Audience engagement is never an afterthought for Indian artist Jitish Kallat, who often plays with participatory and public art in his work. In his 2007 installation “Public Notice 2,” shelves hold 4,479 resin letters mimicking bones that spelled out Mohandas Gandhi’s 1930 speech delivered before the historic 240-mile Dandi March, inviting visitors to revisit these words nearly a century later.
Kallat’s most recent project, Antumbra, initially took the form of a participatory installation at the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art’s (FICA) presentation at the India Art Fair 2024 in Delhi earlier this year. Kallat’s goal was to actively engage audiences with the life of South African leader Nelson Mandela, whose legacy of anti-Apartheid activism connects to ongoing struggles for justice across India and South Asia writ large. Scans of Mandela’s desk calendar entries from 1976 to 1989 were hazily projected onto the walls and floor of a darkened room, immersing visitors in his daily routines, interactions, and even blood pressure logs during his decades-long incarceration in South Africa. Keeping meticulous records is just one of many habits Mandela practiced in his cell, including writing letters and an autobiography, studying, reading, and building connections with other anti-Apartheid activists incarcerated alongside him. The picturesque hills, greenery, flora, meadows, and beaches as photographed in the desk calendars, which were produced by the national tourism department, are all accompanied by the phrase “It is sunny today in South Africa.”
Curator Sukanya Baskar designed a book published in September by FICA that preserves Antumbra in a physical format, gathering images of the installation, an essay by art historian Beth Citron, and a transcript of a conversation between Kallat and legal professional Albie Sachs, whom Mandela appointed as a judge on South Africa’s Constitutional Court in 1994. In their conversation, Kallat and Sachs discuss the importance of the seemingly routine calendar imagery to the study of Apartheid.
Baskar told Hyperallergic that for her, the Redaction typeface was crucial to expand on notions of social versus legal definitions of justice. It was developed in 2019 by visual artist and filmmaker Titus Kaphar and memoirist, poet, and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts to highlight ways in which legal systems often redact and erase conflicting accounts, which is particularly apt as the book pairs the conversation between Kallat and Sachs with scans of Mandela’s desk calendar entries in his own handwriting.
Hardbound, Antumbra greets us with overwhelming darkness on its cover and in its pages, reminiscent of the multiple prison cells Mandela would have inhabited. The spiral-bound book is designed to stand as any typical desk calendar, and one can flip to any page to encounter Antumbra through Kallat’s eyes.
One entry from August 1989 reads “Visited by Mamphela Ramphele for 3 hrs.,” referencing Mandela’s meeting with the South African activist and politician, whose partner was the late Steve Biko. Above the grid is a saturated photo of a wide-open expanse in the Namaqualand region, lushly captured in springtime.
Another week from April 1976, mere months before the Soweto uprising led by Black South African students in response to legislation mandating the use of Afrikaans and English by teachers, bears only two scribbled notes. The image above, an artwork by White South African painter J.H. Pierneef, captures the rugged beauty of the Great Escarpment rock formation whose appearance here feels decidedly sinister.
Mandela also recorded his blood pressure sporadically alongside records of his activities, with some months crowded with notes and others left mostly blank. Certain bleeds of installation photos attempt to retain its scale without overshadowing its focus on the act of maintaining a desk calendar, a deceptively mundane ritual whose intimacy both grants us a new understanding of Mandela’s inner life and the everyday archival objects that speak to societal structures of violence and injustice.
