Jitish Kallat plays with scale and distance to offer an assembly of sensory and speculative propositions that weaves unexpected links between everyday reality and the cosmos. The exhibition opens with Elicitation # 1 (Terranum Nuncius), a photographic diptych of images drawn from the Golden Record archive dispatched by NASA on the Voyager space missions in 1977. These images – children playing with a miniature globe, a woman tasting an ice cream, a man eating a sandwich – were conceived as a summary of human life as addressed to an extraterrestrial intelligence. These inaugural images of consuming and surveying the planet can be read as an oblique invitation to reflect on the exhibition.

Extending his intimate notebook into an immersive mural-like format, Integer Study (drawing from life) is a repertoire of shapes and numbers that spans the entire gallery. Since the beginning of 2021, the artist has been exploring the planetary present through a daily count of the world population. One encounters 365 drawings, each displaying the algorithmically estimated births and deaths that have occurred up until a specific time each day. With intricate graphite and aquarelle pencil markings and gesso stains, Kallat’s painterly abstraction contrasts with precise data, forming a triangulation of life by mapping birth, death and time. Echoes of existential questions morph into ecological ones, from reflections on climate and extinction to evolution and decay.