Blood, sweat and cheers

Jitesh Kallat may be young, but he has a body of work that speaks of years of observation and thought. He speaks to Ramya Sarma about his latest show, Sweatopia.

You hear about Jitesh Kallat more than you actually see his work in Mumbai. Reports come in from Milan, Shanghai and London about the success of his showings and the prices his works command.

Reviews are usually laudatory and everyone, but everyone, raves about his latest…or his last piece. But showings in his home city of Mumbai have been rare.

There is a reason for it, Kallat says pragmatically. “It’s tough to make this the
debut place. Galleries in Mumbai have a quick turnaround — 21 day exhibitions.

The scale of my work is humungous. I need a 200-feet space to house the 200-feet 365 Lives, for instance. I couldn’t do this on short notice.” In fact, the galleries had eight days of installing time for the current show.

The piece 365 Lives is on display in Sweatopia, Kallat’s new show, jointly opening at Chemould Prescott Road and Bodhi Art. “It’s a big project — the sculpture of a huge car, life-size, will sit bang in the middle of the 365 photographs. It weighs almost a ton.”

And there is a large Eruda, the sculpture of a boy holding books, about 14-15 feet high and “super heavy. The logistics are really beyond  normal exhibition requirements.”

Almost all of Kallat’s works are enormous, even though he has created ‘smaller’ pieces that were “just about 22-24 feet”. Anger at the Speed of Fright was a ‘mere’ 50 feet long.

“There are some works that rely on scale to generate meaning” — 365 Lives, as you walk into it, seems like colour swatches, some seemingly repetitive, in some way seductive; the colours and images come rushing at the viewer.

As Kallat explains, “It’s only when you walk past that it all slowly changes tenor. Then you realise that these are dented vehicles, nothing too tragic.

Then you keep going through the piece and realise that somewhere along the way these actually evoke bodily wounds, dents, scars, rust marks…and then it changes meaning. Something cold and inanimate becomes a chronicle of the city’s heartbeat.”

“When you make these works, you don’t know what you’re going to do with them. A piece I am currently showing in Milan (Public Notice II) goes to over 200 feet”, where 4,500 bones shaped like alphabets spell out the speech that Gandhi delivered before he embarked on the non-cooperation movement.

“The sheer realisation of it is not easy, but if you really want to do it, you do it,” Kallat says.

The self was once the crux of Kallat’s practice, especially between 1992 and1999. “It started changing form gradually,” he says.

His work Artist Making a Local Call (2005), a panoramic view with multiple exposures, “envelops my core concerns, the whole idea of the human struggle,  interspersed with small soft calamities which are in our lives everyday.

The picture has several layers of meaning and you can enter from various places.”

Kallat is often said to be an ‘intellectual’, his work deep with meaning and sometimes incomprehensible to the average critic and viewer. But ‘intellectual’ “is a burdened word, loaded with things that you do not want associated with  your work immediately.”
But that does  not make it a non-cerebral effort.” He works hard, thinks hard and puts his understanding of himself and the situation into his work.

The names of his show is, in itself, unusual. Kallat coined the word “by collapsing sweat with utopia, sweat being the constant toil, the idea of survival, aspirations of hope.”

Each work speaks at various levels, for which an onlooker needs time and space and an open mind, a freedom that Kallat relishes.

“You are allowed to miss things; there is no reason to believe that we can all always soak in everything a work holds. Many years ago Gieve Patel said something like, ‘If you understand the work, great; but if you misunderstand it, even better!’

Somewhere within it there is the fact that the moment you miss something, you have seen something else and added a layer of meaning that I could not have offered.”

Sweatopia, Chemould Prescott Road and Bodhi Art, December10 — January 5