Jitish Kallat
Conjectures on a Paper Sky
Bikaner House, New Delhi

Large balls of ostensibly crumpled paper, scattered across the entrance floor of Jitish Kallat’s exhibition “Conjectures on a Paper Sky” at Delhi’s Centre for Contemporary Art, Bikaner House, soon revealed themselves to be polyurethane-coated aluminum sculptures inscribed with text. Titled Moon Treaty (2025), the installation references the 1979 United Nations agreement, which declared the moon and other cosmic bodies as the common heritage of humankind. However, ratified by only a handful of nations, the treaty’s ambition of collective planetary stewardship has remained unrealized. 

Kallat has long been fascinated by the cosmos and the interplay between the earthly and the celestial, which came across forcefully in the show presented by Saat Saath Arts and curated by Alexandra Munroe. Nowhere was this more evident than in the capacious hall on the first floor, where 10 large-scale sepia-toned paintings towered over visitors. Lending the show its title, Conjectures on a Paper Sky (2023–25) extended the artist’s ruminations on the moon and the dynamics between fact and speculation. Drawing on Project A119, a once-classified 1950s US military proposal to detonate a nuclear device on the lunar surface, Kallat created elliptical forms reminiscent of missile trajectories and nuclear blasts on his canvases. Set against hand-drawn grids, these complex schematic diagrams were juxtaposed with organic motifs such as plants and underwater organisms. As visual conjectures on past and future projects of annihilation, the artworks pointed to the precarity of our planetary existence.