Reena Saini Kallat

Reena Saini Kallat’s (b. 1973, Delhi, India) practice spanning drawing, photography, sculpture, and video is concerned with ideas that hold each other in tension—barriers in a world of mobility, porosity in sites of a fissure, memorialization in the aftermath of amnesia, and the promise and illegibility of national legal documents. Kallat’s interest in political and social borders—and their violent cleaving through the land, people, and nature—resonates with the continuing aftershocks of the Partition in India, which her family experienced. Kallat has researched various histories of migration, the plunder of shared natural resources for national gain, and archives of disappeared people. The figure of the hybrid has come to hold symbolic potential in Kallat’s practice, like a truant against dividing lines and divisive national narratives. That barriers give way and can be subverted, is an idea that is pronounced in Kallat’s work using electric cables twisted to resemble barbed wire. She uses the paradox of the existence of technology for a free flow of information and restriction on movement to suggest that total isolation is not possible. Where there is contact there is exchange and fusion. Read More..