Reena Saini Kallat

Reena Saini Kallat, Born in New Delhi, India, in 1973, lives and works in Mumbai. Her multidisciplinary practice spans drawing, photography, sculpture, and video, and examines ideas held in states of tension—mobility and obstruction, memory and erasure, hybridity and national narratives. Shaped in part by her family’s experience of the Partition, her work engages with political and social borders, exploring how they divide land, people, and ecosystems.

Through research into histories of migration, contested natural resources, and archives of the disappeared, Kallat reflects on the violence embedded in state structures and the fragility of the legal frameworks that sustain them. Her recurring use of hybrid forms and electrical wires twisted into barbed motifs evokes the paradox between the free flow of information and the restrictions placed on bodies. Memory, both personal and collective, is central to her inquiry. Employing the bureaucratic symbol of the rubber stamp, she reinscribes names and monuments that have vanished into anonymity, using the tools of institutional authority to question systems of inclusion and exclusion.

Reena Saini Kallat’s work has been presented in solo exhibition at: the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (2025); Kunstmuseum Thun (2023); Compton Verney (2022); Musée national des arts asiatiques – Guimet (2020); and Manchester Museum (2017). Her work has also been presented at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Mori Art Museum, and featured in international biennials such as the Sharjah Biennial, Havana Biennial and Busan Biennal.