Jitish KallatCycles of Time

Seven prints that together make one image of a street with overlaying colors violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red
Jitish Kallat, Event Horizon (the hour of the day of the month of the season), 2014. Lenticular photographic print, 45 x 45 x 1 inches. San José Museum of Art. Gift of the Lipman Family Foundation, Peggy and Yogan Dalal, Kaushie Adiseshan and Anand Rajaraman, Virinda and Vasudev Bhandarkar, Tad Freese, and Dipti and Rakesh Mathur, 2017.02a–g. Photo by Richard J. Karson.

Time is a recurring theme in Jitish Kallat’s artwork, evoking ancestry, the history of the Indian subcontinent, ideas about survival and mortality, and daily acts of living. Its cycles are expansive and fractal: every breath is a unit that punctuates a lifetime. Kallat’s Event Horizon (the hour of the day of the month of the season) (2014) documents a mundane panoramic cityscape in a rainbow-hued lenticular print. The image shifts as the viewer changes position such that the same figures appear and reappear in different panels. Multiple timeframes are caught in a single image as if to suggest that history replays itself. Kallat’s idea that “embodied cognition,” or the awareness of oneself in space, “is central to really thinking about the world”1 seems at play here, suggesting that one’s position in space places them in both a single moment and an expansive history.

  1. Jitish Kallat, in “Meet Jitish Kallat,” Art Dubai Portraits, Art Dubai channel, posted September 12, 2019, video, 0:59 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=yIdWxAwc47s. ↩︎