
It is not about harmonising but recognising complexity in hybridity, which challenges limiting notions of identity.
1. BIOGRAPHY
Reena Saini Kallat works across drawing, photography, sculpture, and video to explore ideas held in states of tension—mobility and obstruction, memory and erasure, hybridity and national narratives. Shaped in part by her family’s experience of the Partition, her practice engages with political and social borders and the ways they divide land, people, and ecosystems. Through research into histories of migration, the contestation of shared natural resources, and archives of the disappeared, Kallat reflects on the violence embedded in state structures and the fragility of the legal documents meant to sustain them. Her recurring use of hybrid forms and electrical wires twisted into barbed motifs evokes the paradox between the free flow of information and the restrictions placed on bodies, suggesting that contact inevitably leads to exchange and entanglement. Memory, both personal and collective, is central to her inquiry. Using the bureaucratic symbol of the rubber stamp, she works with the names of people, monuments, and entities that have vanished into anonymity, reinscribing them into public consciousness through the very tools of institutional authority. Her attention to foundational constitutional texts reveals the universal aspirations embedded within them—freedom, equality, and belonging—while exposing their simultaneous production of exclusion and blind spots. Throughout her oeuvre, Kallat highlights the limits of perception at both individual and societal levels, proposing an expanded field of vision that acknowledges what lies at the margins.
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Kallat’s work has been exhibited internationally at major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe; the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba; and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, among many others. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai (2025, 2013); Kunstmuseum Thun (2023); Compton Verney (2022); the National Museum of Asian Arts – Guimet, Paris (2020); the Manchester Museum (2017); and the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite programme (2015). Her work has been featured in the Sharjah Art Biennale (2023), the Bangkok Art Biennale (2020), the Havana Biennial (2019, 2024), the Busan Biennale (2016), and the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (2011), among others. Her works are held in numerous public and private collections, including the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Ottawa; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Museum Arnhem, Netherlands; the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung; the Vancouver Art Gallery; the Sharjah Art Foundation; KADIST, Paris; Fondazione Golinelli, Italy; and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.
2. WORK SELECTION
3. PROGRAM AT THE GALLERY
4. INSTITUTIONAL PROJECTS
Blindspot, YYYY
Kunstmuseum Thun, 2023
Museum Guimet, 2020
Norrtälje Konsthall, 2020
Common Ground, YYYY
Zero Horizon, YYYY
Bhaudaji Lad Museum, 2012
While memory is the ability to recall the past, I’ve always been interested in its relationship with language, in how you understand and interpret the past. There is a fictional element in what we bring to memory through our unique version; usually all renditions are different accounts of what happened. While language is a tool, I’m interested in its limitations and when language becomes form and loses meaning.
There is an overemphasis on articulating through the intellect, but we are able to communicate through many other channels, such as intuition; the body is also a communicator.
5. VIDEOS
2024
Between Rivers
Astrup Fearnley Museet
2023
Artist in Focus: Reena Saini Kallat at Sharjah Biennial 15
Sharjah Art Foundation
2023
Fluid Geographies: Reena Saini Kallat
Geoffrey Bawa Trust
2021
Reena Saini Kallat, Woven Chronicle (2011-19) — Art and Migration Virtual Exhibition Tour
Minneapolis Institute of Art
2018
Reena Saini Kallat, Artist statement
KunstmuseumWolfsburg





