Jitish Kallat: Conjectures on a Paper Sky

What happens when humanity’s earthly histories are viewed against the vastness of the cosmos?

Jitish Kallat: Conjectures on a Paper Sky brings this question into focus through an ambitious exhibition exploring the intersections of science, political power, technological ambition and human precarity. Presented by the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum (BDLM) and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), the major solo exhibition is curated by scholar and curator Dr Alexandra Munroe, with curatorial advisor Tasneem Zakaria Mehta of BDLM. Opening in Mumbai on November 13, 2026, the exhibition is supported by the Saat Saath Arts Foundation and Nature Morte.

First presented at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Bikaner House, New Delhi, in February 2026, Conjectures on a Paper Sky arrives in Mumbai in an extended and reconfigured form. Conceived by Kallat and Munroe as an evolving exhibition, this second iteration is set within the architecture of the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, unfolding across its historic galleries, Special Projects Spaces and outdoor plaza through carefully considered spatial relationships. 

Bringing together paintings, drawings, sculptures, lenticular works and installations from the past decade, the exhibition traces recurring inquiries into orientation, measurement and shifting perspective. Kallat’s practice moves between the microscopic and the telescopic, the quotidian and the extraterrestrial, drawing on historical archives, scientific thought and observations of the natural world. Across the exhibition, earthly histories are repeatedly viewed within planetary and cosmic frames, placing questions of political power, technological ambition and human precarity against vastly different scales of space and time.

In the Main Museum Hall, Moon Treaty (2025) expands to comprise 54 sculptural forms derived from the 1979 United Nations Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. Resembling sheets of the treaty crumpled into planetary forms, the sculptures evoke an unrealised international covenant that sought to place the Moon beyond national appropriation and military use. Presented as an expanded group in Mumbai, the work occupies the central hall at the entrance to the Museum, establishing a planetary frame for the exhibition from the moment of entry.

The exhibition takes its title from Conjectures on a Paper Sky (2023–25), a ten-part suite of paintings developed through research into Project A119, a once-classified 1950s American proposal to detonate a nuclear device on the Moon. Across hand-drawn grids, Kallat overlays ballistic trajectories and blast-like formations with botanical, geological, suboceanic and celestial forms, allowing fact and conjecture to occupy the same pictorial field.

The Mumbai presentation extends these inquiries through works including Lunar Redux (2024–26), Epicycles (2021–25) and the Albedo (Point of Incidence) paintings, alongside new bronze sculptures not included in the Delhi presentation. In the Museum Plaza, Untitled (Two Minutes to Midnight) (2018) brings together enlarged forms derived from Palaeolithic hand axes and stone tools—among humanity’s earliest technologies—with a wedge-shaped plinth based on the distance between the hands of the Doomsday Clock, which stood at two minutes to midnight when the work was made. Cast in dental plaster, the work brings the beginnings of human tool-making into proximity with a contemporary measure of humanity’s capacity for self-destruction.

A major new element of the Mumbai iteration appears in the Special Exhibition Space, where all 365 original drawings from Integer Study (drawing from life) (2021) will be presented together for the first time. Made daily over the course of 2021, each drawing begins with three algorithmically estimated numbers: the global human population at a particular instant, and the number of births and deaths recorded up to that moment in the day. Paired with a timestamp, these numbers generate an evolving visual form, turning demographic data into a daily meditation on birth, death and time.

Also presented in the Special Exhibition Space, Wind Study (Hilbert Curve) (2022) extends Kallat’s long-running engagement with drawing as a durational and elemental process, accompanied by an interactive drawing platform developed in collaboration with programmers at Google Arts & Culture Lab.