Kochi comes alive with a riot of colours as the second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), the three-month art jamboree, gets underway in the historic port city. Ninety-four artists are showcasing their mind-boggling art at awe-inspiring spaces inside the heritage zone of Fort Kochi and Mattancherry. Mainland Ernakulam and the neighbouring towns will also host events linked to the event. Curator Jitish Kallat’s vision statement, ‘Whorled Explorations’, sets Kochi as the viewing point, encouraging artists to use city-specific inspirations to create. The city is as much muse as backdrop to the works. Team MetroPlus in Kochi walks you through the best of the Biennale.
The Venues
What makes the Biennale unique is the spaces chosen for its display. Most of the venues are either historic and heritage buildings. Even the Durbar Hall Art Gallery at Ernakulam, a legacy of the erstwhile Cochin Royalty, has been renovated to a state-of-the-art gallery. Restored heritage buildings, warehouses and go-downs, all turn into electrifying spaces. Aspinwall House, the main venue, for example, was once the waterfront office of an English trading house. It hosts works of 69 artists. This edition will also see some exciting new venues like Kashi Art Café on Napier Street, Fort Kochi, and the CSI Bungalow, a delightful colonial-style house near the Parade Maidan. Collateral events are on at Aasiya Bai Trust Hall, off the famous Bazaar Road at Mattancherry, Heritage Arts, an antique shop in Mattancherry’s Jew Town, Mohammed Ali Warehouse, Mattancherry, and Rose Bungalow, behind St Francis Church.
Listen to the art beat
Among the 94 artists at the Biennale this year are some of the best-known Indian and International names in the industry today. Walk around the various venues of the Biennale to unearth stellar, mind-bending works by these masters. Here’s our pick of five must-see artistes.
Yoko Ono, once best known as wife of former Beatle John Lennon, has today made a name for herself as a performance and conceptual artist. Ono brings to the Biennale ‘Earth Piece: Listen to the Sound of the Earth Turning’, one part of her iconic ‘Instruction Pieces’ that was meant to create paintings, musical compositions and theatre in the mind of the viewer simply from a list of instructions written by the artist on a postcard. Don’t forget to pick up prints of her work while you’re there!
Look out for Albanian artist Adrian Paci’s video installation ‘The Column’ that tracks the journeys of Chinese stone carvers fashioning a column from a block of stone aboard a ship headed to Europe from China. Interwoven here are stories from history, travel and maritime exchange.
Italian artist Francesco Clemente, remembered for his connections to the Theosophical Society from the 1970s onward, has often drawn from India in his art. His ‘Pepper Tent’ sculpture-installation-painting at the Biennale fills the wall of a tent with imagery from pepper pods, to stars, energy fields, ships, and navigators.
Watch out! You could get sucked into this one! Sculptor Anish Kapoor, who’s made the exploration of empty space his forte, presents ‘Descension’, at Aspinwall House, a giant water-vortex that “descends into a void of complete darkness”.
‘1.9.2014 Dear Mr. Walter’ is photographer and book-maker Dayanita Singh’s piece at the Biennale this year. Eleven interconnected teak-wood pillars support photographs that build on Singh’s life-long play with the idea of chance and its subtle, yet powerful, shaping role in our lives
Student’s Biennale and Children’s Biennale
The Biennale is not all about master artists and their works. The event encourages students to be part of the pulsating show. Fifteen young curators have put together the Student’s Biennale, which will have works from 35 Government art schools across the country. It is an impressive, and innovative, attempt to connect an International art event to the art pedagogy. It opens on December 13 at Mohammed Ali Warehouse and KVA Brothers in Mattancherry. The Children’s Biennale is a worksho-oriented event conducted by artists with a special programme for tots between three and five years, dealing with touch-based aesthetics. An exhibition of 60 works of child prodigy and art genius, the late Edmund Thomas Clint, will open on December 16.
Artists’ Cinema
It looks like an installation itself. The twirled and twisted Umbrella Pavilion at Aspinwall House will play venue to a 100-day film festival, Artists’ Cinema, beginning from December 14. This 3,000 sq feet space, made of jute sacks, steel ribs and concrete, forms a sort of gallery for screenings that begin at 6.30 pm. The festival, curated by renowned names from the film fraternity, will be inaugurated by filmmaker Amol Palekar and will open with the iconic Amma Ariyan by John Abraham.
