Inside the Vision of Jitish Kallat: Art, Infinity, and Existence

What does it mean to be an artist? For Jitish Kallat, being an artist holds its most expansive, philosophical definitions. A painter, sculptor, photographer, and installation artist, Kallat explores form—how a mark becomes an idea—and our status in the universe. He reflects on larger truths, the body, and what it means for bodies to interact with his artwork. Moving across disciplines, he interweaves ecological, political, historical, and mathematical frameworks in a way that is entirely his own. 

As Kallat examines some of the biggest questions, Whitewall posed smaller ones to better understand how he conceives of his oeuvre. He talks through his early career, his evolving relationship to the viewer, his inspirations, and intuitions. Throughout, he maintains a strong sense of historical specificity, demonstrating that even the most existential questions come down to details. 

WHITEWALL: You have talked about becoming interested in drawing at an early age—and continuing that passion throughout your teens. When did you start to think about yourself as an artist?

JITISH KALLAT: Drawing felt deeply empowering in those early days. A blank piece of paper transformed if you made a mark. With a few lines, space deepened; mark a sun, cast a shadow, and that space became a place—you direct the shadow and summon time.

“Drawing felt deeply empowering in those early days,”

–Jitish Kallat

As a child, drawing was a daily obsession. Growing up in suburban Mumbai, it wasn’t clear that one could become an artist or live the life I do today. It was through a series of serendipitous steps that I arrived at art school, where the clarity to become an artist came through an olfactory sensation—the smell of aged oil paint and lingering linseed oil made it clear that I was just where I needed to be. 

As an art student, I was very prolific and already thought of myself as an artist… and I often feel like an art student today, with all the vulnerabilities, exhilarations, and exasperations even to this day.

WW: At that early stage, what did being an artist mean to you? Has that meaning changed as your career has evolved?

JK: The question of what it means to be an artist is ever-changing, as the process is a constant state of becoming. The shifts in my work often parallel an evolving self and shifting worldviews, leaving behind a trail—a fossil record of one’s journey—that only becomes clear in retrospect. Over the decades, certain themes have lingered and animated my work, even when they may not bear an obvious family resemblance formally or in their medium. Themes such as time, sustenance, birth, and death, and the recurrence of historical texts move fluidly across registers and media without a singular trajectory.

Engaging with the Biological and the Philosophical 

WW: Your work is deeply engaged with science, universe, ecologies, and the elements. Can you tell me about your relationship to science?

JK: Science seeks to understand the world through observation, experimentation, and evidence-based reasoning. It needs testable hypotheses and navigates the sharp dichotomy of true and false to become science. Art, on the other hand, thrives in ambivalence. It rearranges the world to find meaning, and it can be both true and false at the same time. Radical fictions are often portals to deeper truths.

It is in this spirit that my work intersects with science. It’s often not about engaging the cosmic or the ecological as linear subjects. It’s more about how reflecting on these ideas shifts our optics and our relation to the urgencies of the present.

WW: Your work asks us to think about some of the biggest, most existential questions one can ask. What is it like to make material that is philosophical or biological?

JK: My work is often inclined toward inquiring into fundamental questions of life, fully aware that they cannot be answered within the realm of the relative. Art, science, and other exploratory disciplines must engage with the relative, rearranging the world to find pointers that gesture toward larger truths.

“My work is often inclined toward inquiring into fundamental questions of life,”

–Jitish Kallat

Let me attempt an analogy here; to navigate the unseen and intangible, ancient Indian traditions produced reflective instruments such as tantra (energetic practices), mantra (sound and vibrational tools), and yantra (diagrams or symbolic mappings of the cosmos). I feel art, for me, is very much the making of such instruments—tools that are visual, conceptual, and material. My studio processes often involve recurring drawing rituals that interweave with time, seasons, and elemental forces, alongside research-based approaches that lead me to archival data.

These processes often lead to immersive installations such as Covering Letter (Terranum Nuncius) (2018), which engages with interstellar communication to explore planetary identity and existential themes, or Epilogue (2010), which reflects on cycles of time, memory, and the ephemeral through all the moons my father saw in his lifetime.

In my Wind Study and Rain Study drawings, elements like wind, fire, and rain leave imprints that serve as residual signatures of time and invisible atmospheric forces. A small suite of drawings titled Circadian Studies (Contact Tracing), created during the pandemic in 2020 recorded the shifting shadows of a tree stem based on planetary rotation leading to the portfolio of 365 drawings titled Integer Study (Drawing from life) in 2021. Here I began anchoring my drawings to three integers: the estimated human population of the planet at that moment, along with the births and deaths recorded up to that time of day referencing an algorithm that tracked these estimates. All of these exercises are an attempt to find forms or rearrangements that point toward something otherwise intangible to me. 

Jitish Kallat’s Artistic Process and Inspirations 

WW: And what is your process like? Is it an idea, an image, or something else that prompts the initial spark?

