“Yes, it’s my first visit to this quaint little town. But it won’t be the last,” said Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation in New York.
Enjoying himself under the shade on a breezy Monday afternoon at Aspinwall House, he was eager to find out if spices were grown in nearby areas. “Where’s cardamom grown?” he asks. “Oh, so you have mountains too in this province?” he exclaims as you explain to him the topography of Kerala, its population, literacy rate, politics and the like.
Mr. Armstrong was on a brief visit to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), but was enamoured by its “giant” nature, scale, and public participation. Just a day old in the city, he has come to understand its hoary past, the signs of its exploitation, too, apparent in its vistas.
Mr. Armstrong is sure that the city has woken up to the spirit of the arts festival, something that he had experienced way back at Pittsburgh, a medium-sized city where he curated the centenary Carnegie International in 1995.
“This really opens a door and as the biennale brings about a globalisation of minds, it’s good that the people are playing their part here.”
Artists’ biennale
In its third edition, the KMB has already acquired a big reputation and is quite ambitious, he says. There’s wide interest in it being an artists’ biennale, which is a rarity, and it offers a learning experience as it has the right mix of big names and not-so-popular artists. “Some of the works are really amazing. The sea of pain by poet Raul Zurita, to name one. But the quest should be how you make a powerful metaphor in today’s world.”
Metaphors are important, you know, he suggests, as they offer a structure and a pathway. Mr. Armstrong feels that the curator, Sudarshan Shetty, has cleverly laid out the works of art, offering a path to the visitor. “The visitor has been taken care of, which you can identify from the spaces allocated to view the works.”
He also sees the ubiquity of video arts, as this dominant medium all over the world facilitates the quest for infinity, the cinematic experience providing it the best possible way.
To Mr. Armstrong, the works at KMB look “inside-inside”, connecting the multiple voices within India, and “inside-outside”, those with the voices from the rest of the world.
The way forward for KMB, he thinks, is to remain on its own. “It should have its brand. I don’t want to be presumptuous, but there’s a shyness about expertise in India and people want their opinion to be validated by the outside world. That needn’t be the case.” He is leaving for Mumbai on Tuesday and will then leave for Abu Dhabi where Guggenheim intends to set up a museum.