From the artists’ mouth
History Now, a series of curated seminars and talks by eminent personalities, will be held at the Umbrella Pavilion during the course of three months. The inaugural talk, ‘Terra Trema’, will be by art critic and historian Geeta Kapur. ‘Cosmology to Cartography: Artists in Conversation’, a talk by French gallerist Jerome Poggi, a session with the Indian Museum, KMB, and the Institute of Chandernagore, and a workshop on ‘Translatability of Art and Aesthetic Terms into Malayalam’ are some of the important components in the line-up.
On the stage
A bouquet of theatre, dance, music, percussion and literary programmes, cutting across different Indian cultural aesthetics, from ancient to medieval to modern times, which trace a cultural commonality to the long-lost port of Muziris will be on through the Biennale . 650 artistes and 25 troupes will perform across venues. Kathakali, Nangiarkoothu, Chavittunatakam, ghazals and a Mappila Festival from Kerala, besides Yakshagana of Karnataka and Chhau dance from Jharkhand, will make the cultural fete curated by ‘Keli’ Ramachandran. A special interactive sequence, titled ‘A Day with the Artist’, will feature both veterans and prodigies in the field of Kathakali (Kalamandalam Gopi), Melam ensemble, Nangiarkoothu, contemporary theatre, mizhavu , besides Chavittunatakam and Koodiyattam. A Chavittunatakam festival and a three-day Women’s Classical Theatre Festival on the Mahabharata will be held on January 27 at RLV College, Tripunithura.
One man. One show. 52 hours.
Performance artist Nikhil Chopra will stage a 52-hour performance La Perle Noire II at Aspinwall House. The live act is based on an ambiguous colonial character named the La Perle Noire or the Black Pearl, who is also a metaphor for that ubiquitous spice trade that brought traders to the Malabar Coast. Chopra will inhabit a cell within the Aspinwall House during the course of the performance.
Dressed in European clothing reminiscent of Portuguese explorers the Black Pearl observes the Periyar River and draws what he sees on the walls of his cell. The drawings create on the walls the illusion of land and water. Soon, the prison is turned inside out. The walls seem to disappear into the drawings, giving the Black Pearl a chance to escape his prison.
Salute to Dadaism
Fifteen collateral projects and four partnership programmes will open alongside the main KMB exhibitions. One of them, is a must-see project at the pop-up space in Aspinwall on Dadaism, marking the jubilee celebration of the Dada Movement. Another project by architect Luis Feduchi at Aspinwall will showcase a bamboo construction, a prototype of the Pattanam, an Indian port frequented by Romans, located 25 km north of Kochi.
Pepper House Residency Show
Between the two biennales, the Pepper House Residency was home to several International artists. Their works are on display at Mandalay Hall in Jew Town, Mattancherry.
A fascinating work is by German artist Peter Rösel. His exhibit 458.42 m/sec (2014), is a ‘mobile installation for demonstrating the velocity of the Earth’s rotation’. Assembled out of a violin-case in which the artist carries its components, this installation seeks to represent optically the speed at which the Earth’s surface moves through space as it rotates on its axis. A velocity that increases as we approach the equator, in Kochi this touches a supersonic 458.42 metres per second. It is a dizzying speed, but one that is impossible to perceive as we stand on the Earth’s surface.
Some of the other artists exhibiting at this venue are N.S. Harsha, Benitha Perciyal, Gigi Scaria, Prajakta Potnis, Bharti Kher and Navin Thomas.
Map it!
An exhibition of gallerist Prshant Lahoti’s collection of 3,000 maps with 35 manuscript maps is on show at Heritage Arts. The piece de resistance at the show is the earliest map of India to be printed in the Islamic World.
Travel Tips
Visitors are encouraged to wear comfortable walking shoes, a sun cap and carry water. The main venue – Aspinwall – has a cafeteria. The exhibition timings are from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tickets are priced at Rs. 100 for adults and Rs. 50 for children below 15. The exhibition is open everyday till March 29, 2015.
(Visit kochimuzirisbiennale.org for more details)
