Reena Saini Kallat’s (b. 1973) is widely exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York; Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich; Tate Modern, London; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; SITE SantaFe, New Mexico; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Saatchi Gallery, London; Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Helsinki City Art Museum, Finland; Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan; ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe; Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba; SESC Pompeia and SESC Belenzino in Sao Paulo; IVAM Museum, Spain; Göteborgs Konsthall, Sweden; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney; MOCA, Shanghai; Busan MOMA; Chicago Cultural Centre amongst several others. She has participated at the Bangkok Art Biennale (2020); Havana Biennial (2019); Busan Biennale (2016), Goteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (2011), the Vancouver International Sculpture Biennale (2011), the Asian Art Biennale, Taiwan (2009) among others.
Her works are part of several public and private collections including Musee de Beaux Arts, Ottawa; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Manchester Museum, UK; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; Chau Chak Wing Museum, the University of Sydney; Norrtalje Konsthall, Sweden; Initial Access (Frank Cohen Collection), UK; Pizzuti Collection, Ohio; Burger Collection, Hongkong; Fondazione Golinelli, Italy; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai; National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi amongst others.
The artist lives and works in Mumbai.
Reena Saini’s practice spanning drawing, photography, sculpture and video is concerned with ideas that hold each other in tension — barriers in a world of mobility, porosity in sites of fissure, memorialisation in the aftermath of amnesia, and the promise and illegibility of national legal documents. Kallat’s interest in political and social borders — and their violent cleaving through land, people and nature — resonates with the continuing aftershocks of the Partition in India, which her family experienced. Kallat has researched various histories of migration, the plunder of shared natural resources for national gain, and archives of disappeared people. The figure of the hybrid has come to hold symbolic potential in Kallat’s practice, as a truant against dividing lines and divisive national narratives. That barriers give way, and can be subverted, is an idea that is pronounced in Kallat’s work using electric cables twisted to resemble barbed wire. She uses the paradox of the existence of technology for free flow of information and restriction on movement to suggest that total isolation is not possible. Where there is contact there is exchange and fusion. Memory is an important site of investigation, to regard not only what we choose to remember but also how we think of the past.. Kallat’s examinations highlight the limits of perception, of both individuals and societies, to reveal blind spots that might allow the clearing of shared vision.
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