Artistic concerns of India’s leading contemporary artist, Reena Kallat

Reena Kallat’s practice spans a whole range of forms and mediums like painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video. It often incorporates multiple media and styles into a single piece. Peculiarly, she may opt to base her work on officially registered or recorded names of objects, monuments and people who have disappeared or vanished sans any trace, only to be noted down as forgotten statistics.

A recurrent motif in her artworks is the rubber stamp, utilized both as an imprint and an object, implying the bureaucratic apparatus that confirms and obscures identities, as well. The fragility of our existence is an oft-expressed sentiment across her oeuvre. To explain how it’s structured around dualities, which reverberate with ideas of loss and frail recovery, the artist has mentioned, “I seek to explore a sense of order within urban chaos; this suggests (to me) a state of permanent change."

Reena Saini Kallat completed her graduation from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai. Her most recent solo show was at the Primo Marella Gallery, Milan (2009), whereas her last solo in India was hosted at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (2008). The artist has had ten solos in India and abroad apart from featuring in a number of important workshops and residencies across the globe.

Contemporary popular culture invariably comes under her scanner. She may depict the glitz of the ad world that tends to act as a lid on shattered hopes, if the underlying thought is to be believed. Analyzing her work, art critic Nancy Adajania has once mentioned: “Her paintings and sculpture-installations portray the human body, and by extension the body politic, under perennial siege, wracked by mythic demons and unknown viruses that strike at it from all sides.

The beauty of the highly powerful and nuanced objects she employs is deceptively belied by their implicit violence as she deftly retrieves these as symbols, or even creates new ones to reposition them, resulting in irony viewers simply cannot escape.