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Reena Saini Kallat focuses on themes of interdependence and co-existence in her multi-dimensional practice which spans installation, sculpture, drawing, photography and video. One of India's most prominent contemporary artists, Kallat explores the tension arising between ideas and conditions: barriers in a world of mobility, natural forces that evade human control and resistance and memory in the wake of historical amnesia.
Born in Delhi in 1973 and living and working in Mumbai, Kallat's engagement with political and social borders and their violent cleaving of land, people and nature, resonates with the continuing aftershocks of the Partition in India which her paternal family experienced. Many of her works draw on the narratives of countries that are politically split yet historically connected, in order, she has said, 'to make us question the frameworks that govern us, the choices we make, and the world we imagine for ourselves and the future'. For Kallat, memory is an investigative act, a way to trace migration, the plunder of shared natural resources for national gain, or the archives of disappeared people, through careful examination of official records, state-constitutions, maps and archaeological surveys.
Kallat's interest in official documents and the nomenclature of rule is noticeably present in her numerous works that incorporate the motif of the rubber stamp, which she re-inscribes into collective imagination. First appearing in Kiosk (2003), this obsolete bureaucratic apparatus accumulates and reconfigures across her practice to become a symbol of power, a tool that can restrict movement and endorse, legitimise and invalidate existence. The legacy of colonial rule is further explored in references to foundation legal texts, especially the Preamble to the Constitution of India, which has appeared in her work since 2003, in Synapse (2009-10), and prominently, in the major installation Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso (2017-19). Produced with the assistance of skilled artisans from Gujarat, it encapsulates Kallat's deployment of resonant materiality to navigate spaces of liminality and the precarious balance of division and connection.
Since 2011, electrical cables have featured significantly in the artist's practice, both as a 'carrier and barrier'; a paradoxical material that alludes to the inherent contradictions of contemporary life. In the ongoing series Ruled Paper (red, blue, white) (2014-), the lines of a traditional school exercise-book are replaced with strips of cable, twisted to resemble barbed wire, invoking the role of colonial education systems as enduring structures of discipline and control. Meanwhile, in the series of monumental wall drawings, Woven Chronicle (2011-26), Kallat visualises urgent social issues, including the routes of migration - from indentured labourers to professionals - and the ecological footprint of nation states, in a colour-coded world map articulated through electrical cables woven into mesh and barbed wire. Presented at several significant institutions including MoMA, New York (2016-17), The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2018-19) and Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland (2023), it draws attention to the impenetrable barriers that continue to structure mobility and belonging for many, exposing the inherent incongruity of a 'connected' world, ever-more stringently controlled at its borders.
A similar concern frames the artist's enquiry into hydro-hegemony - the control of shared waters - and into rivers simultaneously as arteries of life and fluid boundaries that can separate and connect. Following her participation in the River Biennale, Sydney in 2010, Kallat produced the notable work 2 Degrees (2010), followed by Leaking Lines (2019) and River Boundaries Break the Sound of Silence Between Them, (2022). These works address the dual nature of rivers as essential shared resources and sites of geopolitical tension. In these meditative aquatic explorations, she intentionally conflates the artistic lineage of a freely drawn line with the language of sharp, territorial delineation.
Hybrid forms hold equal significance in her practice, evoking pluralism and resistance in the face of division. In Chorus (2015), a series of sculptures first shown at the Manchester Museum and subsequently presented at Sharjah Art Biennial 15 and the Astrup Fearnley Museum, metal forms modelled on WWII, pre-radar acoustic devices emit the intermingled song of birds from countries that share borders. The sculptures transform technologies once designed to detect and defend against an enemy into instruments of listening and connection. In the wall drawings Siamese Trees (2018-19), the national trees of countries at war merge to form lungs, foregrounding our dependence on trees for oxygen and referencing their root networks as subterranean channels of communication. Similar themes underpin Hyphenated Lives (2014-ongoing), initially conceived for the 10th Busan Biennale, comprising a group of botanical-style drawings, maps, texts and objects that re-imagine a world of hybrid flora and fauna. An allusion to nature's defiance of arbitrary man-made divisions, these mutations propose, in the artist's own words, a 'poetic provocation from the past or a proposition for an imagined future'.
Reena Saini Kallat's work has been widely exhibited at institutions around the world. Recent solo exhibitions include Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai (2025), Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland (2023), Compton Verney, UK (2022), Firstsite, UK (2022), Norrtalje Konsthall, Sweden (2021), The National Museum of Asian Arts - Guimet, Paris (2020); the Manchester Museum (2017) and Offsite, Vancouver Art Gallery (2015). She has participated in the Sharjah Art Biennale (2023), Bangkok Art Biennale (2020); Havana Biennial (2019); Busan Biennale (2016), Goteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (2011), the Vancouver International Sculpture Biennale (2011) and Asian Art Biennale, Taiwan (2009) among others. Recent group exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Saatchi Gallery, London; Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan; MOCA, Shanghai; and Busan Museum of Modern Art amongst several others.
Kallat's works are held in public and private collections including Musee de Beaux Arts, Ottawa; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Museum Arnhem, Netherlands; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; Manchester Museum, UK; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE. She lives and works in Mumbai, India.
1. 1 Ocula interview
2. 2 Quoted in PDF, 'Fluid Geographies' Geoffrey Bawa Foundation, Sri Lanka