Jitish Kallat: Return to Sender

Jitish Kallat’s solo exhibition titled Return to Sender brings together two works based on missives: Kallat’s widely exhibited work titled Covering Letter (2012), which was part of India’s pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), and a new project called Covering Letter (terranum nuncius) (2018-2020). Kallat’s explorations of the epistolary mode are well suited to the Frist Art Museum building, the former main post office of Nashville from where countless letters have been sent and received.

Covering Letter (terranum nuncius) commemorates and reinvokes select sounds and images that were composed for expedition into interstellar space as a planetary message to extraterrestrial life. Kallat draws from the Golden Record hoisted onto the legendary Voyager 1 and 2 space probes launched by NASA in 1977. Currently located over 13 billion miles away from planet Earth, the contents of this “time capsule” were assembled for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan. It is expected to continue its cosmic journey well beyond the probable extinction of our species and our planet.

In the gallery permeated with the sound of greetings to the universe in 55 languages is a large round table with over a hundred backlit 3-D photographic transparencies of images ranging from scientific and cosmological diagrams, representations of our genetic makeup and anatomy, as well as other life forms, architecture, etc. This is an epic presentation of “our” world to an unknown other. A diagram resembling the one on the cover of the Golden Record is projected on the wall showing our place amongst the stars, it is our return address.  At a time when we find ourselves in a deeply divided world, Kallat foregrounds these sounds and images for a collective meditation on ourselves as joint residents of a single planet, where the “other” is an unknown “intergalactic alien.” Also part of the installation is a bench that takes the shape of the hands of the Doomsday Clock. This symbolic clock, presented annually by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists represents a hypothetical human-made global catastrophe as midnight, and the proximity of the world to apocalypse as a number of minutes to midnight.

Covering Letter 2012 is a piece of historical correspondence projected onto a curtain of traversable dry fog; a brief letter written by Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler in July 1939, just weeks before the start of World War II. In his letter Gandhi makes a radical appeal for peace, anticipating the brutal bloodshed that the impending war would unleash. In the spirit of his doctrine of universal friendship, Gandhi begins the letter with the salutation “Dear Friend…”, urging Hitler to resist “reducing humanity to a savage state.” Audiences walk through the screen of descending mist, simultaneously inhabiting and dissipating the moving text. Kallat describes the letter as a space for self-reflection—a petition from one of the greatest proponents of peace to one of the most violent individuals who ever lived. 

About the Artist
Jitish Kallat’s work (b. 1974, Mumbai) has been exhibited widely at key museums, galleries and biennales. His select solo exhibitions at museums include the Art Institute of Chicago, Frist Art Museum, Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Philadelphia Museum of Art amongst others. In 2017, the National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi) presented a mid-career survey of his work, curated by Catherine David. Kallat was the curator and artistic director of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014.
 

Curator: Trinita Kennedy

Exhibition Sponsors: Silver Supporter: The Sandra Schatten Foundation. The Frist Art Museum is supported in part by the Metro Nashville Arts Commission, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional Support: Nature Morte (New Delhi), Sperone Westwater (New York)