Now, Jitish Kallat is a bone collector

Here is another feat for Indian art. Artist Jitish Kallat’s huge installation of about 100 feet in length will be installed at the pre-historic burial site of Pilane in Sweden. It’s a nine-person sculpture show with other renowned sculptors like Wim Delvoye, Tony Cragg, Ursula Von Ryding taking part in it.The project is titled Sculpture at Pilane and Jitish’s work is called When Will You Be Happy. It consists of 18 alphabets, shaped like bones, which will be reminiscent of unearthed relics or pre-historic skeletal remains of an extinct animal found during an archeological excavation. The bone and the re-fashioning of the skeletal structure have recurred through Jitish’s sculptural practice over the years.Jitish says, “Given the spread-out prehistoric landscape of Pilane, within which the exhibition is installed, I wanted to work with the primeval and corporal image of the bone. It is at once evocative of one’s physicality as a living being and a reminder of one’s mortality. I would like to disperse and embed within the landscape a single line that would read ‘When Will You Be Happy’. The bones will be over-sized so that they would be legible from a distance; from up close it would feel like the remains of an oversized creature from the past, returning to the landscape in its pre-historic aura and connecting tangentially to the many graves and remnants of past lives that continue to imbue the landscape.” This show will start in June.