a rope. This arresting figure is also weighted to the ground over a mirror base with a detail of a drain, in shoes that resemble monopoly style houses. Kallat’s archetypical houses are suggestive of homes and locations that we all become rooted to, and for the artist, these semi naked figures appear to seek such permanence.

Much of Kallat’s work appears to deal with Mumbai’s dislocated and downtrodden inhabitants. In his canvases, faces are illuminated by animated collages that rest precariously over their heads like overbearing wigs containing scenes of the underbelly of the industrial city. Kallat mounts these animated portraits onto bronze gargoyles that are reproduced from the Victoria train terminus in central Mumbai. The Untitled (Eclipse) 2008 series takes on a more pressing significance when elevated upon these replica gargoyles, as the portraits become emblems and epitaphs to these animated lives.

Rickshawpolis 4 is a work that is fashioned by Kallat’s signature style of misshaped and contorted objects delivering a final image of multiple narratives. The vehicles collide on the face of the canvas like a mushroomed explosion, depicting India’s new reality as a piece of modern history. Battered vehicles are intermingled with figures that appear to negotiate a way through this chaos and calamity. Kallat’s explosion drips blood, staining the left-hand corner of the canvas, as a consequence of the collision.

Another from the series of Eclipse works, Kallat’s huge triptych is an awe-inspiring celebration of the children that litter the streets of Mumbai and Delhi. Seeking solace in the public buildings and the make-shift shanty towns on the edges of the city, this generation of lost children are symbolic of the consequences of modernity and a sub-continent’s race for newness. Like an unforgiving disease riddled to their hair, Kallat’s young boys are camouflaged by his signature narratives of miniature figures and the corrosive over-spill of modern life.

Kallat’s boys look out at the audience as this triptych stretches across the wall. Rays of sunshine emanate from the background. The artist wishes to expose the greater reality that exists away from the flourishing economy and technological cities in India. Made-up of a series of templates, Kallat’s Eclipse series is determined by the distorted figures illuminating much of the canvas, as these heavy narratives and figures arise from the modern detritus of the city.