Please join us for the preview of Cosmic Calls, a solo exhibition by Jitish Kallat.
Where do we exist when the notion of space itself is contingent? How do we situate ourselves when place, once anchored in land, history, and a sense of belonging, is rendered provisional and suspended?
Jitish Kallat (b. 1974, Mumbai) reimagines Pushkin House as a control room for planetary reflection, where signals crisscross skyward and inward. Through sustained research-based inquiry, his practice traverses space and time, the terrestrial and the cosmic, borders and identities. This gesture recalls the universalist and speculative spirit of Russian Cosmism, where scientific thought, spiritual inquiry, and a vision of humanity’s place in the cosmos converge.
Curated by Denis Maksimov and grounded in Pushkin House’s Discourse programme, Cosmic Calls offers nuanced perspectives on the Eurasian region’s political and historical legacies by setting a constellation of site-specific interventions and five speculative drawings into dialogue.
We invite you to join us at 6pm for a conversation between Jitish Kallat, Mark Rappolt (Editor-in-Chief of ArtReview) and Denis Maksimov.
From 7pm, the exhibition will be open for preview.
Jitish Kallat’s work probes the intersections of science, historical memory, and existential inquiry, often reflecting on our planetary presence and place in the cosmos. A consistent approach in Kallat's practice involves shifting focal lengths – across space and time – to reframe and comprehend the immediate and the imminent. His diverse body of work spans a wide range of media, including abstraction, schematic forms, historical texts, and varied modes of representation, often juxtaposing the everyday with the cosmic, the present with the historic, and the terrestrial with the celestial.
Previous solo exhibitions have been held at the Art Institute of Chicago; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Frist Art Museum, Nashville; Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, which hosted a mid-career survey in 2017.
His work has also been presented at Tate Modern, London; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Kunstmuseum Bern; Serpentine Galleries, London; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. He has participated in the biennales of Venice, Gwangju, Havana, Curitiba, Bangkok, and Kyiv, as well as the Fukuoka, Guangzhou, and Asia-Pacific triennials.
Kallat was curator and artistic director of the 2014 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, titled Whorled Explorations. His other curatorial projects include Tangled Hierarchy at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK, and I draw, therefore I think on the SouthSouth platform.
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