JK: My process often begins with nebulous impulses that trigger threads of research or image-making processes in drawing and painting. Notes, records, and often my own previous works evolve into new pieces. Many ideas remain dormant until, one day, an unexpected intuition takes hold.

WW: Who are the thinkers, artists, and writers that you find yourself turning to for inspiration?

JK: This is always a revolving pantheon, like a roulette of inspiration, with multiple eclectic books drifting in and out of my attention. At the moment, I’m revisiting Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here, and referencing Extraterrestrial Languages by Daniel Oberhaus. Recently, I re-read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Due to the re-staging of Public Notice 3, Swami Vivekananda’s The Complete Works have been a focus.

Last year, while working on Antumbra, which centers around 600 of Nelson Mandela’s desk calendars, Long Walk to Freedom and Conversations with Myself returned to me after nearly a decade. Whenever I seek to open my spirit, I revisit Tagore’s Geetanjali. I’m now in the early chapters of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Song of the Cell. Incidentally, Siddhartha is contributing a beautiful text to a forthcoming monographic publication by Hatje Cantz on my Integer Study drawings.

WW: Is there a certain extent to which you see your role as an artist as making visible the unseen?

JK: The primary role of an artist is to “see,” and the work is a consequence of this looking. Sightings (2015) emerged from recurring shifts in observation during the months when I was curating the Kochi Biennale in 2014. At breakfast, the fruit skins of apples and papayas resembled star fields and cosmic phenomena. Back in my studio a year later, this impulse evolved into Sightings, a series of lenticular prints where close-up photographs of fruit surfaces shift colour as viewers move around them, flipping between their colours and inverse, appearing as distant cosmic phenomena—as if the fruit held a forensic trace of the starlight from which it descended.

Evolving Exhibitions and Viewer Engagement 

WW: Some of your work is extremely site-specific. Perhaps you can speak about your ongoing exhibition Public Notice 3 at the Art Institute of Chicago?

JK: Public Notice 3 is perhaps the most site-specific work I’ve created. First exhibited in 2010, the Art Institute of Chicago is restaging it at the moment. At the center of the work is a speech delivered by Swami Vivekananda, calling for an end to fanaticism, fundamentalism, bigotry, and intolerance. Installed on the Grand Staircase of the museum—the very site where Vivekananda addressed the World Parliament of Religions on September 11, 1893—the work juxtaposes his plea for tolerance with the post-9/11 terrorism threat-level colors.

Another site-specific work, Whorled (Here After Here After Here), was installed at Somerset House in London. Conceived as a seismic ripple or galactic whorl, the spiraling work maps over 300 locations, from Somerset House to global sites and celestial bodies like Mars and distant supernovae, through interwoven scrolls aligned with Earth’s cardinal directions. Some locations point to places lost to rising sea levels, while others point to flood-prone locations, resonating with Somerset House’s proximity to the Thames and London’s vulnerability to flooding. The terrestrial and the cosmic, the past and the imminent intersected in the work reflecting on current urgencies.

My solo exhibitions at the Ian Potter Museum in Melbourne and the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai, and my curatorial project Whorled Explorations (2014)—the second edition of Kochi Biennale—were deeply site-inspired. Tangled Hierarchy (2022), which I curated in Southampton, UK, was site- and date-specific. It foregrounded notes written by Gandhi to Mountbatten 75 years earlier, on the same date of the exhibition. The project marked the eve of the 75^th year of the Indo-Pakistan Partition.

WW: Much of your work engages the viewer as a participant more than a traditional viewer. How do you think about your relationship to the viewer?

JK: The relationship between the work and the viewer is dynamic because neither is static. Artworks travel, encounter diverse audiences across geographies and time, and their meanings evolve as contexts change.

“The relationship between the work and the viewer is dynamic because neither is static,”

–Jitish Kallat

That said, the viewer’s body can be central to the conception of certain works of mine, such as Covering Letter (2012), which actively engages the audience as they walk through its illuminated text, dissolving boundaries between themselves and the work. The piece reiterates an unlikely historic correspondence: a brief letter written by Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler a few weeks before the Second World War. In this letter, Gandhi urgently appeals for peace, beginning with the words “Dear Friend,” addressing one of history’s most violent figures. The text ascends on a veil of descending mist, allowing the audience to walk through, inhabiting and dissolving the moving words.

WW: Any parting thoughts on your mind?

JK: Stepping into 2025, it is clear that we are rotating on a planet inflamed by ecological urgencies, nearly 60 unrelenting conflicts, and several million people forcibly displaced from their homes. Yet, one can only hope that we will find antidotes, summon empathy, and embrace sanity to heal a fractured world.

“One can only hope that we will find antidotes, summon empathy, and embrace sanity to heal a fractured world,”

–Jitish Kallat