Kiran Nadar Museum of Art presents Tangled Hierarchy 2, curated by Jitish Kallat alongside his seminal installation Covering Letter at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022 . The twinned presentations of Covering Letter and Tangled Hierarchy took place at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton UK (2 June–10 September 2022) and are now presented together in close conjunction at TKM Warehouse, Fort Kochi as invited parallel exhibitions at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022.

Tangled Hierarchy 2 is an exhibition that centres on a collection of five humble yet remarkable used envelopes. Each envelope is addressed to Mahatma Gandhi and is now conserved within the Mountbatten Archive at the University of Southampton. The first iteration of Tangled Hierarchy opened at John Hansard Gallery Southampton UK on 2nd June 2022, marking 75 years to the day since the momentous meeting between Lord Louis Mountbatten (the newly appointed Viceroy of India) and Mahatma Gandhi.

On Monday 2nd June 1947, Mountbatten met with Mahatma Gandhi to discuss the imminent partition of the Indian subcontinent, a proposition strongly opposed by Gandhi. As a consequence of Gandhi undertaking a vow of silence on Mondays, the meeting took an unusual turn. Instead of conversing, he communicated with Mountbatten by writing notes on the backs of used envelopes, which are now the only surviving record of their exchange. Kallat takes the ‘Gandhi envelopes’ as a reference point for a series of artistic conversations and correspondences. Combining archival and scientific artefacts, alongside works by contemporary artists, Tangled Hierarchy explores the various relationships between silence and speech, visibility and invisibility, partitioned land, bodies, and pain. Themes of maps, borders, recurring cycles and unsettling displacement are woven throughout the exhibition.