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Lot 93

 

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Since he began exhibiting in the mid 1990s, Jitish Kallat’s canvases, sculptures and installations have mirrored both the small ironies and glaring juxtapositions inherent to his native Mumbai, a megalopolis simultaneously allied to the past and the future. With their arresting central images and the complicated networks of signs and symbols that populate their peripheries, the artist’s cipher-like paintings are inspired by the facades of the... Since he began exhibiting in the mid 1990s, Jitish Kallat’s canvases, sculptures and installations have mirrored both the small ironies and glaring juxtapositions inherent to his native Mumbai, a megalopolis simultaneously allied to the past and the future. With their arresting central images and the complicated networks of signs and symbols that populate their peripheries, the artist’s cipher-like paintings are inspired by the facades of the city’s buildings and billboards, the non-stop pop programming on television, and the blunt directness of agitprop posters. Thus Kallat’s amalgamated canvases demand pause, interrogation, and conscious involvement from his viewers.

In the present lot, part of Kallat’s Humiliation Tax series of portraits of child labourers and street dwellers, the artist uses computer pixels as building blocks to describe the precarious existence of some of the city’s most neglected and downtrodden citizens. Against their almost psychedelic backdrops, the “…focus of Kallat’s meditation in ‘Humiliation Tax’ is the portrait of the labouring or deprived child: the orphan, the waif, the street urchin. The artist has been concerned with the phenomenon of child labour, which amounts, in the metropolitan context, to child slavery” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Pictorial Declarative: Reflections on Jitish Kallat’s Recent Works, 2002-2005" in Jitish Kallat, Walsh Gallery and Gallery Chemould exhibition catalogue, 2004-05, p. 40).

In the background, the syllables ‘ra’ and ‘ma’ are repeated in a fingerprint like impression, inspired by the body tattoos of the Ramnami sect of central India. In this arrangement, the viewer may put them together to create the word Rama, a divine, positive and sustaining force, or Mara, the negative, malevolent energy that opposes it. Here this tattooed duality suggests that the future of the city’s multitudes of street children can take either path – theirs are lives marked by struggle and by determination. As Kallat inscribes at the base of this piece, it is up to us to prevent Mara, or “what is threatened” from becoming “fact”.

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