Artist Talk: Jitish Kallat In Conversation with Dan Werthimer and Atreyee Gupta

Explore some of the big questions of existence with acclaimed contemporary artist Jitish Kallat and SETI Chief Scientist Dan Werthimer. Werthimer is a leading name in the search for extraterrestrial life, while Kallat’s Covering Letter (Terranum Nuncius) installation at the Asian Art Museum examines the legacy of interstellar greetings carried aboard the Voyager space missions. Don’t miss this singular opportunity to hear two pioneering figures in their fields discuss art, science, and what the search for intelligent life in the universe reveals about us. Moderated by UC Berkeley art history professor Atreyee Gupta, this program is co-hosted by Art Forum SF.  

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  Jitish Kallat’s work traverses the intersections of science, memory, existential inquiry, and the rhythms of the natural world, inviting reflections on our planetary presence and place in the cosmos. His practice often shifts perspective, across space and time, to reframe the immediate and the imminent. Kallat’s diverse body of work spans abstraction, schematic forms, historical texts, and varied modes of representation, often juxtaposing the everyday with the cosmic, and the terrestrial with the celestial. He has exhibited widely at venues around the world, including a 2017 mid-career survey at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. 

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  Dan Werthimer is Chief Scientist of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and principal investigator of SETI@home. Werthimer has testified to congress about SETI, holds the Frank Drake Award for SETI research and the Carl Sagan award for science education, and published 300 papers in the fields of SETI, astronomy, and science education; he is editor of “BioAstronomy: Molecules, Microbes and Extraterrestrial Life” and “Astronomical and Biochemical Origins and the Search for Life in the Universe.” Werthimer was also in the “Homebrew Computer Club” with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; everyone in that club became ultra-rich, except Werthimer. 

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  Art historian Atreyee Gupta is Associate Professor of Global Modern Art and South and Southeast Asian Art at the Department of History of Art, University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of “Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India” (Yale University Press, 2025) and co-editor of “Postwar Revisited—A Global Art History” (Duke University Press, 2025). Her curatorial work includes When All That Is Solid Melts into Air (BAMPFA, 2020) and the born-digital artist residency Crisis Creativity: Mithu Sen and Brendan Fernandes (2020). In 2018, she co-founded the South Asia Art Initiative (SAAI) at UC Berkeley’s Institute for South Asia Studies.