Reena Saini Kallat: Deep rivers run quiet / Jitish Kallat: Epicycles

Norrtalje Konsthall, Sweden is pleased to present two concurrent solo exhibitions by Mumbai-based artists Reena Saini Kallat and Jitish Kallat between June 19 and September 26, 2021. Their first institutional solos in Sweden bring together recent bodies of work offering a glimpse into their wide-ranging practices. The exhibitions shift registers between the panoramic and the microscopic, the ecological and the existential, and the planetary and the cosmic to reveal the divergent ways in which they survey the world.

In Reena Saini Kallat’s works, the border, the territory, and the map have recurred as potent forms that point to broad historical narratives as well as the manner in which humankind has left the imprint of history on geography.

Her exhibition Deep Rivers Run Quiet, includes a new site-specific wall drawing using electrical cables, a recurring medium in her work; and the 8-channel video Blind Spots that deploys the preambles of constitutions of warring nations around the world as Snellen eye charts used by optometrists to measure vision. In the ten diptychs Leaking Lines, the artist intentionally conflates the “line”—a primary artistic tool—juxtaposing the outlines of borders from across the world with images of the landscapes they divide and apportion.

Jitish Kallat’s exhibition Epicycles reveals his longstanding engagement with ideas of time, transience, sustenance, the ecological, and the cosmological. The exhibition is an assembly of conceptual and sensory propositions through a suite of large format paintings, drawings, sculptures, and video. The single channel video Forensic Trail of the Grand Banquet invokes a journey through space wherein planetary and stellar formations are replaced by hundreds of x-ray scans of food. In The Eternal Gradient, 365 rotis morph with waxing and waning images of the moon as if aeons of time were passing through an ever-changing lunar almanac. The exhibition features a suite of Palindrome/Anagram Paintings, elemental drawings such as Wind Study (Hilbert Curve) and the sculptural installation titled The Infinite Episode which is an assembly of ten sleeping vertebrates wherein their bodily sizes are equalized in a state of sleep.

Reena Saini Kallat’s (b. 1973, Delhi, India) work is widely exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York; Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; SITE SantaFe, New Mexico; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Helsinki City Art Museum, Finland amongst many others. Her solo exhibitions include the National Museum of Asian Arts - Guimet, Paris; the Manchester Museum; Offsite, Vancouver Art Gallery; Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai; Kennedy Centre, Washington. Her biennial participations include the Bangkok Art Biennale, 13th Havana Biennial, Busan Biennale, Goteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, the Vancouver International Sculpture Biennale, the Asian Art Biennale, Taiwan besides others. 

Jitish Kallat was born in Mumbai in 1974, the city where he continues to live and work. He has exhibited widely at institutions including Tate Modern, London; Kunstmuseum, Bern; Serpentine Galleries, London; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; ZKM Museum, Karlsruhe; and the Gemeente Museum, The Hague amongst many others. His work has been part of numerous biennales including the Venice Biennale, Havana Biennale and Gwangju Biennale. His solo exhibitions at institutions include the Art Institute of Chicago, Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai; the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; CSMVS Museum, Mumbai; the San Jose Museum of Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Frist Art Museum, Nashville and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2017,  the National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi) presented a mid-career survey of his work curated by Catherine David. 

He was the curator and artistic director of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the exhibitions are open to a maximum of 50 people at a time.