We are very pleased to present, Silt of Seasons, an exhibition of new works in various media of Reena Saini Kallat at Chemould Prescott Road after a gap of four years. 

While the interim years have been an enriched period of working and showing, both in solo and group exhibitions, the coming together of her recent body work, whether it be sculpture, photography, or painting, this exhibition brings together under one roof an ongoing range of interests that have enveloped her work: politics, evolutions in human conditions or loss, her art practice pays careful attention to historical and contemporary narratives.

The politics in India with its neighbour Pakistan, the unresolved dispute of Kashmir have been an ongoing dialogue and source of friction between our nations infiltrating into world politics. This has been a source of continued dialogue within the artist’s work. Reena Saini Kallat works as artist and chronicler. Research towards facts and data leads her from one government office to another. Often encountering resistance, her persistence wins over bureaucracy. The names collected, enter into the very essence of her work. Names of actual workers (in symbol forms) who built the Taj Mahal; names of persons who signed the peace petition between India and Pakistan; names of persons who have gone missing due to various accidents. Seen together, if one looks at the various bodies of work within the exhibition, Saini Kallat’s concerns seem to address an overarching sense of loss. In her work, loss of lives during partition, the continued loss of lives through war, through terrorist activities, the very loss of life itself amongst Kashmiri people; the loss of Shahjahan’s wife Mumtaz which prompted the building of the Taj Mahal, followed by the legendary story of the actual builders whose hands were chopped off in order that the Taj Mahal remains an isolated, unique tomb. The loss of lives through accidents, murders, riots or natural calamities, is also collected in languages of the concerned people.

Kallat Saini is interested in representation, which is fundamental to painting and the possibilities it carries for the generation of meaning through a calibrated interplay of image and form.