Experience a powerful work featuring a letter from Gandhi to Hitler.
Covering Letter is an immersive installation and video projection by Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat. Projected onto a traversable curtain of cascading fog, this work presents a historical letter by Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler, written just weeks before the start of World War II. In the spirit of his doctrine of universal friendship, Gandhi begins the letter with the greeting “Dear friend.” Mist diffuses Gandhi’s projected text, echoing the fate of his message, which went unheeded.
Jitish Kallat describes this correspondence as a plea from a great advocate of peace to one of the most violent individuals who ever lived. It is equally an open invitation for self-reflection, as its scrolling words speak to the extreme violence in the world today.
Kallat’s interest in remediating history through the actions and words of historical figures aligns Covering Letter with his earlier work. In his Public Notice series, Kallat staged sculptural and interactive interventions that similarly appropriated texts by Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru (India’s first prime minister), and Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda. In revisiting these historical documents, Kallat calls attention to the possibilities of peace and tolerance in a world plagued by violence, control, and surveillance.
Jitish Kallat: Covering Letter is the first exhibition of this work in the United States. It also marks the tenth anniversary of the Museum’s Live Cinema series, which is dedicated to exploring the vast production of contemporary video and film work.
About Live Cinema >>
Live Cinema explores video and film work by a diverse group of local, national, and international artists. In recent decades an ever-increasing number of artists have appropriated these mediums in a dialogue with the early video and Super 8 practices of the 1960s and the tradition of experimental filmmaking. Each program of the Live Cinema series focuses on a specific aspect of this work in order to both map and analyze this important facet of contemporary art.
Multimedia
Jitish Kallat on Covering Letter

Interview with Jitish Kallat from Telling Tales: Excursions in Narrative Form, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © Jitish Kallat
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Jitish Kallat. Photograph by Mohammed Roshan
Artist Talk from the Archive
Whorled Explorations: South Asian Contemporary Art with Jitish Kallat

In this talk from October 2014, Jitish Kallat discusses his art and how it informed his vision as artistic director and curator of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014.
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