Saat Saath Arts presents a major solo exhibition of work by Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat, Conjectures on a Paper Sky. Bringing together recent projects across media, the exhibition traces Kallat’s trajectory over the last decade and marks his most comprehensive presentation since his mid-career survey Here After Here (1992–2017) at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, in 2018. The exhibition is curated as an independent project by Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator at Large, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation.
Kallat’s practice revolves around inquiry and speculation. He mobilizes art-making as a research method for probing the world through the entanglements of time and space. His visual itineraries deploy measurements that veer between the microscopic and the telescopic, the quotidian and the extraterrestrial. The studio functions alternately as an archive of historical documents, a laboratory of material experimentation, and an observatory of the natural world. Working with abstract, schematic, and pictorial imagery, he interweaves fact and conjecture about our physical universe, modern political history, and the fragility of planetary life. What does it mean when our moral, political, scientific, and even cosmological coordinates keep shifting, rendering the scale of our existence radically uncertain? Drawing on geological, astrophysical, and mathematical thought, Kallat’s vocabulary unsettles familiar frames of reference, prompting a closer attentiveness to the systems through which we interpret the world.