Wall Drawing Series: Jitish Kallat
September 10, 2026 – August 8, 2027
The Menil Collection
1533 Sul Ross Street Houston, TX
Jitish Kallat’s site-specific wall drawing grows out of his sustained engagement with Project A119, a partly declassified 1958 plan by the United States Air Force to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon. In Wall Drawing / Redux: A119, Kallat introduces enlarged images derived from his previous work Accordion of Drawings / Project A119 / Early Intuitions, 2025, in which delicate watercolor graphics evoke an unrealized episode of ambition, secrecy, and violence during the Cold War.
The process of creating the work began with the printing of all 190 declassified pages of the document onto the Menil Drawing Institute’s 36-foot wall, forming a dense field of text and graphics. The wall was then sheathed in laminated glass that echoes an architectural detail of the building itself. Magnified and transferred across the glass, the watercolor images overlap with the archival text. The glass is treated with PDLC film, a material, a material whose transparency can be regulated electrically. Across nine panels, a slow gradient moves through changing states, with each cycle lasting roughly 500 seconds; the approximate time it takes sunlight to travel from the Sun to the Moon and return to us as moonlight.
As transparency shifts, images emerge, dissolve, and reappear, while the documents move in and out of legibility. The changing surface moves between redaction and reappearance. Kallat describes this as “a constant shift between the condition of wall and that of window.” These ruptures also become apertures into the Project A119 document beneath.