A work titled Epicycles (2020-21).

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

Ishara Art Foundation Dubai opens 2022 with Order of Magnitude by Jitish Kallat, the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the Middle East and the Levant (Jan. 12 — June 16, 2022). Presenting new works that include paintings, multimedia installations, drawings and site-specific interventions, the exhibition reflects the artist’s deliberations on the interrelationship between the cosmic and the terrestrial. Kallat’s works over the last two decades reveal his continued engagement with the ideas of time, sustenance, recursion and historical recall, often interlacing the dense cosmopolis and the distant cosmos. His oeuvre sits between fluid speculation, precise measurement and conceptual conjectures, producing dynamic forms of image-making.

Using abstract, schematic, notational and representational languages, he engages with different modes of address, seamlessly interlacing the immediate and the cosmic, the telescopic and the microscopic, the past and present. In Order of Magnitude, one finds a contemplation of overarching interconnectivity on the individual, universal, planetary and extra-terrestrial dimensions. The viewer is first confronted with Integer Studies (Drawings from Life), which run through the space resembling both the horizon and the equator.

 Epicycles is created in double-sided, multilayer print on 20 LPI lenticular lens and teakwood.

Since the beginning of 2021, Kallat followed a ritual of making one daily drawing as part of a durational study in graphite, aquarelle pencil and gesso stains. Each work comprises diverse forms anchored by the same three sets of numbers: the algorithmically estimated world population, the number of new births, and the death count noted at the particular moment of the work’s creation. Human life and death are abstracted in drawings that are both graphic and painterly, prompting questions of extinction and evolution.

Seen alongside these studies is a wall-sized painting titled Postulates from a Restless Radius, whose perimeter takes the form of the conic Albers projection of the Earth. The work begins as an unstable, cross-sectional grid (in aquarelle pencil) that opens up the globe on a flat plane. There is no cartographic intent here; in place of planetary geography it assembles signs and speculations, at once evoking botanical, suboceanic, celestial, and geological formations. Postulates is an exploratory abstraction of forms that suggest signatures of growth and entropy. Placed centrally are four double-sided and multi-scopic photo works titled Epicycles.

The series began during the early days of the pandemic in 2020 with a hand-drawn journal capturing minute changes in Kallat’s studio - such as cracks surfacing on walls. The artist embeds these chance encounters with iconic pictures from the Family of Man exhibition organised by photographer Edward Steichen at the MoMA, New York, in 1955. The resulting prints combine the artist’s everyday observations with archival images of human solidarity taken by photographers from around the world.

Meticulously composed on a lenticular surface, the depicted figures appear and disappear as one moves around the work, yielding a complex portrait of time in its transience and ephemerality. A new iteration of Kallat’s immersive installation Covering Letter (terranum nuncius) occupies Ishara’s mezzanine floor. Images from the Golden Records that travelled as part of NASA’s 1977 Voyager 1 and 2 space mission rest on shelves along two opposite walls. Placed inside programmed LED frames, 116 parallax prints flicker in a breath-like cadence.

They include scientific, anatomical and cosmological diagrams as well as flora, fauna and architecture, in an attempt to encapsulate a summary of life on Earth. Permeating the exhibition space are the sounds of salutation to the universe that were on the Golden Records in 55 languages. As the two Voyagers continue their journey in space, now over 14 billion miles away from Earth, the work is a reminder of an epic presentation of our world to an unknown other.

At a time when we find ourselves in a deeply divided globe, Kallat foregrounds these images and reverberations for a collective meditation on ourselves as residents of a single planet, where the ‘other’ is an unfamiliar ‘intergalactic alien’. An obsolete map of our cosmic neighbourhood, the return address marked on the Records is projected within the installation facing a bench in the shape of the Doomsday Clock.

The symbolic clock proposed by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is reset every year, representing our growing proximity to a hypothetical man-made global catastrophe that is expected to strike at midnight. Finally, a site-specific intervention by the artist titled N-E-S-W serves as an allusive clue to reading this exhibition. Embedded within the foundation’s architecture, a functional magnetic compass is inset in the flooring. N-E-S-W summons the cardinal directions of the Earth, aligned to invisible force fields, rendering both the exhibition and Ishara into planetary surveying devices.

The exhibition will be accompanied by physical and virtual tours, educational and public programmes, a newly commissioned text by Amal Khalaf and artist conversations. Kallat was born in 1974 in Mumbai, the city where he continues to live and work. Ishara Art Foundation was founded in 2019 as a non-profit organisation dedicated to presenting contemporary art of South Asia. Located in Alserkal Avenue Dubai, the Foundation supports emerging and established practices that advance critical dialogue and explore global interconnections.

With a research-led approach, it realises its mission through exhibitions, onsite and online programmes, education initiatives and collaborations in the UAE and internationally. The Foundation also facilitates exchange between South Asian and international artistic networks that include museums, foundations, institutions, galleries and individuals. Smita Prabhakar, Founder and Chairperson of Ishara Art Foundation, is an entrepreneur, collector and art patron who has been based in the UAE for over four decades.

She is on the Advisory Board of Art Dubai, a member of the South Asian Acquisitions Committee at Tate Modern (London), the Middle Eastern Circle of the Guggenheim Museum (New York) and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice). Her collection, The Ishara Art Foundation and The Prabhakar Collection, focuses on South Asian contemporary art guided by the shared histories and plural voices from the region. Sabih Ahmed is the Associate Director and Curator at the Foundation. He has co-curated exhibitions in Barcelona, Dhaka, Delhi, Hong Kong and Shanghai.