A call for peace often goes unheard, for those who rule the world are more interested in war. The pleas, nevertheless, reverberates through the history even after the wars they sought to avoid have caused wounds that would never be healed. An artist participating in the fifth edition of the Kochi Muziris Biennale has invoked one such prayer from the past, reminding the world of one of the most blood-stained episodes of its history and how it keeps playing out time and again.
Jitish Kallat’s seminal installation titled ‘Covering Letter’ is a contemporary reproduction of a letter written by the Mahatma to Adolf Hitler weeks before the World War II began. Kallat, the curator of the 2014 edition of the biennial event, has also curated a show titled Tangled Hierarchy-2 as part of the Kochi Muziris Biennale this time. Presented by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, the installation and the show are held at TKM Warehouse, Fort Kochi.
Gandhi’s letter, addressing Hitler as ‘dear friend’, reflects his philosophy and passion for non-violence. The letter from history unfolds in front of the viewers in a darkroom as the words are projected onto a curtain of cascading fog. The words calling for peace disappears eventually when the mist diffuses. The diffusion could be symbolic of how the lofty message from one of the greatest minds history has produced went unheard.
Kallat has described the correspondence within the ‘Covering Letter’ as a plea from a great advocate of peace to one of the most violent individuals who ever lived. While Covering Letter (2012) has been widely exhibited at museums and biennales around the world, this is the first time that it is exhibited in Southern India.
“This historic letter had been on my mind ever since I first saw it at Mani Bhavan sometime in 2006 or 2007; its intent tightly held within a wrap of ambivalence. Somehow I envisaged it as a nebulous apparition that one could traverse with one's body. As people move through it, they briefly inhabit the letter with their bodies… the words emanating from a principle proponent of peace to one of the most violent individuals who lived in that era. And yet, like all Gandhi’s gestures and his life experiments, this piece of correspondence seems like an open letter destined to travel beyond its delivery date and intended recipient… to be read by anyone, anytime, anywhere,” Kallat told Onmanorama when asked about the origin of his work.
“I'm placing this deceptively simple piece of historical correspondence for a viewer to interpret in their own way. I know that for some the descending 'fog' evokes historical memory attached to a certain descending gas... But these are not specific readings I want to make. I want to leave the experience and reading open so people might imbibe from their own state of consciousness and their view of history,” he said.
‘Tangled Hierarchy’
While the Mumbai-based artist has revisited Gandhi’s letter in his installation, a collection of five used envelopes addressed to the Mahatma is at the core of his curatorial Tangled Hierarchy 2. When Mountbatten discussed partition of the Indian subcontinent on Monday, June 2, 1947, Gandhi who was undertaking a vow of silence on Mondays, wrote notes on the backs of the used envelopes to communicate his differences of opinion on dividing the land. The envelopes are now conserved in the Mountbatten Archive at the University of Southampton.
Kallat tries to connect ‘Gandhi’s envelopes’ with the artistic conversations and correspondences. The exhibition features works of artists such as Kader Attia, Kim Beom, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mahatma Gandhi, Mona Hatoum, Somnath Hore, Partition Museum, S.L. Parasher, Sir Roger Penrose, Paul Pfeiffer, Dr Vilayanur S Ramachandran, Mykola Ridnyi, Prof Roger Shepard, Homai Vyarawalla, Alexa Wright and Zarina. With elements like maps, borders, recurring cycles and unsettling displacements, the works explore the relationship between silence and speech, visibility and invisibility, portioned land, conflicts and pain.
The twinned presentations of Covering Letter and Tangled Hierarchy took place at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, UK from 2 June–10 September 2022.
“We are delighted to present two projects by Jitish Kallat at the upcoming edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale to coincide the 75th anniversary of India’s Independence. Positioned around two key historical moments, we hope the exhibitions will take the discourse beyond Gandhi and Partition and allow visitors to reflect upon how acts of division and destruction continue to this day” Kiran Nadar, chairperson, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, said in a statement.
Kallat’s solo exhibitions at museums include institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago), Dr.Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (Mumbai), Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), Frist Art Museum (Nashville), the Ian Potter Museum of Art (Melbourne), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia). Kallat's work has been part of the Venice Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Havana Biennale, Asia Pacific Triennale, Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale and the biennales of Curitiba, Guangzhou, Kiev and Bangkok amongst others. Kallat was the curator and artistic director of Whorled Explorations, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014, and he curated I draw, therefore I think for the SOUTH SOUTH Platform in 2021.
