A numerical sketch of Mandela

In an immersive installation, Jitish Kallat maps Nelson Mandela's desk calendars from his long imprisonment

- Avantika Bhuyan

At the ongoing India Art Fair in Delhi, an immersive installation A puts forth the ideas of resilience and hope in the face of incarceration. It also showcases artist Jitish Kallat's ongoing investigation of the notion and scale of time. Like his earlier works, Covering Letter (2012) and Terranum Nuncius (2020), in Antumbra (2024) too-a special artist project being presented by the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art in collaboration with the JSW Group-a historical artefact becomes a site of deliberation.

Kallat presents a numerical biography of Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first President, by mapping his desk calendars from 1976-82, a period of his long incarceration on Robben Island and in other prisons. An immersive magnification of the calendars on a vaporous film of mistcomplete with annotations by the leader, notes about his blood pressure and heart rate, details of weight and more-form the core of this installation. Kallat first came across these "objects" nearly a decade ago in Mandela's book Conversations With Myself, which drew on his personal archive of materials that the world had not been privy to before. It stayed in his subconscious.