Pattern Recognition

Pattern Recognition consists of 28 digital collages and an illustrative map which examines how different nationalities’ passports grant or deny access to international travel, addressing the ever-shifting politics of border mobility and inequity.

Kallat’s family experienced firsthand the effects of the partition of India, and the issue of national borders is a recurrent theme in her work. In Pattern Recognition, borders appear not as fences or barricades but as constraints produced through privileges and policy, while passports are portrayed as portals to the world.

Each work in the series represents one country – a single collaged page, layering images sourced from the internet and news. References include the war in Ukraine, the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh and the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Each collage is then arranged within a pyramid according to the 2022 Henley Passport Index, which ranks nations by the number of destinations their citizens can enter without a visa. Countries with greater freedom of movement appear larger and higher on the chart, while those facing more restrictions are rendered below in smaller scale. Collectively the works demonstrate a global ‘mobility map’ and sketch a stark portrait of a divided and unequal planet.

Autograph commissioned Kallat to produce this new body of work as part of Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary Photography, a project led in collaboration with Bagri Foundation supporting three artists to respond to the geopolitics of our time through photography.