Letter writing on vapour

Every few years, Jitish Kallat 'issues' a 'notice' to the public. These are historic speeches he feels hold relevance even in the "now." Covering Letter (2012), follows this line of thinking. It's the first of two letters Mahatma Gandhi wrote to Adolf Hitler in 1939, pleading with the dictator to stop his actions in the name for peace's sake. After travelling to Ukraine, Paris and Delhi, it comes to Mumbai. It's a dark room, somewhere towards the middle is a descending gossamer curtain or fog with ascending shadowy words that come at you. As you walk into this 'letter,' you walk onto a carpet of approaching words and compute them with your skin. The words urge you [the reader] to save "humanity from going to a savage state." Only at, "Your Sincere Friend," you realise the intended recipient was Hitler and the author, Mahatma Gandhi.

This letter is not the best example in world peace. Of Gandhi's two letters to Hitler, this one is hardly persuasive… "Dear friend, Friends have been urging me to write [to you] for the sake of humanity…" with a feeble end, "…I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you."
I saw this facsimile on a wall at Mani Bhavan, Mumbai, seven years ago. It's stayed on my mind since. A fundamental plea from the greatest proponent of peace to the greatest perpetrator of violence at the same moment in history. This letter written in the now, the here and from the self. It's far more complex than it appears. Not as Gandhi and Hitler, or divine and devil, but from one life view to another life view. As metonyms. There's no one way to understand this letter. For instance, Gandhi calls Hitler a friend at the height of his brutality. Several of Gandhi's fellow revolutionaries found this problematic, till Gandhi explains in a second letter to Hitler in 1940, "in my world of universal friendship, I know no foe."

And what is your purpose in doing so?
I'm placing the complexity of a very simple piece of parchment for anyone else to think in their own way. Like the descending 'fog' can have historical memory attached to a certain descending 'gas'... But these are not readings I want to make. I want to leave the experience open so people might imbibe from their own state of consciousness and view of history. What it means being inside a historic letter that's descending on your body. What it means to run your hand through a letter involving two individuals whose associations can be symbolic to extremes coexisting within one's self. I see myself as an interventionist, working with the viewer to create meaning. The artwork has to echo within the viewer and also, me.

Public Notice (2003), (2007) and (2010), and now Covering Letter (2012). What was the catalyst to 'issue' these 'notices' at select intervals?
These four belong to a separate register from my other works. Though they come from a connected space that is exposed to a flux of images, text and ideas. The idea for these works came to me at a time when communities in India began voicing their intolerance towards the other. Beginning from the '90s to the riots of early 2000, we saw a progressive shift in society. I felt I had no other place to ask my questions but close-read words spoken during independence. Maybe, the answers lay in just reading speeches that were heard and spoken in a certain context. As I took a clerical position in rewriting them, I felt something. These letters are not 'the' need of society, but may serve a need.
For Public Notice (2003), I took Jawaharlal Nehru's iconic speech at India's Independence and set every alphabet on fire. Like 'cremated' words of Nehru to evoke the Gujarat riots we read in the newspapers daily. Each alphabet warped the mirror surface as if perennially distorting the present moment. In Public Notice 2 (2007), it was Gandhi's speech at the historic Dandi March. It resembled a wide, chalk drawing from far. As you came near, every alphabet became a relic, a bone. So first being charred/burnt, second being boned, and third was light – Public Notice 3 (2010). 70,000 light bulbs, each handwoven onto a rubber film to form alphabets of Swami Vivekananda's speech at the Art Museum of Chicago. It was first delivered on September 11, 1893 at the First World Parliament of Religions at the auditorium that was exactly where the staircase [see pic] is today. The show opened on September 11, 2010 and Homi Bhabha delivered the closing lecture exactly one year later. The purpose was to reflect on Vivekananda's speech about convergence of all world religions, delivered exactly 108 years before the 9/11 attacks we know.

After three versions of Public Notice, why a Covering Letter now?
It's like a covering letter to what's behind the letter. But here, what's behind the letter is exactly what's in the front of it.

Covering Letter is showing at Jehangir Nicholson Gallery, CSMVS, Mumbai till 28 Feb

ornella.dsouza@dnaindia.net, @_oregano_