When the past holds a shudder, the dead come to rule the course of future. Phantoms from a gory, unjust past of Kerala return to shake the conscience of an uncaring society in the works of Aryakrishnan and V.V. Vinu to be showcased at the rundown Aspinwall House, one of the key venues of KMB-18.
It was in 2012 that a harbour worker, Anil Sadanandan, a transgender, also known as Sweet Maria, was murdered in a ‘hate crime’ in Kollam. This jolted her friend Mr. Aryakrishnan, then a student of visual arts at the Ambedkar University, to think up ways to create an ode to a lost friend.
Sweet Maria Monument
“The project began with my final year MA thesis and went in to a curated exhibition at the degree show, ‘none the less art’ at the university in 2014. Maria’s aesthetics cannot be represented or appropriated by art and an authorial role. Thus I started exploring a monument which could use different forms of engagement in recreating Maria’s aesthetics and politics,” says Mr. Aryakrishnan, native of Pathanamthitta, who’s set up the ‘Sweet Maria Monument,’ with an ever-transforming space that contains a bed, library and works of art.
It’s a space where people are expected to spend time. “The work explores the unwritten histories of queer lives, and the irreducibility of human life to identities,” says Mr. Aryakrishnan, who was one of the curators of the Students Biennale in the last edition. Along with fellow artists Gee Imaan Semmalar and Raju Rage, he will conduct a performance at the space at 4 p.m. on December 15.
Vinu’s phantoms
An attempt to reconcile a dead but haunting past with the lopsided corpus of historical knowledge about the ‘other’ — the subaltern and the minorities — characterises the work of V.V. Vinu, a graduate from the RLV College of Music and Fine Arts, in the nearby room.
Sculptures made using the wood of Cerbera odollam , Othala in Malayalam, known as the suicide tree; steel roads used for construction; coconut tree stumps; screw pine mats, tarpaulin and plastic buckets form part of his installation. Nearly 300 human figurines are nailed to three tree stumps, and as you walk along, voices from Vaikom Mohammed Basheer’s disquieting novel, ‘Sabdangal’, C. Ayyappan’s ‘Prethabhashanam’ and from Pattathuvila Karunakaran’s oeuvre resound in the brooding environs.
Misrabhojanam
There’s also a past that fought social injustice and reformed society. Artist Vipin Dhanurdharan is trying to reclaim those moments of progress. Over the last three or four months, Mr. Dhanurdharan, a self-taught artist, went around households in Fort Kochi for a meal with the residents. “It was the word ‘Sahodaran’ that moved me and made me do so,” he says, recalling Sahodaran Ayyappan’s ‘Misrabhojanam (community meal) initiative 101 years ago against caste biases.
At each home, Mr. Dhanurdharan drew portraits of his hosts. “I made about 45 portraits and a video recording of me savouring a meal with the residents will be screened alongside, at the biennale. There will be a live kitchen where anyone can walk in and prepare a meal and there’s space to sit together and eat. They can also leaf through the books, on social change and renaissance, kept in a corner shelf,” he says.
Mr. Dhanurdharan plans to bring in people in the neighbourhood to be a part of his installation. Local cooks will drop by on and off to dish up a savoury.
