Water Footprint
2023
acrylic on linen
42 x 60 in. l 106 x 152 cm.
Reena Kallat’s painting, Water Footprint explores critical geographies by emphasizing humanity’s potential to transform the environment.
At first glance, Kallat’s artwork features a map of an uncanny world where the proportions of countries depicted betray standard expectations.
While cartography has often been linked with assertions of power, with the sizes of regions exaggerated or minimized based on political
motivations and biases, this map is data-driven. Kallat rescaled the sizes of individual countries based on their water consumption patterns.
The water footprint measures humanity’s appropriation of fresh water in volumes of water consumed per capita per day. Kallat’s map reveals
that countries with higher populations, often in the Global South, exhibit lower per capita consumption compared to those with smaller
populations, highlighting global inequities in the distribution and utilisation of scarce natural resources.
