The Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai has become a backdrop to some interesting juxtapositions. In different corners and rooms, museum objects can be seen interacting with contemporary works by artist Reena Saini Kallat in a solo show, Cartographies of the Unseen, which is on view till 6 April. So, you have Memoria Corona (2006) placed in front of the statues of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. This pristine white sculpture, modelled on the crown of Queen Elizabeth II of England, is inscribed with the names of those who fought in the Indian freedom struggle. The symbol of imperialism can be seen turned on its head as a memorial of sorts for those who sacrificed their lives against colonial rule. Through such works, Saini Kallat questions ideas of colonisation and decolonisation, cartography and colonial frameworks of museology.
“The works get activated in this space like no other,” says the artist. “Take the series of works, Synonym, which are screens holding up images made up of several hundred names of people who’ve gone missing, forming portraits of migrants and citizens, who are either on the margins or have fallen off the radar. Tasneem Zakaria Mehta (managing trustee and director of the museum) placed these next to the community cabinets on the first floor, which didn’t feature a single woman.” That erasure or omission comes out in a stark manner when viewed against Saini Kallat’s Synonym, which features several portraits of women. “The context of the various museum objects and the settings lend their own meaning to my works.”
As you navigate the show, walking between the various floors, you get to see how Saini Kallat has engaged with themes of borders, fissures and fractions through out her career but in very different ways through works such as Verso Recto, Leaking Lines and Blind Spots. Her engagement with boundaries also has its roots in her personal history—her family had to move to Delhi during Partition. Using the line as a leitmotif and tactility of material—textile, electric cables, barbed wire— the artist creates a poetic body of work in a bid to seek unifying factors amid differences across humanity.
In a 2019 interview to Lounge, Saini Kallat had talked about how her choice of material and medium is intuitive. “I research and collect material for several years, after which at some point I start deciding on the form that it would take. I have always been very hands on with material. I believe in the transformative ability of the medium itself in conveying ideas. My work is not about putting out research, but as an artist it lies in the act of ‘making’ and creating shifts in the imagination,” she had said.
This is evident in her new video work, Saline Notations (2023-24), on view at the “Origins of Mumbai” gallery on the first floor. It is part of the permanent collection of Partition Museum, Delhi, and has been loaned to the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum for this show. “During Partition, while Bengal and Punjab were divided, we lost Sindh completely to Pakistan. When you lose land, you don’t just lose territory but also the language, culture and traditions tied to it. So, the video work features two frames. In the one on the left, I worked with salt to render the professions and addresses of Hindu residents of Karachi— taken from a British-era directory—who left Sindh during Partition,” she elaborates.
While their names are obscured in the left frame, the right frame only reveals the names but not the rest of the details. “The tide comes in and erases the text. I wanted the work to invite reflections on identity, memory and erasure to show what happens when a community has to start everything from scratch. Salt as a material is used to reflect on ideas of fragility and the transient nature of our individual and collective memories,” adds Saini Kallat. The video is accompanied by the sound of her reading the poem Blind Smoke by Arjan “Shad” Mirchandani from the anthology Freedom and Fissures: An Anthology of Sindhi Partition Poetry.
Saini Kallat has also used the rubber stamp in different works through her practice such as the Color Curtain (2009). An ensuing symbol of bureaucratic processes, the stamp has been used to confirm or erase identities—to legitimise existence, give state sanction or make invisible those on the margins. In the show, the viewer can see this in Synonym. From afar, it feels like a series of portraits have been propped up on screens. But when you go closer, you start the multitude of names rubber stamped in 14 Indian languages that make up each portrait. Instead of those who have been legitimised, the stamps announce the names of those who have gone missing in India across geographies. “Each screen casts a shadow—a silhouette that acts as a crowd, with the representation of society as an ocean of humanity, where individu als are often reduced to an anonymous statistic,” states the artist.
Some of the works, such as Verso Recto, have not been shown in Mumbai before. Made with tie-and-dye in collaboration with craftspersons from Bhuj, Gujarat, the set of silk scrolls looks at preambles to the constitutions of nations that have been politically partitioned or are in conflict. Here, Saini Kallat has looked at preambles of South Sudan, North and South Korea, Serbia, Croatia, and more. “The artist has replaced words that denote common shared values in both preambles such as justice, equality, liberty and fraternity with braille characters rendered as yellow dots, making it illegible to both the sighted and blind people,” states the museum note.
In this work, Saini Kallat has continued to spotlight historical amnesia and the fact that we are losing sight of our shared values. “Within the museum, it acquires other layers of meaning as it is displayed in the Industrial Arts Gallery on the ground floor. Prince Albert looked at the museum to promote indus trial arts and colonial ideas. Here, the preambles as a promise of democracy suggest reclaiming sovereignty. The anticolonial framework of the work makes for an interesting contrast. Also, the neighbourhood in Mumbai where the museum is situated was home to several mills. So, Verso Recto also alludes to the history of textile mill workers, labour and craft,” she explains.
Another interesting work is the recrea tion of the 2010-work, 2 Degrees, which was part of the River Project at the Camp Belltown Arts Centre in Sydney. Here, Saini Kallat has recreated the work using red earthenware split into two, henna and a single-channel audio loop. “The earthenware alludes to the Indus Valley Civilisation, which lies along the river Indus in both Pakistan and India. While nation states can divide territories and partition the river—with the river even taking on multiple names— essentially the water remains the same.” says the artist. At the museum, she has also created a wall drawing in henna of a tree that has two halves—stemming from the same roots, with one half growing into a banyan tree and the other half into the deodhar, national trees of India and Pakistan respectively. “I referenced the drawing of the banyan tree from the oriental memoirs at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum. That made this site-specific installation all the more interesting,” she adds.
For Saini Kallat, cartographies of existence have always played a crucial role, and she has worked with maps, passports, and thumbprints to draw attention to the inequities of policy and mobility. One recent work in this context is Pattern Recognition, which has been created using the format of the Snellen charts used to test vision. The idea for the work came to her during the covid-19 pandemic as she mulled over travel restrictions, and the wide mobility gap across the world that highlighted the inequities between the global north and south.
In Pattern Recognition, Saini Kallat has created two pyramidical representations featuring maps from different countries. The charts are based on data from Henley’s Passport Index, which ranks nations on the strength of their passports. “The chart on the left represents data from 2006, while the one on the right reflects statistics from 2023. The maps of countries with visa-free travel to more regions are larger and placed higher on the charts, while countries with more travel restrictions appear below in smaller scale,” states the artist note. “...However, the gap between countries with the highest and lowest mobilities remains significant in both charts, suggesting persistent global travel imbalance.” The work is emblematic of Saini Kallat’s ongoing engagement with ideas of inequality and privilege, while looking at new divisions of mobility and access that seem to be afflicting global society today