A solo show with works by Jitish Kallat.

"Much of my work, absorb the twin codes of pop and agitprop, addressing some of the classic themes of art: birth, death, survival and the endless narratives of human struggle. While the human figure, isolated or crammed in a vast humanscape, has been at the core of my practice, in the current project titled ‘Rickshawpolis’, the chaotic dynamic of numerous inanimate objects becomes the recurrent motif." – Jitish Kallat

The photographic work titled ‘Artist Making Local Call’ is a 35 feet panorama wherein the artist/self symbolically dials into the immediate making a reference, not just to the history of one’s own practice but also to such inspirational figures as Sudhir Patwardhan and Bhupen Khakkar. Employing the 360 degrees panoramic format, one is able to hold multiple timeframes within a single still image. For instance, within the red brackets, a moving taxi occupies the same spot where a rickshaw stood moments ago mimicking a mishap. The two men seen on either side of this crash are the same; they have marched across in the moments that passed.

The two large format paintings titled ‘Rickshawpolis- I and II’ are vast collision portraits of the thumping, claustrophobic city-street; part of my persistent project to find fresh ways to register the life I see around. Cars, buses, scooters, cycles, cats, cows and humans collide and coalesce to form mega-explosions. These optical jerks caused by the high decibel of daily action can also be read as distorted reflections of a city seen on the dented body of an automobile. The painting itself is mounted on bronze sculptures, re-creations of gargoyles that are found atop the 120 year old Victoria Terminus Building in the center of Mumbai. The gargoyle, herein symbolizing the figure of the bystander/ artist/ self, has been a daily witness to this constant calamity of the street running into itself.

‘Onomatopoeia/ The Scar Park’ is a 68 piece photographic chronicle of the scarred surfaces of dented automobiles in the city. At first the individual pieces appear like swatches or colour fields; in time they transmogrify into wounds becoming an inventory of daily quakes in urban existence or seismographic records of the city’s erratic heartbeat. They also reference the painterly project of abstraction, evoking metaphor through pictorial illusion and poetic allusion.

‘Rickshawpolis (The Dented Chariot)’ was a direct result of my extended photo-project ‘Onomatopoeia/ The Scar Park’. Here, found anatomical studies of the human body are juxtaposed with drawings of crashed vehicles. Against a rippled backdrop, the image of a junked automobile and that of a paused autopsy is seen conjunction, drawing many parallels between life, death and the motif of the journey evoked through the image of collision.