Hardly had the applause — for Kochi-Muziris Biennale having curated more women artists than men this year — faded from the rows in Museum Theatre, than the festival curator Anita Dube picked up her mic to make a point.
“The artists I have seen and works that I have been affected by for 25 years, have included a lot of women. So the selection of these artists happened naturally; I was not trying to check a box,” she says, simply.
But more pertinent than her statement is her question: “If I can find 50% women artists, why not the male curators around the world? Why do I keep hearing this idea that women’s work is ‘weak’, from curators, journalists and other people? I am told that this is the first time anywhere in the world that there are more women artists than men [featured in such an event]: it comes as a huge surprise to me.”
Representation of women, however, was the final in a long list of topics discussed by Dube and Pushpamala M, curator and artistic director of Chennai Photo Biennale (CPB), at a Curators’ Talk moderated by Helmut Schippert, CPB co-founder and director of Goethe-Institut, Chennai.
The talk, attended by curious members of the public, artists, experts and journalists, dissected the larger social role of events like the two Biennales, through questions thrown up by the moderator and audience alike.
It began with each curator explaining her vision for her Biennale. Pushpamala M spoke about her theme, ‘Fauna of Mirrors’: “It is an ancient Chinese myth about an alternative world that exists beyond mirrors, inhabited by unknown creatures. I see photography as a portal to another world: images, like those creatures, can be friendly or aggressive.”
Dube spoke about her concept — Possibility of a non-alienated life — and how she went about making the event more inclusive; how a number of attendees (from a footfall of 6,00,000) told her that they could connect to it.
This point led to a discussion on whether multiple small art Biennales are better than one large one. “That way we all won’t have to make a pligrimage to Kochi every two years,” was one point made by Dube, another being, “This Biennale is the only window to the art world in Kochi, which is dangerous, because there is no point of reference or comparison.”
From there, the proceedings made a natural progression towards the question of inclusion. Pushpamala introduced a dichotomy: “I have curated smaller events in the past, but here I enjoyed having such a large canvas to work with. You usually cannot create a canvas like this; it can only be given to you — but Varun (Gupta), Shuchi (Kapoor) and Gayatri (Nair) did create it,” she noted, adding, at the same time, that she did intially find the idea of a large Biennale a bit alienating, but could address it by using the venues and the works “to represent the world with all its complexities”.
But it wasn’t as simple as all that — the topic of inclusivity took over most of the remaining discussion, with audience member and art expert Sadanand Menon pointing out that many venues in both the Biennales — like Aspinwall House and Pepper House in Kochi, and Senate House and Museum Theatre in Egmore — were colonial structures, “spaces which generated alienation” originally. Both curators accepted this point, and had different ways of addressing it.
Dube, for instance, spoke about the “non-grandiose micro events” like a performance bus that travelled to places around Kerala, taking both art and appreciation to fishermen of the State who had played a big role in rescue operations during the recent floods. She also spoke of the pavilion, a Kochi-Muziris Biennale venue that “is an imagined space meant for just this purpose” of non-alienation.
Pushpamala, on the other hand, pointed out that CPB had been held on beaches and railway stations earlier — and in the latter this year as well. She described as “tongue in cheek” her decision to put up photographs of the fishing community as Senate House’s central installation.
As Dube pointed out, “As a curator, you cannot reimagine the whole thing. You have to work within the structure, and try to subvert it from the inside.”
