Return to Sender brings together two works based on missives: Jitish Kallat’s widely exhibited work titled Covering Letter (2012), which was selected for India’s pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), and a new project called Covering Letter (Terranum Nuncius) (2018-2020). This exhibition marks the first time Kallat’s two Covering Letter installations will be shown together. Exhibited in darkened galleries and open ended in meaning, they are intended to provoke contemplations of our world and the universe.
Covering Letter is a piece of correspondence projected onto a curtain of traversable dry fog; a brief letter written by Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler in July 1939, just weeks before the start of World War II. In response, Covering Letter (Terranum Nuncius) commemorates and reinvokes select sounds and images that were composed for expedition into interstellar space, as a planetary message to extraterrestrial life. Kallat here draws from the Golden Record, two gold-plated phonographic records hoisted onto the legendary Voyager 1 and 2 space probes launched by NASA in 1977. At a time when we find ourselves in a deeply divided world, he foregrounds these sounds and images for a collective meditation on ourselves as united residents of a single planet.
Born in India in 1974, Jitish Kallat currently lives and works in Mumbai.
JITISH KALLAT: SOLO EXHIBITION AT FRIST ART MUSEUM
Exhibition Dates: March 13 — June 28, 2020
Opening: Thursday, March 12, 2020
Frist Art Museum
919 Broadway
Nashville, TN 37203
Leave a Reply