Jitish Kallat: Order of Magnitude

Ishara Art Foundation, located in Alserkal Avenue, Dubai is the first permanent space in the Gulf dedicated to South Asian art. For its 7th exhibition, the foundation presents an ambitious, major solo exhibition of Jitish Kallat including new works that include paintings, multimedia installations, drawings and site-specific interventions. The exhibition reflects Jitish Kallat’s profound deliberations on the interrelationship between the cosmic and the terrestrial.

Using abstract, schematic, notational and representational languages, Kallat engages with different forms of image-making, seamlessly interlacing the immediate and the cosmic, the telescopic and the microscopic, the past and present. In Order of Magnitude, one finds a contemplation of overarching interconnectivity on the individual, universal, planetary and extra-terrestrial dimensions.

Since the beginning of 2021, Kallat followed a ritual of making one daily drawing as part of a durational study in graphite, aquarelle pencil and gesso stains. Each work comprises diverse forms anchored by the same three sets of numbers: the algorithmically estimated world population, the number of new births, and the death count noted at the particular moment of the work’s creation. Human life and death are abstracted in drawings that are both graphic and painterly, prompting questions of extinction and evolution.

His series Epicycles began during the early days of the pandemic in 2020 with a hand-drawn journal capturing minute changes in Kallat’s studio – such as cracks surfacing on walls. The resulting prints combine the artist’s everyday observations with archival images of human solidarity taken by photographers from around the world. Meticulously composed on a lenticular surface, the depicted figures appear and disappear as one moves around the work, yielding a complex portrait of time in its transience and ephemerality..

A site-specific intervention N-E-S-W serves as an allusive clue to reading this exhibition. Embedded within the foundation’s architecture, a functional magnetic compass is inset within the flooring. N-E-S-W summons the cardinal directions of the Earth, aligned to invisible force fields, rendering both the exhibition and Ishara into planetary surveying devices.

Jitish Kallat: Order of Magnitude will be accompanied by physical and virtual tours, educational and public programmes, a newly commissioned text by Amal Khalaf and artist conversations over the duration of the exhibit.