07 March 2011

Art at “maximum INDIA” Festival Evokes Cultural Memory and Loss

By Howard Cincotta
Special Correspondent

Washington — Archeologists know something that most of us tend to ignore or forget: All our works and accomplishments, whether buildings, monuments or even cities, are destined to become ruins, somehow, someday. If they survive at all, it is through memory and commemoration.

One artist who hasn’t forgotten this is Reena Saini Kallat from Mumbai. Her monumental installation, Falling Fables, celebrates and mourns the passing of time and disappearance of architecture.

On display at “maximum INDIA,” a 20-day festival of dance, theater, music, art and crafts at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, the work is a massive fallen pillar covered with more than 30,000 hand-crafted rubber stamps, Kallat’s signature motif. Many stamps bear the names or locations of missing monuments. Others carry fragments of poems or writings dealing with architecture and loss.

REMEMBERING RUINS

Approximately 200 irreplaceable monuments and sites have vanished or are well on their way to oblivion in India, according to Kallat.

“My work deals with the notion of loss in a city where new buildings are rubbing shoulders with the old,” she said.

The construction of Falling Fables was almost as arduous as some of the monuments Kallat seeks to commemorate. The Kennedy Center commissioned the work two years ago, during which time she conducted lengthy research in the Archeological Survey records to collect names and references. Each stamp was handmade by her studio staff of six, with additional help from her artist husband and friends.

The design was inspired by a fallen pillar in the Nicholson Cemetery, one of the oldest British cemeteries in New Delhi. The pillar itself was constructed on site at the Kennedy Center. Kallat and her staff assembled the stamps on wooden panels that were taken to Washington and attached to the pillar structure.

STAMPING MEMORIES

Kallat has long worked with words and unconventional materials; she first began creating large-scale portraits and images with rubber stamps in 2003. For Closet Quarries (2008), she consulted with archeologists to create a series of images with rubber stamps that recall the great inlay patterns on the walls of the Taj Mahal.

Kallat explored backwater areas around the Taj where she found markings and engravings in red sandstone identifying either individual craftsmen or families. Archeologists speculate that some of the stone symbols were a means of totaling up their work for payment.

Similar carved names of stone craftsmen can be found at other Mughal-era monuments, according to Kallat, who transferred many of the markings to her stamps.

“These names ... intercept the austere inlay patterns through text and symbols, evoking notions of labor, memory and the submerged — factual and fictional — histories and myths that surround monument-making,” she wrote of Closet Quarries.

Similarly, the thousands of rubber stamps in Falling Fables can be viewed as representing the multitude of lost and forgotten lives behind any great public work or building.

In commenting on Kallat’s work, Indian writer, critic and curator Nancy Adajania observed that a paradox of democracy is that it theoretically empowers every single individual.

“The tragedy is that we cannot see these units clearly, but only through a symbolic blur,” Adajania wrote. “Precisely this paradox animates Reena’s mixed-media works, photographs, sculpture installations and videos.”

WORDS AS ART

Reena Kallat’s husband, Jitish Kallat, is a noted Indian artist whose installation at “maximum INDIA” is built around words as well. Public Notice 2 commemorates the speech given by Mahatma Gandhi on the eve of the historic Salt March in 1930 to protest the British tax on salt, and by extension, British occupation of India.

In this speech, Gandhi declared the principles of “absolute nonviolence” and civil disobedience that have profoundly shaped political discourse and social change throughout the world, including in Martin Luther King’s civil rights campaign in the United States.

Jitish Kallat depicts Gandhi’s words through some 4,500 bone-shaped letters appearing on large panels that march down the length of the Kennedy Center’s Hall of Nations.

“Each alphabet in this speech, like a misplaced relic, will hold up the image of violence in clinical clarity even as their collective chorus makes a plea for peace,” Kallat has written.

As for Falling Fables, it will share the fate of the monuments it celebrates, and be dismantled once the festival is over.

For more information, see “maximum INDIA” and the websites for Reena Saini Kallat and Jitish Kallat.

Learn more about some “maximum INDIA” performers through the photo gallery “Art and Culture of India Showcased in Washington.”

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)