You can feel it in the air — the optimism, the pulsating energy and the celebratory mood — as artists, art historians, critics, writers, curators converge in the port city of Kochi for the second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, ‘Whorled Explorations’ (December 12 to March 29). There is no indication of its agonising struggle with finances.
Money may have come in late and slowly — Rs. 2 crore committed by the Kerala State Government was released just 10 days before the event (against Rs. 9 crore in 2012) — but optimism abounded in the team led by well-known artist Jitish Kallat who is curating the three-month-long art affair. And this spirit envelops all the eight venues in Kochi — Aspinwall House, Durbar Hall, Pepper House, David Hall, CSI Bungalow, Cabral Yard, Vasco da Gama Square and Kashi Art Gallery, where the central exhibition featuring 94 artists from 30 countries is taking place alongside a gamut of other events like Artists’ Cinema, Students’ Biennale, Children’s Biennale, seminars and talks, book launches, collateral events and cultural programmes. Repeating what he has said before, Kallat says, “The resources are in inverse proportion to the optimism and energy here.”
Everyone would agree with Kallat on that. Despite such straitened circumstances, the Biennale has shaped up beautifully. It had to, according to Riyas Komu, an artist and General Secretary of the KBF. “It is the only available experimental space in the form of biennale in a diverse country like India. And we aren’t restricting it to art; we are engaging with different things so that it will become a site for larger discourse.”
Komu, co-founder of the Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF) and co-curator of the inaugural edition in 2012, remarks that the biennale has brought several people together in support for the event. The Biennale went online on a crowd-funding platform Catapooolt asking people to support. And they responded. Karan Johar gave money, so did John Abraham. Artist Vivan Sundaram and art-historian Geeta Kapur have donated Rs. 40 lakh, while Sudhir Patwardhan donated Rs.10 lakh. Shashi Tharoor and filmmaker Aashiq Abu helped spread the word by retweeting the crowd-funding news.
Delhi-based artist Manisha Gera Baswani, who is participating in a collateral project in the Biennale, tries to put things in perspective. “Everyone is saying that the Biennale needs the money but the public should also know why it needs the money. It needs the money because it can easily become a brand for India just like the Jaipur Literature Festival, whose posters you will find on bookstores in London. The Kochi Biennale happens on a bigger scale and it’s non-profit.”
Sponsored by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and supported by Saffron Art Foundation, Baswani will showcase an archive of India’s contemporary art world through 430 photographs of artists, curators, historians and scholars — clicked over the last 12years.
The art works displayed at these eight sites turn Kochi into an observation deck through which it looks at time and space. Two chronologically overlapping, but perhaps directly unrelated historical episodes in Kerala, became Kallat’s points of departure. “The period from 14th-17th century was when the Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics made some transformative propositions for locating human existence within the wider cosmos. It was also the time when the shores of Kochi were closely linked to the ‘Age of Discovery’. The maps changed rapidly in the 1500s with the arrival of navigators at the Malabar Coast, seeking spices and riches. Within this revised geography were sharp turns in history; heralding an age of conquest, coercive trading and colonialism, animating the early processes of globalisation. A reflection of this navigational history, as well as a shift of one’s gaze deliberating on the mysterious expedition of our planet Earth hurtling through space at over a dizzying 1,00,000 km/hour, where none of us experience this velocity or comprehend its direction, were two prompts made in my letter to artists. The seemingly unrelated directions of these suggestions were deliberate; one was a gaze directed in time, the other in space…” says Kallat of his curatorial premise.
An amazing line-up of artists — Francesco Clemente from Italy, Mona Hatoum, Anish Kapoor, Patrick Blanc, the winner of Artes Mundi Prize Xu Bing from China, N.S. Harsha, winner of Artes Mundi Prize from India, Bharti Kher, Dayanita Singh, Mithu Sen, Raqs Media Collective, Sarnath Banerjee, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and others — responded to Kallat’s curatorial intentions in different ways.
Mumbai-based Sahej Rahal, has spent months in Kochi working on his installation ‘harbinger’, now on display at Aspinwall. It is an assortment of clay structures, some identifiable and some not, evoking an architectural site. “It is like ruins of the future in your present. How would we be 5000 years from now?” explains Sahaj about his work. Internationally acclaimed artist Yoko Ono tells the visitors to listen to the sound of the earth turning on its axis. Delhi-based Gigi Scaria’s “Chronicle of the Shore Foretold” references Kerala’s history, myths and labour, while Sumakshi Singh’s project blends animation with mythology.
New elements are a children’s biennale and students’ biennale. “We are looking seriously at art education. Students study art for five to six years but don’t have a platform after that. And when art has become so multi-disciplinary, why are our institutions wasting their time teaching the basics? So we are asking questions like these,” says Komu of the various experiments the art laboratory will conduct over the next three months.
