Hyphenated Lives, Earth Citizens & Siamese Trees; Installation View

Developing from Hyphenated Lives is Earth Citizens, evoking an imaginary planetary system where hybrid flora and fauna formed by merging the national animals and plants of hostile neighbour states roam the earth and sky. The existence of one depends on the other or the disappearance of one species affects the other adversely. Earth Citizens is cleaved apart by the superimposition of barbed wires woven from electric cables, a recurring motif in the Kallat’s works.

19th century books from Museum’s library prompted three of the most recent drawings from Reena Kallat’s series of works titled Hyphenated Lives. Displayed alongside the reference books are drawings titled Cob-ger, Lo-mine and Deo-yan, hybrids formed by the merger of species appropriated as national symbols by India and Pakistan. By combining one half from each side of the border, the artist creates a poignant narrative of convergence, uniting a subcontinent that was divided by an occupying colonial force.

In Siamese Trees, an enlarged embroidery ring, whose base itself is a painstakingly woven mesh of electrical wiring, forms a fabric fence even as these conduits of contact entangle and morph into barriers. One half grows into the Banyan tree, while the other left half bifurcates into the Deodar tree, the national trees of India and Pakistan respectively. They grow like conjoined Siamese twins paying no heed to partitioned national borders and alluding to the shared and rooted past, enmeshed in a complex civilisational history.

The works were featured as part of the exhibition 'Asymmetrical Objects', curated by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta and co-curated by Himanshu Kadam. The exhibition presented the works of ten contemporary artists whose practice includes an interest in nature and science or consumption and degradation as process and product, to respond to these ideas and to explore the much-debated Age of the Anthropocene and its impact on the environment and the effects on biodiversity.