Reena Saini Kallat’s solo exhibition Common Ground is a carefully woven tapestry of themes, investigating notions of borders, migration, inequity and citizenship. In Kallat’s powerful work maps, rubber-stamps, flags and the constitutions of nations become tools to address political and social boundaries and global inequalities. Based in Mumbai, India, Kallat’s own family’s past overlaps with the partition of the subcontinent into the two entities of India and Pakistan in 1947, and the division is a thread that runs through the exhibition. The friction between manmade and natural boundaries is also a recurring theme in Kallat’s work, with rivers and the types of flora and fauna officially assigned to represent nations becoming part of a glossary of signs through which she questions hierarchies of power and notions of enmity and harmony.

Reena Kallat’s work has been widely exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. This exhibition will be the largest of her work to date in the UK. Spanning a decade of her practice, it will include new works.

Image: Reena Kallat, Woven Chronicle, 2018 (detail)