For contemporary artist Jitish Kallat, his mid-career retrospective, ‘Here After Here’ has been a process of looking back as well as looking ahead to his career. Currently on display at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), the exhibition comprises his works spanning 25 years, many of which are being shown for the first time in the capital.

His expertise in bringing his experiences as an urban dweller and emotions on canvas, sculptures, photographs and paintings is fascinating and compels one to think and perceive the world through his eyes. According to Jitish, the exhibition allows artworks to dialogue through carefully considered juxtapositions. From close detailing of the skin of a fruit or the brimming shirt-pocket of a passerby, his oeuvre seems expansive and dense.

In an interaction with The Asian Age, the artist shares more about the exhibition, explaining why a lot of his work is autobiographical and what about urban spaces intrigue him.

Excerpts:

Tell us about your idea behind a mid-career retrospective.
My exhibition curated by Catherine David has over 120 works. The exhibition is non-chronological and unfolds as an interplay of related themes and overlapping ideas, where old and new works come together. The exhibition frequently moves interchangeably between ideas of the self, the city, the nation or the cosmic horizon as if to view the transient within the context of the perpetual, the everyday alongside the historical, the microscopic alongside the telescopic.

You are the central character of many of your early paintings. Why are a lot of your artworks autobiographical?
Much of my early work in the 90s were visibly autobiographical with the self image at the centre of the paintings, appearing as an artist-pilgrim-seeker, or as a tourist, a news reader, or a shaman caught in a private ritual. Around the central figure, numerous images evoking notions of time, one’s ancestry, ideas of survival and mortality, would be playfully rendered as a journey through epiphanies and missteps.

Urban chaos and confusion is something that you have widely displayed and worked on. What intrigues you about the busy life of cities?
With their dense population, one could say that all themes of life get exaggerated in cities. Within the exhibition, one would find paintings such as ‘Rickshapolis’ which is a collision pictured as a tumbling mass of cars, buses, rickshaws, trucks and derelict buildings, a bit like cosmic inflation.

Covering Letter (Fogscreen projection, 2012)

Explain your three artworks, titled “Public Notice”. How did you conceptualise them?
In the beginning, I felt that going back into the past might help us understand the present. In ‘Public Notice’, the words of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, spoken on the midnight of Indian independence against the backdrop of riots and the bloodshed of partition  were evoked, by hand rendering them on mirror using a rubber adhesive. I would write the text and then set it aflame, as if cremating the speech.

Modus Vivendi (Mixed media on canvas, 2002)

In ‘Public Notice 2’, the speech delivered by Gandhi before he broke the brutal salt act simultaneously calling for total non-cooperation and non-violence, total resistance and peace, appear like unearthed fossils placed on shelves. On 9/11, but in 1893, the first world parliament of religions took place at the World Trade Centre (WTC). This was 108 years before the attack on WTC where Swami Vivekanand delivered a keynote lecture calling for universal tolerance, end of fanaticism, fundamentalism and bigotry. ‘Public Notice 3’ re-invoked this speech in the heart of the Art Institute of Chicago, which was the very location where the world parliament of religions took place. Since in 1893, the museum building was a large auditorium, ‘Public Notice 3’ is a convergence of the speech, two historically divergent dates and overlaid on a single site.

All three of these works come together for the very first time at Jaipur House, NGMA.

Where do you see your mid-career retrospective taking you? What kind of progress does this exhibition mark on your career?
The making of ‘Here After Here’ has been a process of looking back. Two monographs accompany the exhibition and these have been helpful in reflecting back on many years of work. One could say that the exhibition is a retro(pro)spective, looking back to looking ahead.