Jitish Kallat: Mumbai artist brings Hinduism to Obama's hood

Step one, "Brothers and sisters of America". Step two, "the most ancient order", step three, "the mother of religions", step, "millions of Hindu" people", step, "the idea of toleration", step, "universal acceptance", step, "sheltered the persecuted", step, "holy temple", step, "brothers", "religion", "sheltered", "fostering", "bosoms", "earth", step.

Words from Swami Vivekanand's speech on the foundations of Hinduism and universal tolerance refracts in rainbow colors between each step of The Woman's Board Grand Staircase at the historical Art Institute of Chicago.

A show by Jitish Kallat titled "Public Notice 3" opens here on September 11 and is the institute's first showing by a contemporary Indian artist.

Text steps

Kallat, a renowned Mumbai artist, uses 68,700 light bulbs to literally illuminate a 108-year old speech delivered by the Hindu sage on September 11 on that very site in 1893.

The date, of course, is uncanny in its contemporary context of terror and intolerance, and Kallat toys with this date by placing Vivekanand's text in the color code drawn up by the U.S. Homeland Security Department to indicate terror alerts.

Thus is the play of time and history on our feeble legs as we step, read, step, re-read, step, fumble, step, unearth, step, go back down and around the art exhibition which runs till January next year.

The correspondence between the Parliament of the 9/11 attacks and this historically eminent speech made for the 'Parliament of Religions' Kallat describes as a "palimpsest" -- a document which has been altered but bears traces of the original text, an overlay of history, memory and context.

Circular incantation

The gap in time between the two events is also significant. The number 108 recurs in Hindu numerology and is the number of beads on the Hindu rosary, a circular incantation.

Kallat however, makes sure to travel into historical fact rather than the array of mythical contemplations that followed 9/11, to reveal that at a peculiar convergence of time and space: reality itself can be eerily coincidental.

The fascinating aspect of this exhibition is the conjunction of several diverse dualities, much like the Swami's speech itself which quotes the Bhagavat Gita in its opening, as if to symbolically bridge Hinduism and Islam, a struggle that India has not yet reconciled.

"As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take, through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee!"

The architecture of the Art Institute is such that the Grand Staircase arises from two access points and multiplies into four exit points.

This multiplication has grand reverberations in Hindu culture, wherein the four sides of the Lion Capital of Asoka represent the four cardinal directions, in which a singular message is multiplied into universality. The glass roof above -- a modern addition -- allows these ancient words to scatter, as if into the infinite.

The work thus, is naturally framed within the site in which it rests almost too literally when the pillars above the staircase appear to mimic the twin towers that later fell to rubble.

Installation-performance art

Swami Vivekanand's speech is repeated across the 118 steps of the grand staircase, the colors randomized by a law of chance, so that the same word begins to acquire a new meaning in different shades.

Kallat straddles installation and performance art.

The staircases slow down your movement: step with your left foot, right hanging in the air as you intervene in the space, your mind absorbing the first impact of eastern religion on western culture and its aftermath 108 years later.

Several American conceptual artists have used text to tease the mind, but this is serious stuff. You walk in different directions in order to read every stair, but lines simply repeat themselves -- you are unsure of truth now.

Curator Dr. Madhu Ghose celebrates the show as an event that "marks a unique point of conjunction for the Art Institute, reaffirming its own commitment to upholding its historicity and simultaneously moving onward with the contemporary."

The step-by-step movement as the way to appreciate Kallat's work has the effect of transcending time and place. So while the show is site specific, with every visitor's step its message is likely to spread with repercussions felt from here to Chicago.