Jitish Kallat
Show notes
Episode No. 777 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Jitish Kallat.
The Menil Drawing Institute is presenting "Wall Drawing: Series: Jitish Kallat" through August 8, 2027. For the exhibition Kallat has produced a site-specific wall drawing that grows out of his years-long engagement with Project A119, a partly declassified 1958 US Air Force plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon. The drawing Kallat has made for the MDI, Wall Drawing / Redux: A119, presents enlarged images derived from Kallat's 2025 Accordion of Drawings / Project A119 / Early Intuitions, in which watercolors evoke an unrealized Cold War story of ambition, secrecy, and the exporting of global violence to the moon. The presentation was curated by Edouard Kopp.
Kallat's work often blends the intimate and specific and the immense, and references history, science, time, and philosophy. He has exhibited at institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Tate Modern, London, and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and he has participated in biennials in Venice, Gwangju, Havana, and more.
Works discussed on the program and extensively documented on Kallat's website include:
- Epilogue, 2011;
- Public Notice 3, 2010;
- Covering Letter (Terrum Nuncius), 2018-20;
- "I draw, therefore I think" (curatorial project); and
- Conjectures on a Paper Sky, 2025.
Instagram: Jitish Kallat, Tyler Green.
Air date: September 24, 2026.