Jitish Kallat’s 2008 piece “Aquasaurus” is a massive replica water truck made to look like a great prehistoric leviathan’s skeleton, with great bowed ribs and enormous grinding teeth. It’s part of a series of pieces that includes a bone motorcycle as well. His work is currently displayed on the India stage at Art Stage Singapore.
kallat’s series of bone vehicles references his own photographs of cars, trucks, bicycles, and buses that had been incinerated and torched during riots. he has transformed the visual of the burnt-umber endoskeletons into intricate white sculptures mimicking fossilized remains that he describes as ‘grotesque, burlesque and arabesque in equal measure’. ‘aquasaurus’ and ‘ignitaurus’ are two examples from the series — hybrid pieces that compound the aesthetic of mammoths found in natural history museums and specialized transportation devices from an automobile-expo. the refashioned carcasses can be seen as carrying, even through a playful approach, a broad and deep inclination of extinction and death.
bone vehicles by jitish kallat [Nina Azzarello/Designboom]
(via WTBW)