KOCHI:
A book on eminent artist Jitish Kallat was launched at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale today, unveiling his expansive corpus of artwork that has won the painter-sculptor critical appreciation over the past quarter century.
Titled ‘Jitish Kallat’, the monograph explores the contemporary visual culture from which the 44-year-old Mumbaikar Malayali initiated his wide-ranging art practices that have gone on to form a massive personal archive. Former Kochi Mayor K J Sohan received the first copy of the book. The book was released at the Pavilion at Fort Kochi’s Cabral Yard, which is one of the ten venues of the 108-day Biennale that began on Wednesday.
The 376-page tome with 155 colour photographs has been published by MAPIN in association with Nature Morte, Galerie Templon, Chemould Prescott Road. Brought out with contributions by art scholars such as Natasha Ginwala, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ranjit Hoskote, Girish Shahane, Suhanya Raffel, Dilip Gaonkar, Jyoti Dhar, Bernardo Kastrup, and Shumon Basar, the book costs Rs 3,950.
Edited by Natasha Ginwala and featuring an extensive interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, the work chiefly includes essays and conversations involving curators, art historians and scholars in the fields of social theory and science.
“It also includes two piece of short fiction,” reveals Ginwala. “Shumon Basar deftly manoeuvres the dystopia of city planning and its libidinal fantasy that generates a ‘walkway in the sky’. This, while also revealing the self-destructivity programmed into suburban lives.”
Further, the commissioned work commemorates Kallat’s 2017 retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi. “In the book, one could see Kallat’s aesthetic language and its obsessive interweaving of the cosmos and the cosmopolis,” notes Ginwala. “You will find hitherto-unpublished sketches: visual references for his early paintings and works such as Rickshawpolis and Aquasaurus.”
Talking about his book, Jitish said he felt Kochi-Muziris Biennale will be to the best place for the launch. “I wanted to give the first copy of my book to the Biennale Library and everyone enjoys the book,” he added.
Kallat, whose family hails from Kiralur village in Thrissur district, was the curator of the second edition (2014) of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The ongoing Biennale also features a new work by the artist.
