Nature Morte is pleased to present Reena Saini Kallat's solo exhibition at the Musée National des Arts Asiatiques Guimet, in conjunction with Asian Now Paris 2020. The exhibition presents Kallat's large-scale immersive installation Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso, which is composed of textual scrolls rendered using the tie and dye fabric process.
The scrolls present the preambles of the constitutions of countries politically partitioned or in conflict. These are the constitutions of India and Pakistan, the US and Cuba, Serbia and Croatia, Sudan and South Sudan, Bangladesh and India, China and Japan, North and South Korea, adopted by their citizens as a promise to themselves in creating nations where justice, liberty, equality and fraternity would prevail. The texts in English are reproduced as fragmented dot patterns, revealed in reverse against cloth dyed blue-black by artisans in the town of Bhuj, in the Indian border state of Gujarat. In between the lines, words morph from the Roman alphabet to Braille, rendered as yellow dots. The artist replaces words common to both preambles with those written in Braille, making the text illegible to both the sighted and the blind. Using the metaphor of blindness, the inscrutability of the renderings also suggests a collective amnesia, resulting in a failure to understand and fight for the common values upon which these nations were first constituted.
Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso has also recently been exhibited at The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; The Oscar Niemeyer Museum as part of the Curitiba Biennial, Brazil; The13th Havana Biennial, Cuba; and Nature Morte, New Delhi. The first set of scrolls was shown at the Tate Modern as part of Tate Exchange.