Public Notice 3: From Vivekananda to Kallat

Join Dr. Madhuvanti Ghose, the first Alsdorf associate curator of Indian, Southeast Asian, Himalayan, and Islamic art at the Art Institute of Chicago, as she unpacks the process of working with contemporary Indian artist Jitish Kallat on his project Public Notice 3.

In 2010, the Art Institute of Chicago opened a site-specific installation connecting two key historical moments—Swami Vivekananda's landmark speech delivered at the first World Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago on September 11, 1893, and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon 108 years later. The resulting work, Public Notice 3, created a trenchant commentary on questions of religion in the 20th and 21st centuries.

With Public Notice 3, Kallat converted Vivekananda's text to LED displays in the colors of the Department of Homeland Security's alert system, on each of the 118 risers of the historic Woman's Board Grand Staircase of the Art Institute of Chicago, adjacent to the site of Vivekananda's original address.

Launched on September 11, 2010 and installed for one year, Public Notice 3 explored the possibility of revisiting the historical speech as a site of contemplation, symbolically refracting it with threat codes devised by a government in response to a terror infected era of religious factionalism and fanaticism.

This talk was in conjunction with the exhibition, "Yoga: The Art of Transformation" at the Asian Art Museum. For more information: