The Inverted Mantra: Reena Saini Kallat’s Spectral Frequencies And The Sound Of What We’ve Lost

In the Indian philosophical tradition, Naad Brahma places sound at the origin of creation. Vibration is not just what we perceive but what exists. In Reena Saini Kallat’s Spectral Frequencies, this metaphysics returns inverted. Sound no longer heralds life; it registers life’s withdrawal. What fills the gallery is an inverted mantra, a repeating resonance of loss that asks what happens when the universe keeps holding sounds the world can no longer make.

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Walk in and, before long, what reaches you is not an object but a voice. At its centre is an archival recording of the last known male Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, made in Hawaii in 1987, and it fills the concrete room without ever filling the silence. The species sang in synchronised duets. On the tape, the male sings into the canopy, pauses, and waits. Nothing answers. He sings again. The poignancy lies less in the melody than in the permanent void where the second voice should be. A call presupposes a listener, a relationship, an ecology. Here that web has been severed, though the instinct to call persists.

Around the recording hang long, horizontal bamboo flutes, unplayed and deprived of breath (prana). They promise sound and withhold it, so the room’s quiet becomes something you hear. If the birdcall is a japa, a devotional repetition, it is a secular one. It offers no elevation and no wholeness, only the discipline of staying present with what cannot be undone.

The same discipline governs the suspended bamboo sculptures, which render the acoustic signatures of twelve extinct birds at eye level. Their jagged contours are the calls themselves, each bird’s voice made solid. They also read as an ECG of the earth, the pulse of a forest caught mid-beat. Each is a different bird and a different silence, and at eye level we meet them face to face. Derrida’s “trace” is useful here: absence persists through the marks it leaves, and these forms are marks that sound has left on bamboo.

They are also beautiful, and that is the difficulty. Does the elegance soften extinction into something palatable, or hold us at a polite distance? Look down. In white salt across the concrete, directly beneath the bamboo waves, lie the species names and dates of last recording: Dusky Seaside Sparrow, 1990, USA; Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, 1987, Hawaii. Nothing prevents you from stepping on them, and no one does. Salt can be scattered by a single footfall, yet the names stay whole, protected by a care that costs the visitor nothing. Perhaps some visitors will simply be soothed, and the gallery allows for that. But the room stages, too, the way we have learned to look at extinction: from a respectful distance, with appreciation, never quite touching what is lost. The beauty is not an excuse for the loss; it is the evidence of our habit of admiring it.

River Morphologies carries this logic to water. Sound patterns drawn from historical recordings of river flow are laser-cut into paper drawings of dry riverbeds: the Zayandeh, the Limpopo, the Yellow. The method matters. The sound is not drawn onto the paper but made from what is removed. The fissures are lacunae, and the river’s voice survives only as missing material, in a landscape already emptied of its water. Two disappearances meet in one gesture: a soundscape silenced and the terrain that produced it.

The Surface Remembers: Sheetal Gattani And The Light That Waits Within

Last Seen in Light, a series of framed prints on the wall, shows a sundial whose twelve hour marks are soundwaves, each labelled with a year of last recording. They are the same twelve birds whose calls hang in bamboo. One clock tells the time of day and returns tomorrow; the other tells the time of extinction and does not. 2 Degrees carries that unease into the climate. Its title borrows the language of thresholds, a figure that frames planetary harm as something to be measured, bargained over and deferred. Set beside names that cannot be bargained with, the number sounds almost like a euphemism.

Kallat’s achievement is to give weight to what is, by nature, vanishing. Sound becomes sculpture, a name becomes an inscription, silence acquires mass. Yet an archive, however careful, is also a form of containment, a place where what can no longer live is kept. The exhibition does not claim that remembering restores anything. It only makes absence legible, and legibility may be the point: it removes the excuse of not knowing.

Naad Brahma imagined a vibration from which everything began. Spectral Frequencies offers its aftermath, the resonance that lingers once life has gone. Traditional mantras invoke continuity; this one inhabits interruption. And the most unsettling thing it tells us is not that the bird went silent, but that we have quietly learned to live alongside such silences.

(Spectral Frequencies is on view at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, until 21 November 2026.)

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