Jitish Kallat was born in 1974 in Mumbai, the city where he continues to live and work. Kallat’s works over the last two decades reveal his continued engagement with the ideas of time, sustenance, recursion and historical recall, often interlacing the dense cosmopolis and the distant cosmos. His oeuvre traverses varying focal lengths and time-scales. From close details of the skin of a fruit or the brimming shirt-pocket of a passer-by, it might expand to register dense peoplescapes, or voyage into intergalactic vistas. While some works meditate on the transient present, others invoke the past through citations of momentous historical utterances. Frequently shifting orders of magnitude, Kallat’s works can be said to move interchangeably between meditations on the self, the city street, the nation and the cosmic horizon, viewing the ephemeral within the context of the perpetual, the everyday in juxtaposition with the historical, the microscopic alongside the telescopic.
Kallat has exhibited widely at museums and institutions including Tate Modern (London), Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane), Kunstmuseum (Bern), Serpentine Galleries (London), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), BOZAR: Centre For Fine Arts (Brussels), Pirelli HangarBicocca (Milan), Busan Museum of Art, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo), ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art (Karlsruhe), Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Oslo), Arken Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen), Valencia Institute of Modern Art (Spain), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Museum Tinguely (Basel) and the Gemeente Museum (The Hague) among many others. Kallat’s work has been part of the Venice Biennale, Havana Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Asia Pacific Triennale, Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Asian Art Biennale, Curitiba Biennale, Guangzhou Triennale and the Kiev Biennale among others.
His solo exhibitions at museums include institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Frist Art Museum (Nashville), Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, the Ian Potter Museum of Art (Melbourne), Norrtalje Konstall (Sweden), the San Jose Museum of Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2017, the National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi) presented a mid-career survey of his work titled Here After Here 1992–2017, curated by Catherine David.
Kallat was the curator and artistic director of Whorled Explorations, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014. He curated I draw, therefore I think for the South South Platform in 2021, and Tangled Hierarchy at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton UK (2022).