Public Notice 2

2007
Resin
4,479 sculptural units, display dimensions variable

Public Notice 2 is the second work in a series by Jitish Kallat that redeploys historic texts as sculptural forms, making out of them mirrors against which to assess our present. It is based on a speech that Mahatma Gandhi made at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad on 11 March 1930, a day before he began the Dandi salt march against British laws taxing salt production in India,inspiring a nationwide civil disobedience movement.

In Gandhi’s own words, the speech is his will in which he lists out instructions on taking the resistance forward in the event of his arrest or death. The artist replays this historic speech as a ‘Public Notice’—a call to attention, a reminder of promises and a reading out of rights and obligations—through a massive installation which reproduces Gandhi’s words letter by letter in simulated resin bones. The bones evoke excavated remains,archaeological finds or sacred relics. In stark contrast to the text they inscribe—a strident extraction of the promise of non-violence– the bones seem to capture a long history of human aggression, conjuring up images of unmarked graves and disappeared bodies whose remains are exhumed and enumerated as evidence or cast into a mammoth memorial.