Jitish Kallat
Here After Here After Here
Preview: October 11, 2015, 3pm
Permanent public sculpture in Lower Austria
In the year 2012, the regional consortium of ten municipalities “10 vor Wien” contacted the Advisory Council of Public Art Lower Austria to propose large-scale public artworks to be installed in three selected roundabouts in Lower Austria. Jitish Kallat was one of the artists invited by the Advisory Council to conceive of a sculpture. Kallat chose a roundabout located in Stockerau, about 20km north of Vienna, a nodal point on the expressway connecting several towns.
Rendered in a “traffic blue” shade and layered with information set in the font TERN (“Trans European Road Network”), Here After Here After Here (2012–15) could appear like a mammoth loop of infinitely stretched traffic signage. Kallat draws together a confluence of myriad references to arrive at this compelling form, amongst them the mythic symbol of ouroboros, ancient eternal knots, alchemical diagrams, and sacred geometry. Here After Here After Here is six meters in height and spans 17 meters across.
The text and symbols on this unending highway signage connect Stockerau to places all over the world, ranging from Singapore to Salvador, Marrakesh, Mumbai, Beijing, Brasilia, and Bukarest to New York, Paris and Taipei, amongst several others. They bear actual distances and exit signs that you might follow from Stockerau to reach any of these places. As if by a whimsical flight of the imagination, Kallat maps the circular form of the roundabout located in Lower Austria onto the spheroid form of the globe, symbolically and somewhat playfully connecting this location to the rest of the world.
Jitish Kallat was born in 1974 in Mumbai, the city where he continues to live and work. Kallat has exhibited widely at galleries, museums and public institutions, as well as in biennials and triennials across the world. His solo museum exhibitions include institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Bhau Daji Lad Museum (Mumbai), the Ian Potter Museum of Art (Melbourne), the San Jose Museum of Art, and Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney). He was the curator and artistic director of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014.
