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Lot 81

 

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Jitish Kallat describes the long, often literary titles that identify his early canvases as "…playful mechanisms to provoke the viewer to play detective with the elusive promise of meaning. Text has always played a crucial role in my visual endeavours. While the title is simply a device on one's vast tool-bar of artistic tactics, I remain attentive of its enormous potential to offer and withhold meaning…I think this engagement with the inscribed... Jitish Kallat describes the long, often literary titles that identify his early canvases as "…playful mechanisms to provoke the viewer to play detective with the elusive promise of meaning. Text has always played a crucial role in my visual endeavours. While the title is simply a device on one's vast tool-bar of artistic tactics, I remain attentive of its enormous potential to offer and withhold meaning…I think this engagement with the inscribed title perhaps comes from the fact that my earliest visual references were the billboard and the television screen, where one often consumes images and texts simultaneously" (as quoted in "Jitish Kallat in Conversation with Nina Miall", Universal Recipient, Haunch of Venison exhibition catalogue, 2008, p. 56).

In the present lot, Kallat's title, paired with the set of grainy images on the surface, alludes to the universal sentiments of optimism and resilience, albeit through the local lens of migrant labour and hired help in his native Mumbai. In the background a classified advertisement, which looks as if it has been stenciled on a crumbling wall, offers placement in various domestic help positions or as hotel and office staff by the ‘established' Mrs. Kumar. In front of it, a shadowy applicant with his papers and belongings reminds viewers of the often overlooked lives and histories of the city's millions of migrant workers. A bunch of wilted flowers clamped tightly in a wrench furthers the metaphor, melodramatically referencing the vicious cycle of impoverishment that draws migrants to Mumbai and the constant hope of freeing themselves from it that keeps them there.

According to Ranjit Hoskote, in works like the present lot, "Jitish Kallat has managed a considerable feat: while developing an elaborate cartography of the local, immediate and autobiographical, he has simultaneously rendered a moving tribute to the universal human will to survive, to the same vital human energies of overcoming that express themselves, however variously, in varying terrains of oppression" ("Entering the Maze: Recent Paintings by Jitish Kallat", Ibid., Gallery Chemould exhibition catalogue, 2001, unpaginated).

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