Reena Saini Kallat Indian, b. 1973
Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso, 2017-19
Tied and dyed silk
Dimension variable
Installation View, 13TH Havana Biennial, Cuba
Installation View, 13TH Havana Biennial, Cuba
Copyright The Artist
Further images
Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso comprises textual scrolls rendered using the tie-and dye-process by artisans in the town of Bhuj in the Indian border state of Gujarat. The scrolls present the preambles to the...
Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso comprises textual scrolls rendered using the tie-and dye-process by artisans in the town of Bhuj in the Indian border state of Gujarat. The scrolls present the preambles to the constitutions of countries politically partitioned or in conflict such as: US and Cuba, Croatia and Serbia, Sudan and South Sudan, India and Pakistan, China and Japan amongst others. Words common to both preambles are written in braille, making that portion of the text illegible to both the sighted and the blind. Using the metaphor of blindness, the inscrutability of the renderings suggests a collective amnesia, that is a failure to understand or fight for the common values, such as justice, liberty, equality and fraternity, upon which these nations were first constituted. Kallat has revisited the preamble of the Indian constitution in multiple works since 2003 such as ‘Kiosk’ which included a mock-document framed like an MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) between the republic and the citizens. With this work she began using rubber stamps as a metaphor of the bureaucratic apparatus that either endorse, legitimise, give state sanction or invalidate and stamp histories out of existence. Since then she has returned to the preamble in works such as Synapse in 2009, Preface 2010 and Blind Spots 2017-19 amongst others.