Jitish Kallat’s ‘Circa’

Jitish Kallat’s ‘Circa’ is being showcased at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne in association with Utopia@Asialink. Curated by A Jamieson, N King and B Starr, this is the renowned Indian artist’s first solo in an Australian museum.

As the curators elaborate, his interventions in the Classics and Archaeology Gallery, including a 120-part sculpture, are installed in relation to a display of ancient Indian carved stone sculptures and colonial-era maps. Set in poetic and playful conversation with the venue’s atypical architecture and also the broad time-scale of the whole event, it simultaneously presents art right from the Neolithic period to the present day.

Taking a cue from his recent art projects and their reflective nature, the series is developed as an evolving narrative – emerging as an experiment involving multiple interventions. At the heart of it, is the core concept of ‘time’ and ‘recursion’, with chance, contagion and contingency, all playing a role! One utterance tends to infect another and procreating possibilities give rise to a tentative, dispersed, inconclusive and evolving oration in several parts of the museum in this shape-shifting project.

Some of the works appear only for a few days, whereas some remain on view for a much longer duration. Others await conception when the departure of interventions happens to make space for them as part of a process incorporating entry and exit of different ideas.

Born in 1974, the internationally acclaimed artist Jitish Kallat lives and works in Mumbai, India. On 11 September 2010, Kallat presented his landmark solo exhibition, Public notice 3, at the Art Institute of Chicago. His site-specific work brought together two events: the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and the First World Parliament of Religions which took place on 11 September 1893 in what is now the Art Institute of Chicago building.

The basis of 'Public notice 3' was an inaugural speech delivered by Swami Vivekananda at the Parliament calling for an end to fanaticism and a respectful recognition of all traditions of belief through universal tolerance.