Artist Making Local Call

2005

Digital print on vinyl mesh

95 x 411 in. / 241 x 1044 cm.

Artist Making Local Call is a panoramic image with the artist in the centre of an unfolding street scene making a ‘local call’. Beneath the self-conscious humour of this stitched image — a panorama from an era before iphones and photo apps — lurk several odd phenomena that unsettle the familiar. A red bracket focuses attention on a collision that never was; caused when a moving taxi ‘ran into’ the space occupied by an autorickshaw just moments ago.  On either side of this virtual collision, human figures are duplicated, as if they had fallen into a hole in time and re-emerged elsewhere. There are shadows falling in either direction (as if AM and PM had collided) and shadows bereft of people. All of these uncanny phenomena are the result of the 360-degree panorama holding within it multiple time frames.  It is, in Kallat’s words, “condensed time—a minute compressed into one image”.