Reena Kallat | Labyrinth of Absences

Reena Saini Kallat: “Labyrinth of Absences”
Opening on Tuesday, March 8th from 6 to 8 pm.
The exhibition continues to Saturday, March 26th


PRESS RELEASE

Reena Saini Kallat: “Labyrinth of Absences”
Opening on Tuesday, March 8th from 6 to 8 pm.
The exhibition continues to Saturday, March 26th

Nature Morte is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Reena Saini Kallat, entitled “Labyrinth of Absences”, after a gap of six years since her last solo at the gallery.

Reena Kallat’s practice spans painting, photography, video, sculpture and installation, often incorporating multiple mediums into a single work. She frequently works with officially recorded or registered names of people, objects, and monuments that are lost or have disappeared without a trace, only to get listed as forgotten statistics. One of the recurrent motifs in her work is the rubber stamp, used both as an object and an imprint, signifying the bureaucratic apparatus which both confirms and obscures identities.

Among the works in the exhibition will be a set of new paintings that depict monument sites in Delhi. The surface of the paintings are marked with addresses of monuments listed as protected sites under the Archeological Survey of India, that have either disappeared or have been declared lost, swallowed up by the rapidly expanding urban fabric. The works on paper are constructed from the names of people who have been denied visas on the basis of class, nationality or religion. In most cases, her images are fractured and deconstructed, creating maze-like maps - or as in the case of Synonym, a series of portraits crafted as mosaics of rubber-stamps, holding the names of people who are officially registered as missing - appear pixelated and fragmented. Other works in the show include Crease/Crevice/Contour, a set of ten large-scale photographs tracing the fluctuating Line Of Control between India and Pakistan from October 1947 to December 1948.

Two video works will also be exhibited: Silt of Seasons-I, projects the names of people who have signed the peace petition in 2004. The names are projected on to sand and are gradually blown away, suggestive of the vulnerability of the peace process itself. In Preface, the artist projects the text of the Preamble of the Constitution of India translated into Braille on to the surface of a large, opened book.