Reena Saini Kallat works on loan to Compton Verney

Autograph has loaned works from the series Pattern Recognition, commissioned by Autograph for Critical Times: Dialogues in Contemporary Photography to Compton Verney's exhibition Reena Kallat: Common Ground.

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’s solo exhibition Common Ground is a carefully woven tapestry of themes, investigating notions of borders, migration, inequity and citizenship. In Kallat’s powerful work maps, rubber-stamps, flags and the constitutions of nations become tools to address political and social boundaries and global inequalities. Based in Mumbai, India, Kallat’s own family’s past overlaps with the partition of the subcontinent into the two entities of India and Pakistan in 1947, and the division is a thread that runs through the exhibition. The friction between manmade and natural boundaries is also a recurring theme in Kallat’s work, with rivers and the types of flora and fauna officially assigned to represent nations becoming part of a glossary of signs through which she questions hierarchies of power and notions of enmity and harmony.