Antumbra

2024

fogscreen projection, backlit translite, video on monitior, infinity mirror

display dimensions variable

Jitish Kallat’s immersive installation Antumbra (2024) is a reflection on the passage of time, interwoven with themes of confinement, occlusion, resilience, and hope. This work follows Kallat’s Public Notice trilogy (2002–2010) and Covering Letter (2012), where a historical utterance or document serves as a site for deliberation. A recurring element in Kallat’s work is the incorporation of dates, measurements, and numbers as ordering and sense-making devices.

The installation includes a replica of a note with calculations by Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, and a numerical autobiography that captures his complex life in stark figures. Each sum signifies key milestones: years in prison, his age at initial detention, and his age upon release. Alongside this arithmetic is a video of Mandela’s blood pressure readings, carefully noted in his prison calendars. These inscriptions denote cardiac time within the perpetual flow of calendar time. Additionally, the work highlights a recurring motif of the sun and moon in transition, forming cycles of days and nights visible across multiple pages of these calendars.

At the core of Antumbra are Nelson Mandela’s desk calendars, spanning 1976 to 1989. These calendars, chronicling the relentless passage of time within the confines of his prison cell, coincide with tumultuous events in South African and global history. For the most part, they remain blank and function as diaries, recording recent dreams, prison visits, books read, and personal health details. Some historical events are noted, while others remain unmentioned, and still others are recorded after a delay. For instance, the week of the pivotal 1976 Soweto Uprising is conspicuously blank, as are the weeks that follow. This could imply either limited information reaching Mandela on the isolated Robben Island or deliberate omissions due to surveillance. Conversely, an entry dated 15th January 1980, details the Indian election results, including the vote shares of various political parties.

In stark contrast to the confinement of prison and the calendar’s vacant pages, the accompanying images unveil breathtaking beauty: undulating hills, lush meadows, serene beaches, magnificent cathedrals, and mystical forests bathed in golden sunshine. The tourist department’s recurring stamp on the calendars, “It’s sunny today in South Africa,” accentuates the profound dichotomy between confinement and freedom. Antumbra draws its title from the vocabulary of light and shadow, vision and occlusion. It points to an eclipse phase where the observer stands just beyond the umbra, outside the core shadow, where a ring-shaped, annular light begins to appear.

“…calendars are implacable, marking the days of the year, even accounting for extra time with leap years. And you have no control, and in that sense, the calendar becomes a prison for you. But to the extent that you can make your mark on it, you can inscribe something that says that your hand is functioning and your brain is functioning. It’s a tiny bit of control that you’ve got that he would have. And Mandela took words very seriously. It’s something notable, beautifully phrased, and well-composed with rhythm and structure. I wonder if he sang. I found singing very helpful for me in prison. I’ve never heard of any mention of his singing, but for me, it was just to hear my voice.”

Excerpt from a conversation between Jitish Kallat and Judge Albie Sachs, in Cape Town on 4^th December 2023

Judge Albie Sachs is a renowned South African jurist, author and human rights activist, celebrated for his influential role in the creation of South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution.

“These calendar pages – at once universal and intimate – chronicle incomprehensible scales of time, with one of the most important architects of change in modern global history spending day after day and year after year held within a cell.

They reflect, too, an extraordinary archive of a transformational time at the end of modernism, with the grid of dates indirectly touching on a key aesthetic structure of avant-garde 20th century art. Kallat’s choice to center these calendar pages as an abstraction and, perhaps, a metonym of Mandela’s experience and ideals speaks to a poignant historicity, reflecting a comparatively slower time preceding the internet era (yet just a generation ago).

Both through the device of the screen and its title, Kallat’s Antumbra enacts a layered relationship between light and shadow, as it references the moment in an eclipse when a ring-shaped light begins to appear around the occluding body. The event passes and the sun seems to shine even more brightly, a conviction Mandela held onto for South Africa and the world, and one that, in these dark times, we all hope would mirror the trite tourist slogan, repeated until true.”

Excerpt from the essay “Reflections on Jitish Kallat’s Antumbra”

Beth D. Citron is an art historian and curator.