India’s big splash at the Venice Biennale 2019

With our second-ever pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and three artists participating in the main exhibition, the Indian art community is doing away with its ‘late arrival’ tag

Cane armour by Shakuntala Kulkarni

The wreck of the fishing boat that sank off Libya’s coast in 2015, killing hundreds of migrants, is now in Venice. It is part of Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel’s project for the 58th Biennale di Venezia, which opens today. Elsewhere, Italian artist Lorenzo Quinn’s Building Bridges , a sculpture of six arching hands over a Venetian waterway in Arsenal’s former shipyard, is attracting eyeballs. Amidst all the artwork, you will also spot a smoky screen on which are scrawled Mahatma Gandhi’s words and signature, in Jitish Kallat’s installation Covering Letter .

2019 is looking good for the Indian art scene. Not only is there an India Pavilion (the second in the Venice Biennale’s 124-year history), but artists Gauri Gill, Shilpa Gupta and Soham Gupta are part of the main exhibition curated by Ralph Rugoff — with the overarching theme ‘May You Live in Interesting Times’. (It explores the influx of fake news and alternative facts in the current political climate.)

Jitish Kallat: “Every visitor brings a different personal, social and historical experience to the work, in a way altering its meaning,” he says. ‘Covering Letter’ is a piece of historical correspondence beamed on to a curtain of traversable dry-fog — a letter written by Gandhi to Adolf Hitler in 1939, urging him to reconsider his violent means. “Like many of Gandhi’s life experiments, this correspondence seems like an open letter destined to travel beyond its delivery date and intended recipient — a letter written to anyone, anytime, anywhere.”

Shakuntala Kulkarni: Consisting of a suit of armour woven out of cane, it provides a tongue-in-cheek comment on how the physical space around women’s bodies is violated on a daily basis.

Ashim Purkayastha: The artist’s 2003 works, ‘Farmers’ and ‘Holy Water’, are two sets of postage stamps. In the former, the benign face of the farmer becomes a death mask, and the crop affected by blight, while the latter has the water from a tube-well changing into rivers of saffron, with flames licking the edges of the stamp. “They... are projections, often bizarre and fantastic, but also a sharp socio-political critique,” writes the artist.

GR Iranna: The artist revisits his 2010 work featuring padukas or holy slippers. “Naavu is a Kannada word that means ‘together’. It is symbolic of when we are all united and stand in solidity for a cause,” he says. Padukas are worn by monks and reflect the principle of non-violence (they minimise the risk of trampling insects and vegetation). Attached to each slipper is also an object that indicates a profession or religion, like a pair of scissors (for a tailor). “This stands for their individuality and indicates that while we are together, we continue to retain our unique identity,” he says.

MF Husain: The painting, Zameen — a historic work that brings together ruminations on India’s syncretic nature — was first shown at ‘Hundred Years: From the NGMA Collection’, in 1994. It provides an ‘alternative view’, celebrating beasts of burden, the farmer and bullock cart, who represented the ‘real India’ for the late artist.

Nandalal Bose: The folk-inspired Haripura Posters, commissioned by Gandhi in 1938, are a suite of tempera on paper — windows into rural lives, depicting everyone from the potter to the bull wrangler.

Rummana Hussain: The late artist is represented by one of her most significant works, Fragments. It consists of a broken pot or ‘tomb’ — which speaks of loss and silence — laid bare on mirrors to reflect on its ‘post mortem’. The female body, awakening of a womb, the cycle of life, are at play in this work.

Atul Dodiya: Karode chose ‘Broken Branches’ “because it struck a ‘universal chord’ and revolves around the dialogue of violence”. The installation consists of nine wooden cabinets, given a dark, macabre twist: filled with objects that allude to the horror of violence, including the image of Qutbuddin Nasseruddin begging for mercy during the 2001 Gujarat riots, images of babies blinded by the Bhopal gas tragedy and disjointed broken limbs. “What is perhaps sad is that this work of mine is still relevant today, and the violence continues,” he observes.

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Getting global attention

India’s participation comes as welcome relief, given that its presence in the global art scene is seen as a ‘late arrival’. In Venice, our track record has been a series of sporadic appearances: in 2011, Ranjit Hoskote curated a national pavilion, under the aegis of Jawahar Sircar and Ashok Vajpeyi; in 2013 Dayanita Singh’s photographs were displayed as part of the German pavilion; and in 2015, Shilpa Gupta and Lahore-based artist Rashid Rana brought India and Pakistan together at the Palazzo Benzon on the Grand Canal, in My East is Your West (a project conceived by Feroze Gujral of The Gujral Foundation, Italian art historian Martina Mazzotta, and Indian independent curator Natasha Ginwala).

What’s so special about Venice?

• The first and oldest Biennale in the world (started in 1895), Venice has always been the place to be seen at for ‘critical acclaim’ — despite coming under a fair bit of criticism for its Eurocentric views (in the past, curators have picked mostly European and American artists). This year, the central exhibit features 17 US-born artists, with China and France coming in second with six artists each. Tied for third, with three artists apiece, are Germany, India, Japan, South Korea and the UK.

Putting India on the international art map has been an uphill task, but the efforts of several Indian and diaspora curators, galleries, museums and auction houses are bearing fruit. “It is an exciting time for India, which is being represented at international museums like the MET Bauer, documenta 14 and now the Venice Biennale,” observes Shanay Jhaveri, assistant curator of the South Asian Art section at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently showed a retrospective of late artist Nasreen Mohamedi. But why has it taken us such a long time? Renu Modi, of Delhi’s Gallery Espace, believes there are a number of reasons. “The international community wasn’t aware of the Indian artist community. Earlier there weren’t enough international shows, and [our] galleries hardly participated. There was also an overall lack of government interest in projecting our artists,” she says, adding that “with the Kochi-Muziris Biennale [KMB] on the international map of events, the pace of Indian art will be much faster globally.”

