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Artist Reena Saini Kallat has created new work for Autograph's commissioning project Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary Photography, addressing ever-shifting politics of access and inequity in the form of international travel authorisations
Autograph invited Reena Saini Kallat to create a new work responding to critical geopolitics – past, present, future – of our time through photography. She produced a photo-based series, Pattern Recognition, addressing ever-shifting politics of access and inequity in the form of international travel authorisations.
This conceptual, digital collage-based body of work reflects on the global order through the trope of mobility and passports as portals to the world. While national borders have appeared recurrently in her work, here they appear not as fences or barricades hoisted on land but as constraints produced through privileges and policy. Kallat contemplates on how the pandemic has revealed not just our deep disconnect with the natural world but has exposed new boundaries between nations, and new defences between the self and the world. For her multi part photo-work, Kallat draws upon this uneven statistics and policy landscape of global mobility gap, to sketch an identikit of our divided and unequal planet.
Kallat is one of three artists jointly selected in collaboration with the Bagri Foundation, a non-profit supporting and promoting Asian arts, to create new work for Autograph's commissioning project Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary Photography.
Japan
Singapore
South Korea
Spain
Germany
Italy
UK
USA
Australia
Canada
Greece
Poland
Brazil
Ukraine
Venezuela
Russia
South Africa
China
India
Haiti
South Sudan
Iran
Bangladesh
North Korea
Palestine
Yemen
Syria
Afghanistan
Reena Saini Kallat (born 1973, Dehli) is concerned with ideas that hold each other in tension evolving from her interest in political and social borders — and their violent cleaving through land, people and nature resonating with the continuing aftershocks of the Partition in India, which her family experienced. Her multifaceted practice works weaves together drawing, photography, collage, sculpture, and video to create layered enquiries into culture, history, and the role that memory plays – in not only what we choose to remember but also how we think of the past.
Kallat has exhibited widely including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; SITE SantaFe, New Mexico; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj; Helsinki City Art Museum, Helsinki amongst many others. Her works are held in collections including Musee de Beaux Arts (CA); Art Gallery of New South Wales (AU); Manchester Museum (UK); National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (TW); Vancouver Art Gallery (CA); Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney (AU); Norrtalje Konsthal (SE); Initial Access (Frank Cohen Collection) (UK); Pizzuti Collection (CA); Burger Collection (HK); Fondazione Golinelli (IT); Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (IN); Dr. Bhau DajiLad Museum (IN); National Gallery of Modern Art (IN) amongst others. She lives and works in Mumbai, India.
A new commissioning project working with three interdisciplinary, research-led visual artists from different global diasporas
Find out moreSupported by the Bagri Foundation and Autograph
Banner image: Reena Saini Kallat, Palestine [detail] from the commission Pattern Recognition, commissioned by Autograph for Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary Photography (2022), supported by the Bagri Foundation.
Installation image: Reena Saini Kallat, Patter Recognition on display as part of the artist's solo exhibition Common Ground (2022), Compton Verney, photography by Jamie Woodley.
View the commission images: All images by Reena Saini Kallat, from the series Pattern Recognition, commissioned by Autograph for Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary Photography (2022), supported by the Bagri Foundation.
Other images on page: 1) Reena Saini Kallat. Courtesy of the Artist. 2)Sim Chi Yin, from the series "The suitcase is a little bit rotten", commissioned by Autograph for Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary Photography (2022), supported by the Bagri Foundation.
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