For art enthusiasts, the Dubai-based Ishara Art Foundation has put on a spectacular show in the form of Jitish Kallat’s ‘Order of Magnitude,’ one of the most regularly displayed modern Indian painters.
It is the artist’s first major solo show in West Asia and the Levant, it is a unique opportunity to experience his new works up close and personal, including paintings, multimedia installations, drawings, and site-specific interventions. “The link between the cosmic and the terrestrial” is the overarching topic of “Order of Magnitude.”
Aside from the artworks, Jitish creates a site-specific intervention titled ‘N-E-S-W,’ which includes a functional compass embedded in the gallery’s flooring, anchoring the Ishara Foundation at Al Serkal Avenue in Al Quoz, Dubai, as a planetary surveying device and aligning the location with invisible force fields.
Jitish masterfully communicates his pondering on a personal level while also discovering the ‘overarching connectivity’ between the universal, planetary, and extraterrestrial dimensions.
We’re attracted into a new iteration of Jitish’s immersive installation ‘Covering Letter’ on Ishara’s mezzanine floor (terranum nuncius). Images from the Golden Records, which travelled with NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 space missions in 1977, are displayed on shelves on two opposite walls. 116 parallax prints flash in a breath-like pace inside programmable LED frames. They include scientific, anatomical, and cosmological pictures, as well as information about the Earth’s flora, fauna, and architecture.