2020 Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso, MNAAG-Musée National des Arts Asiatiques Guimet, Paris

Nature Morte is pleased to present Reena Saini Kallat’s solo exhibition at the Musée National des Arts Asiatiques Guimet, in conjunction with Asia Now Paris 2020.

The large scale installation titled, Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso comprises textual scrolls rendered using the tie-and dye-process. The scrolls present the preambles to the constitutions of countries politically partitioned or in conflict. These are the constitutions of India and Pakistan, US and Cuba, Serbia and Croatia, Sudan and South Sudan, Japan and China, Bangladesh and India, North and South Korea adopted by their citizens as a promise to themselves in creating nations where justice, liberty, equality and fraternity would prevail. While the texts in English are reproduced as fragmented dot patterns, revealed in reverse against cloth dyed blue-black by artisans in the town of Bhuj in the Indian border state of Gujarat, in between the lines, words morph from the Roman alphabet to ‘Braille’ rendered as yellow dots. Kallat replaces words common to both preambles with those written in braille, making the text illegible to both the sighted and the blind. Using the metaphor of blindness, the inscrutability of the renderings also suggests collective amnesia, resulting in a failure to understand and fight for the common values upon which these nations were first constituted.

Kallat’s works draw attention to universal truths to subvert the underpinnings of conflicts. “In these polarised times where the gaps in our understanding of the truth are increasingly widening, I hope we can still find some space to reflect upon our own shortcomings in understanding other perspectives and move beyond the many borders, visible and invisible, to recognise our interdependence,” says Kallat.

Kallat has revisited the preamble of the Indian constitution in multiple works since 2003. In the video Synapse (2011) the preamble was rendered as letters of a Snellen chart used by ophthalmologists to measure vision and read out slowly by patients undergoing eye tests; their hesitation metaphorically demonstrating an ordinary citizens myopia and blurred view of the most inclusive document of the nation.

Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso has been exhibited at Musée National des Arts Asiatiques Guimet, The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; The Oscar Niemeyer Museum as part of the Curitiba Biennial, Brazil; The 13th Havana Biennial, Cuba; and Nature Morte, New Delhi. The first set of scrolls was shown at the Tate Modern as part of Tate Exchange.