Speaking of the enmeshment of map-making and creative practice, literary critic Robert Tally offers evocatively: “To draw a map is to tell a story, in many ways, and vice versa.” In the long and fiercely contested histories of cartographic practice, the ability to render the land - to make it legible, navigable, known - has served as both a tool and weapon. For the subcontinent, the spectre of the map’s violence is ever-present, the long arms of forced separation reaching from the past to shape the ways we move, speak and remember in the present. The practice of cartography is as much an act of imagination as it is a science.

Kallat’s work is certainly rooted in the land, attending not only to the workings of geopolitical power but also to the ancient frameworks of the natural world.

Walking into the central hall of the museum, I am greeted by the towering scrolls of Kallat’s Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso (2017-19), a work that renders the preambles of constitutions from politically partitioned or contested territories in blue, tie-dyed silk. Arranged in pairs and placed back to back as though looking out in different directions (hence the title), the preambles of the United States and Cuba, Serbia and Croatia, North and South Korea invite consideration from visitors who must see first one and then, circling around, the other. The impossibility of viewing the two elements of each pairing side by side, despite the mere inches that separate them, is striking, the geo-political implications of the work immediately clear. Created in collaboration with artisans from Bhuj, the textile work further reconfigures these documents through substitution, rendering words symbolising what the exhibition literature describes as “common shared values” - justice, equality, liberty - in Braille, thereby making them illegible to both sighted and visually-challenged visitors. In engineering hurdles to comprehension, Kallat gestures to the fundamental opacity of these ideals, if not in theory, then certainly in practice.

With Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso, Cartographies of the Unseen establishes its geographical remit. This is a project concerned with geographic breadth, place as idea and not as a specific cartographic coordinate. Across the museum compound, in the Special Project Space, Kallat’s dual investment in national documents and legibility emerges once more, this time in the six-channel video installation Blind Spots (2017-19). Picking up where Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso leaves off, Blind Spots breaks down the preambles of various states into disjointed letters, organising them in pyramidal shapes after Snellen charts - the geometric charts used to measure visual acuity. As the preambles appear on the screens, in one vanishing letter after another, hesitant readers struggle to read them in an overlaid audio track, mirroring the incomprehension of the viewer. Where Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso makes its point through the monumental, Blind Spots turns to the granular, asking how much of what we take for granted, once broken down into its constituent parts, truly remains coherent.

Blind Spots signals Kallat’s preoccupation not just with the politics of contemporary power, but also with its schematics: both what is made visible and how. Snellen charts recur in Pattern Recognition (2023), a work that transposes the organisational frameworks of sight onto questions of geographic access to query the “perpetually unequal politics of worldwide access and mobility”, per the exhibition text. Arranging the maps of nations in order of the strength of their passports, Kallat constructs dual pyramidal shapes (corresponding to 2006 and 2023) where size and power coalesce, so that the outsized outlines of European nations sit atop a pile of diplomatically weaker and visually smaller nations in the leftward configuration, a corresponding outline of Japan atop the right. By applying the technologies of visibility to a system of power that is both invisible and plain to see, Kallat forces a reckoning with the profoundly skewed dynamics of global mobility.

In describing the thematic weight of Cartographies of the Unseen, Zakaria Mehta deploys a geological idiom, suggesting to STIR that Kallat “excavates history to bring to light how conflicts have shaped the earth”. Kallat’s work is certainly rooted in the land, attending not only to the workings of geopolitical power but also to the ancient frameworks of the natural world. In 2 Degrees (2010), the artist precipitates a confrontation between the two. A wall drawing in henna depicts a tree in two distinct halves - the left resembling a deodar, the national tree of Pakistan, the right resembling a banyan, that of India. Emanating from the meeting point of the two, on a diagonal across the floor, a line of terracotta pots split in half represents the dispute between the nations over the waters of the Indus. Filling the room is the sound of flowing water, impossible to locate geographically and begging the question: what does it mean to partition a river?

The river as metaphor travels through the exhibition, tapping into the dual valence of water bodies as “essential resources and centres of geopolitical tension”, per the exhibition literature. In River Boundaries Break the Sound of Silence Between Them (2022), Kallat first renders borders dividing water bodies in electrical cable and then reconfigures them into the shape of a river - both the object of the conflict and a force that takes no cognisance of its contestation. On the opposite wall, the large-scale work Woven Chronicle (2011-19) continues the material engagement with wire – taken to represent both a connection and a barrier – by tracing global migration paths of contract workers, indentured labourers, refugees and other vulnerable persons.

In recognising the ideological saturation of Kallat’s work - geopolitical, geological, material – it is impossible to ignore the context in which it is presented: the opulent structure of the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad, formerly Victoria and Albert, Museum. Zakaria Mehta identifies a generative intersection between Kallat’s work and the museum space, suggesting that “the interaction between site and artwork not only sheds new light on the colonial collection of the Museum but also enables the artists’ work to take on a new register”. This dialogue is reflected in the configuration of Cartographies of the Unseen. On one end of the main museum hall stands Memoria Corona (2006), a model of the crown of Queen Elizabeth II engraved with the names of Indian freedom fighters. Diagonally across from it, on the first floor, sits Kallat’s Memoria Mausolea (2007), a model of the Gateway of India engraved with colonial street names that have now been replaced. Between them are, in order, busts of Queen Victoria, Lord Elphinstone and Prince Albert and the preambles of Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso. Seen together, these works, from the museum’s collection and Kallat’s corpus, create, as Zakaria Mehta puts it, a “circuit of alignment” that compels a reconsideration of legacies, both colonial and postcolonial.

What makes Cartographies of the Unseen both vital and haunting is its unmistakable relevance in the present. To speak of borders and militarisation is to see how fully these forces circumscribe the current political moment; how perpetual, by extension, the violence of cartography appears to be. And yet, if Kallat’s work is an acknowledgement of cartographic schisms, this awareness is not to be confused with despair. In her unwavering attention to the mechanics of division, Kallat urges the viewer to remember that the violence of the present is contingent, and reversible. A divided river once flowed freely. It can flow freely once again. Remembrance is the first step towards recovery.