Back in Zurich after a visit to the opening edition of Indian’s only Biennale, the Kochi Muziris Biennale (KMB) in 2012, noted curator Adriano Pedrosa wrote a ‘Letter from Kochi’ for the Parkett magazine.
He argued that biennales are meaningful in places without a well-developed museum infrastructure – places located on the margins. So, you have the Istanbul Biennale, Sao Paulo Biennale, Johannesburg Biennale and now, the Kochi Biennale making significant strides in the art world.
“Another remarkable feature is that the preliminary editions of these biennales have been exemplary, particularly memorable for their freshness, vivacity and enthusiasm and the hunger of artists to do something big,” he says, sipping coffee at a boutique hotel across the Kochi Biennale Foundation office in Fort Kochi.
The opening biennale revealed the city, packed with a layered cultural history, and its venues imbued with history, to an international audience.
Despite having a centuries-old art tradition, the place lacked an institutional form of visibility and the biennale filled the vacuum, reckons Mr. Pedrosa, who figured on Art Review’s prestigious list of ‘Power 100’.
“In its third edition, it has become very ambitious and enormous in scale with 97 participating artists. It’s probably one of the biggest biennales in terms of scale, budget and artistic excellence,” he says, flipping over images of works he liked on his phone. The list is quite exhaustive, as you would expect, featuring some eminent artists from the South Asian region.
Other projects
But it’s not just the main show that the KMB is noted for. “As a biennale grows mature, it starts to branch out to other projects, educational projects for instance, that linger on even after the art exhibition gets over. Thus there’s something perennial and meaningful about such biennales which some people call ‘temporary museums’. Biennales are intense, packed as they are with multidimensional projects. Imagine a curator doing something like that for a year,” he smiles, pointing to the effort that goes into the making of a biennale edition.
Curated by artists
Another distinctive aspect of the KMB is that it is run and curated by artists. “Unlike a professionally curated biennale, where the curator works for a two-year term, the leaders here are a constant and can therefore afford to think and invest in the long term.”
The Kochi Biennale reflects the contemporary art scene of the region. “Not just India, but the entire South Asian neighbourhood. So it is the art fraternity’s enormous window to the contemporary art of the global South.”
Mr. Pedrosa is excited about the multidisciplinary approach of the KMB, with a “strong focus on outdoor and commissioned works and large-scale projects” that also reflects on the cultural landscape of the region.
Global tie-ups
So, is it good for a unique project like this to have tie-ups with global institutions, the Liverpool Biennale? “Of course, they have the resources to do exchange programmes and residencies. When I was at Brazil (as director of the Sao Paulo Biennale), all these rich countries, France, Germany, Britain, called me to look for artists from their countries. No one called me from India or Pakistan. It’s a pity, but that’s how things are. There’s wealth, resources for these countries to invest in art.”
“Agreed, the Kochi Biennale happens in a culturally rich context, but Kochi ranks 75 in terms of population in India. I’m not saying that the biennale should relocate, but just think of the impact such a project would have had in a place like Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata,” he says.
Mr. Pedrosa believes that the harvests of the biennale will only be evident maybe 20 years later.
“See how the Sao Paulo Biennale has taken the art world by storm producing a whole new generation of brilliant artists. Exposure to the biennale will make a significant impact on emerging artists which will only be discernible after a decade or two,” he says.
