The socio-political works of celebrated Indian artist Jitish Kallat draw on the strategies of advertising and agitprop to give voice to the underprivileged of Mumbai. Primarily known as a painter, Kallat began making sculptures in 2003. Aquasaurus, 2008, is a monumental seven-metre long skeletal sculpture of a water-tanker morphing to become prehistoric creature that personifies the radical transformation of Indian city life. According to Deeksha Nath: ‘Aquasaurus’ and its two predecessors – Autosaurus Tripous, 2007, an indigenous three-wheel taxi, and Collidonthus, 2007, a life-size car – forge unfamiliar territory. Missing are the trappings of urbanism, the cacophony of stacked cars, text and people that have populated our vision as viewers of Kallat’s work. Here we are met with silence, a silence that is frightening in its foreignness but one that is also enabling.