Incidentally, the KMB Foundation announced their curator’s name — Singapore-based artist and writer of Indian-origin, Shubigi Rao — for the 2020 edition at the Istituto Europeo di Design, Palazzo Franchetti, on May 9, using the excitement of the Venice Biennale and heightening the India presence. “This ensures that the connection is more than just one way,” says art historian Lina Vincent, who has just curated an exhibition titled Macrocosm in Turkey. “The Foundation has been working towards international endorsement [to use the term carefully] for the last three years,” she says.

Shilpa Gupta: ‘For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit’ draws from Gupta’s year-long research into jailed poets from around the world. The relation between the poet and the state has been a troubling one, across time and geographies. The multi-channel sound installation — featuring 100 microphones suspended above 100 metal rods, each piercing a page inscribed with a verse of poetry — tells stories of deep conflict, exploring the political and societal restrictions that seek to control both the imagination and physical mobility of poets.

“This work takes an emotional journey through 100 stories, 100 poems and 100 small gestures of resistance that celebrate the freedom of thought,” says Gupta, about the installation that was also at the 2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

Gill is showcasing excerpts from two series of photographs 12 colour prints from the ‘Acts of Appearance’ series (2015 - ongoing), and 54 black-and-white prints from ‘Becoming’ (featured here) (2003—ongoing). ‘Becoming’ features a series of landscapes in semi-rural and mofussil towns and urban-scapes of large, cosmopolitan cities across India. In this dystopian world, human beings are dislocated from familiar contexts and rendered invisible in their new environments. Nature herself is bent to human will and desire, and new worlds emerge from the underlying capitalist order,” Gill explains.

‘Acts of Appearance’ features the Adivasi papier-mâché artists from the Kokna tribe in Maharashtra, with whom the artist worked to create masks representing their contemporary reality. The masks also explore human emotions and common experiences, animals and well-used objects, as the tribe believes that objects have sentience too.

Soham Gupta: Gupta is presenting two groups of photographs from a series shot in Kolkata — mostly depicting people living on the street or out late at night. Curator Ralph Rugoff told theartnewspaper.com that “they are riveting, and avoid every cliché about representing the poor and homeless... he worked with his subjects as collaborators, asking them to suggest how they’d like to pose, what props, if any, they’d like to appear with”.

Gupta has taken a page out of Dayanita Singh’s work, where she did a similar set of portraits with the bourgeoise, and captured intimate moments. “It feels strange that I am 30 and yet showing work at this Mecca of art. It is an incredible honour,” shares the photographer.

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A Gandhian outing

The India Pavilion — with financial backing from the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and support of the National Gallery of Modern Art — features eight modern and contemporary artists. Curated by Roobina Karode of KNMA, Our Time for a Future Caring reflects upon Gandhi’s values of satyagraha (non-violence), equality and unity to make a statement about India’s return to these experiments with truth. Karode has selected works including Atul Dodiya’s curio cabinets titled Broken Branches , GR Iranna’s Naavu (Together) and Ashim Purkayastha’s stamps.

But some critics wonder if the Gandhian trope isn’t dated. On condition of anonymity, a contemporary artist shares that while “it is wonderful that India is being represented at the Venice Biennale, why take such a safe and tested path by invoking Gandhi and making ‘all the right noises?’ It casts us as a secular nation when indeed the reality is quite different.” However, Karode responds emphatically, stating that she didn’t conceive the exhibition as a literal representation of the Mahatma in a documentary-like format. “I was more inclined to look at aspects of his practice. He keeps returning to public conscience in periods of crisis or despair; he is the subject of contemporary reflection. [There is] also the idea of craft, dignity of labour and emphasis on self-reliance,” she says.

At this point one must ask, is it the job of art and artists to reflect only the current state of the country or should they project a vision that is critical of the times? We would favour the latter, and Venice is a good starting point.

- Sharan Apparao
Gallerist

"The Indian Pavilion is a government initiative, and given the volatile times we are living in, the curation could not be as (hard-hitting as) it should have been. Being an Indian, one understands the nuances. However, the non-Indian collector may miss the subtleties. I think the story here is Soham Gupta, who is superb and the biggest surprise. No one knows him or has heard of him, but he is part of the main show. His work is powerful and presents the really dark side of life in Kolkata/India."

- Akshay Chudasama
Collector

"Venice is the pinnacle of the international art scene and the fact that India did not have a pavilion in the last three biennales was a commentary on the sad state of affairs. Hats off to Kiran Nadar, Tarana Sawhney and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs for ensuring India is back."

- Sunita Choraria

"It's a proud moment that India finally has its own pavilion in Venice Biennale! It's truly a moment of reckoning for the Indian contemporary art world to be present on a world stage of this repute. And the roster of our top contemporary artists: Atul Dodiya, Jitish Kallat, Shilpa Gupta, amongst others, that are representing us, is amazing. For Shilpa's work to be included in the Arsenale also is praise worthy! Kudos to Kiran Nadar for supporting such an essential cause; it emphasises her undying and generous support for the contemporary art of India."

- Saloni Doshi

"India is a historically rich country in terms of its art and culture for centuries. Even it's modern and contemporary art scene is active with collectors from all over the world buying Indian art. So having a presence at the Venice Biennale is not only important but also crucial to maintain its position on the world stage and one should not lose sight of that."

With inputs from Team Weekend and Gayatri Rangachari Shah