Reena Saini Kallat’s practice spans painting, photography, video, sculpture and installation, often incorporating multiple mediums into a single work. Born in 1973, the artist obtained her BFA in Painting at the JJ School of Art, Mumbai, India. Kallat frequently works with officially recorded or registered names of people, objects, and monuments that are lost or have disappeared without a trace, only to get listed as anonymous and forgotten statistics. One of the recurrent motifs in her work is the rubber stamp, used as an object and an imprint, signifying the bureaucratic apparatus, which both legitimises and obliterates identities.

 

Placed in the Sungbo Museum, a giant sculpted stamp, carries the quotation - “A change in weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves” – by French novelist Marcel Proust. Untitled Rubber Stamp couples a bureaucratic element and a statement about the unpredictability of our own existence. The work highlights how human societies tend to be governed and structured by apparatuses, yet are at the mercy of uncontrollable and overpowering forces.