Reena Saini Kallat

The Haeinsa temple in Korea is most notable for being the home of Tripitaka Koreana, the whole of the Buddhist Scriptures carved onto 81,350 wooden printing blocks that have been preserved over a thousand years.

The Haein Art Project is organized locally by E&A, and is promoted by the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.

ArtOxygen was invited to curate the participation of Indian and international artist to the 2nd edition of the art project in 2013.

Video credits: Binaifer Bharucha

Untitled (Cobweb/Crossings)
2013
painted sculptural installation in FRP, metal

Reena Kallat's interview on CNBC India about her show 'Silt of Seasons' that was exhibited at Chemould Prescott Road Bombay.

Untitled (Map/Drawing) 2014

The flows and movements of travellers, migrants, labour across the world have produced major social and economic implications as well as new forms of cultural exchange. It has not only allowed us to free cultural identities from a physical place but see ourselves entwined in a symbolic web, as it were.

I first conceived and exhibited this work at the Konsthall Goteborg, as part of the Goteborg International Biennale of Contemporary Art 2011. I decided to work with electric wires to form a drawing that traces migration patterns globally, where multitude of actors interact without knowledge of the overall situation. While technology and commerce are blurring geographic boundaries, there are inherent contradictions that the electric wires here seem to suggest both as conduit and barrier, serving on the one hand as channels of transmission and yet on the other their linear formations evoke barbed wires or different kinds of fencing. By changing the instrument of this quasi-cartographic drawing from a pencil line to a wire, I'm interested in the notion of the map as dynamic, ever changing, streaming and transferring data with the global flows of energies and people, as the courses of these travellers intersect.

The audio component resonates with high-voltage electric current sounds drowned within deep-sea ambient sounds, slow electric pulses, the hum of engaged tones from telecommunications, mechanical-sounding drone, factory sirens, ship horns intermingle with migratory bird sounds.

- Reena Saini Kallat

Reena Saini Kallat (b. 1973, Delhi, India) graduated from Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai in 1996 with a B.F.A. in painting. Her practice – spanning painting, photography, video, sculpture and installation, often incorporates multiple mediums into a single work. She is interested in the role that memory plays, in not only what we choose to remember but how we think of the past. Kallat frequently works with officially recorded or registered names of people, objects, and monuments that are lost or have disappeared without a trace, only to get listed as anonymous and forgotten statistics. One of the recurrent motifs in her work has been the rubber stamp, both as an object and imprint, signifying the bureaucratic apparatus, capable at once of confirming as well as obscuring identities. Her more recent series using salt as a medium explores the tenuous yet intrinsic relationship between the body and the oceans, highlighting the fragility and unpredictability of existence.

 

Her work has been widely exhibited across the world in venues such as Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Kennedy Centre, Washington; Vancouver Art Gallery; Saatchi Gallery, London; SESC Pompeia and SESC Belenzino in Sao Paulo; Goteborgs Konsthall, Sweden; Helsinki City Art Museum, Finland; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Casa Asia, Madrid and Barcelona; ZKM Karlsruhe in Germany; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney; Hangar Bicocca, Milan; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; IVAM Museum, Spain; Busan MOMA; Kulturhuset, Stockholm; Kunsthaus Langenthal, Switzerland; Chicago Cultural Centre amongst many others and she has participated in a number of workshops and residencies. She lives and works in Mumbai.