There is an existential foil through which Jitish Kallat's “planetary” visions can be perceived in Epicycles (2020-21). I unpack these unique metaphysical perceptions through Martin Heidegger’s 1936-7 “What is a Thing?”. In effect, my essay aims to marry South Asian contemporary art practices during the Covid-19 pandemic with phenomenology. In Epicycles (2020-21) Kallat uses the technique of photomontage and lenticular prints to dismantle the idealized perceptions of The Family of Man (1955) archives for the viewer to predict how a universalized human family would look like in contemporaneity—portraying it as fragmented, turbulent, transformational and tragic. For Edward Steichen, The Director of the Photography Department at MoMA, The Family of Man, (1955) was about showing the perils of the atomic world in a post-war period trying to sew humanity together with love; I posit that for Kallat, it was to relive the post-war moment, to let the human condition back-track what humans have done to the planet and themselves, through the ongoing pandemic. I argue that the resonance of Epicycles (2020-21) lies in the fact that it eschews all false optimism through the devices of dehumanization. It becomes a timely call to the human action encoded in the responsibility borne upon us by postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty’s conceptualization of “History 3” which enumerates that humans are no longer only biological agents, but have acquired the status of a geological force capable of altering the parametric conditions that support all life forms on planet Earth.