LONDON.- Where do we exist when the notion of space itself becomes contingent? How do we situate ourselves when place—once anchored in land, history, and belonging—is rendered provisional and suspended?
Jitish Kallat (b. 1974, Mumbai) reimagines Pushkin House as a planetary “control room,” where signals crisscross skyward and inward. Through sustained, research-based inquiry, his practice traverses space and time, the earthly and the cosmic, borders and identities. This gesture evokes the universalist and speculative spirit of Russian Cosmism, where scientific thought, spiritual inquiry, and visions of humanity’s place in the cosmos converge. Curated by Denis Maksimov and grounded in Pushkin House’s Discourse Programme, the exhibition offers nuanced perspectives on the region’s political and historical legacies by setting a constellation of site-specific interventions and five speculative drawings in dialogue.
At the heart of the project is the historical episode of December 26, 1991, when the Soviet Union was formally dissolved while two cosmonauts, Russian-born Sergey Krikalev and Ukrainian-born Aleksandr Volkov, remained aboard the Mir space station. This forms the conceptual backdrop to The Last Soviets (2025), a trilogy of interventions comprising a ceiling mural, lenticular photographs with archival materials along the stairwell, and a photographic mural in the Pushkin House Bar. The cosmonauts also developed an Earth-to-orbit exchange with Maggie Iaquinto, an Australian schoolteacher who relayed fragments of news from the collapsing USSR. Their final exchanges, together with the recorded trajectory of Mir and the view of Earth from orbit on that day, form part of the exhibition.
Drawn from historic footage of life aboard Mir during the USSR’s dissolution, these works transform a moment of political disintegration into a meditation on statelessness and belonging. From orbit, the constructs of borders, citizenship, and sovereignty appear momentarily dissolved: what does it mean to belong when suspended between Earth and space? A second historical episode anchors the exhibition in 2003, when the Yevpatoria radio telescope in Ukraine, now inseparable from the region’s contested present, transmitted the Cosmic Call to nearby stars. Digitally encoded interstellar messages perforate five drawings, Hexalemmas [Earthling Chants] (2024), installed throughout Pushkin House.
Cut-out forms from the Cosmic Call are juxtaposed with fasciated flowers, nuclear cavities, and hands moulding soil, all set against a hue reminiscent of “cosmic latte,” the average colour of light emitted by 200,000 galaxies. This assembly of seemingly unrelated forms, drawn from the artist’s studio notes and references, includes a phylogenetic tree—a symbol of evolution and lineage—disrupted by an invisible current of air that fractures its geometry.
The Mir space station and the Yevpatoria radio telescope become conduits: one circling Earth, the other calling into the cosmos. Through them, Kallat explores statelessness and planetary fracture, revealing the paradox of a planetary address issued from a divided world, suspended between terrestrial fault lines and the vastness of the cosmos.
The cosmonauts developed an Earth-to-orbit exchange with Maggie Iaquinto, an Australian schoolteacher who relayed fragments of news from the collapsing USSR. Their final exchanges, together with the recorded trajectory of Mir and the view of Earth from orbit on that day, form part of the exhibition.
Together with his ongoing museum exhibitions Public Notice 3 (Art Institute of Chicago), grounded in a historic speech from September 11, 1893, and Covering Letter (Terranum Nuncius) (Asian Art Museum, San Francisco), derived from a 1977 interstellar message, Cosmic Calls completes a triad of projects that unearth archival traces to reflect on our present world across time and cosmic distance.
