Jitish Kallat
“LOKAME THARAVADU” – GROUP SHOW

Kochi Biennale Foundation, Alappuzha, Kerala, Inde
From April 5 to June 30, 2021

Lokame Tharavadu (The World Is One Family) is a large-scale curated contemporary art exhibition of Malayali artists, organized by the Kochi Biennale Foundation. Over 260 artists will be exhibiting a collection of their works, to foreground each of their practices.  Jitish Kallat presents in this exhibition “Epilogue” (2011) in which the artist memorialises the life-time of his late father by picturing the approximately 22 000 moons that he saw during his lifetime. Strructured in monthly slots for each year, the moons are represented by “rotis breads”, the edges of which grow or crumble away as the moon waxes and wanes. The “roti moons”, a recurring pattern in the artist’s work, distill lived time into its essential components—the daily bread, the recurring routine—even as they connect it to a shared, eternally recurring celestial phenomenon. At the end of the path, the viewer is invited to walk with Kallat as he retraces his father’s life, a poignant frame with a lone moon, representing the night before 2nd December 1998, when the artist’s father died.