Anger at the Speed of Fright

"Anger at the Speed of Fright (2002) is concerned with the hair-trigger impulse to communal violence that is associated with urban crowds [...] A small group of men looms menacingly into the foreground, their threat at once heightened and tethered to context by the juxtaposition of the crowd with a root system made up of knives. The roots feed a temple whose style is South Indian, a distraction from the more obvious political referent, the North Indian temple site in Ayodhya whose promoters’ murder triggered the riots in Gujarat. Similarly displaced from contemporary politics is the labyrinth system that occupies nearly half of this canvas, its center magnified in an optical illusion. These signs avoid any kind of didacticism, resonating more as part of a growing body of references shared between the artist’s works that relate to place, to autobiography, or just to one another. Kallat recapitulated some of these earlier works later in his career, frequently underlining how the framework of locality had, for him, largely been a matter of the relationship between the self and the outside world [...] In recent statements, he has been particularly keen to point out how references to space were always balanced with ones to time, and in particular with relationships between temporal scales. The painting’s title, Anger at the Speed of Fright, deals directly with the way heightened emotion stretches or telescopes the experience of time. He had used the title earlier that year for a large, temporary text-based work on found panels, made during a residency in New York. He painted phrases outlining the cycle of violence in white on a gridded blue background to create a whale-like shape [...] Later, in a 2010 commission for Mumbai’s city-focused Bhau Daji Lad Museum, he used the title for a collection of clay figurines engaged in hand-to-hand combat, a shift in medium and scale that provides what he describes as 'a Gods-eye view of a frenzied mob'" (K. Zitzewitz, Infrastructure and Form: The Global Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991-2008, Oakland, 2022, pp. 63-64).