I was in Kochi for the second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale last month. Forager Collective, of which The Forager is a part, is showing a work under a collateral project The Knowledge Project. But more on that later. A report on the biennale I wrote for Kindle is here. Or see below.
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Every country seems to want one. It's a bit
like the space program, you need to have your own to be able to fully believe
you have 'arrived', so it would seem. And so we have our own biennale, the
Kochi-Muziris Biennale that opened December 12 from a gorgeous platform just by
the Arabian sea, to the stupendous sound of 300 performers piercing the air
with drums, horn trumpets and other traditional musical instruments. It rained
on the parade, but the heat and humidity of the coast abated little. It rained
too on the bar at the adjacent club where the party was, but that is another
story.
The Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) is in its
second edition this year. The first time around, there was utter chaos. Nothing
was organized, there was no schedule printed, most works were not up and there
was mad chaos, people in the know tell me, even two years on; I didn't go, in
2012. This time around, there is a schedule but several works remain stuck in
customs. Oh, let me not nitpick, a home grown brand needs some slack, I'll
allow that a biennale is not a small thing to organize.
Well known artist Jitish Kallat curates the
biennale. There could not have been a prettier venue than the sea-wind
weathered warehouses, old trading offices and expansive halls that fill Fort
Kochi. Kappad in Calicut was where Vasco da Gama landed in the late 15th
century, in the maritime Age of Discovery, seeking spices and untold wealth
that travellers had promised there existed on the Malabar shores. His arrival
in the court of the Zamorin of Calicut started a long period of trade, conquest
and eventual colonisation of the country.
The scene, that of a traveller from distant
shores, in a rich court, is much mythologized over the centuries. An 1898
painting of this imagined moment by Jose Veloso Salgado lends itself to
interpretation by two artists at the biennale, Pushpamala N and Daniel Boyd.
The former recreates the painting in a photograph, changing the now
historically legitimate scene back into fiction, a product of imagination.
Boyd, an Australian artist of Aboriginal ancestry, employs his recurring motif
of resin dots over a painted image before painting the whole surface in black
to trigger questions and connections that animate and unravel dominant
narratives that surround the Age of Discovery.
Daniel Boyd, Untitled
Kallat's curatorial vision starts from these
new discoveries and expands to the next century when astronomer-mathematicians
from what would come to be known as the Kerala School of Astronomy and
Mathematics were making steady advances in trigonometry and calculus, helping
further understand the planet and enabling the placing of humankind within the
wider cosmos. The works in the biennale draw a cluster of signs, images and
metaphors from these references, alluding to the historical, the cosmological
and deliberating on the axes of time and space to interface the bygone with the
imminent, the terrestrial with the celestial. ‘Whorled Explorations’ is the
theme and the works explore the various dimensions and narratives of space,
celestial, time and history and trade that the region has experienced, and
through it, other contexts.
The Aspinwall House, a gargantuan complex
from the 1860s is where over 50 artists show their works. One of the star
attractions of the biennale, Anish Kapoor's Descension
(2014), is a water vortex that seeks to destabilise the experience of
having solid ground below, drawing the viewer in, juxtaposed with the calm
waters of the Periyar River at the other end. Across the hall is N S Harsha's
gigantic 79-feet long painting Punarapi
Jananam Punarapi Maranam (2013), an infinite loop of the universe that
holds a galaxy of stars and the planets in a never-ending procession through
space and time. Yoko Ono, who does not make an appearance, is distributing her
iconic Earth Piece: Listen to the sound
of the earth turning (1963/1999)
postcards as takeaways. I take away two, to give a friend, to stick one on the
fridge. Francesco Clemente, the nomadic artist, continues with his experiments
with the form and structure of a tent. His Pepper
Tent (2014) is a bright pink tent covered in paintings of stars and high
seas and human bodies, made in his studio in Brooklyn and assembled in
Rajasthan by Indian tent makers.
Graffiti in Fort Kochi
From the celestial to more earthly matters,
there are the brilliant photographs of Dayanita Singh. 1.9.2014 Dear Mr Walter (2014)
is not a museum, instead, the pictures, arranged upon pillars, choreograph the
viewers' encounter and engagement by reinventing the space of photography as
sculpture and architecture. Then there is the marvelous work of Bengaluru-based
artist Sunoj D, called Zero to the Right
(2014), an articulation in sound and
drawing of a sum of $2000, his production budget during a Dubai residency - where
the project was conceived - converted into Dirhams and Indian rupees. The
recitation of 2000 USD in English, 7,346 Dirhams in Arabic and 1,25,427 Indian
rupees in Malayalam, all playing simultaneously from three connected rooms, is a
meditation on time, labour and iniquity. There are drawings on the wall
accompanying the sound pieces, both evoking the long standing relationship that
the migratory labour from Kerala to the Middle East has had with the homeland's
economy and social structures.
Sunoj D, Zero to the Right
Well known illustrator K M Vasudevan
Namboodiri offers glimpses of Kochi through a series of drawings of relics of
the colonial era, street scenes, waterways and markets while Aji V N's
mesmerising charcoal on coloured paper landscapes transform everyday earthly
imagery into phantasmagorical, broody visions. One of my favourites was Marie
Velardi's Future Perfect, 21st Century,
a 2006 work that gives a timeline of the 21st century culled from science
fiction books and movies of the 20th century. Some of the scenarios she spells
out are eerily plausible, some are outright funny, some plain absurd. Yet, none
can be completely dismissed. Playful at times, yet profound, the artist as a
cartographer imagines a eccentric mix of what might happen to the world -
ranging from complete collapse of civilisation to migration to Mars to a world
where everyone speaks Portuguese.
Gigi Scaria's Chronicle of the Shores Foretold (2014) is composed of a bell hoisted by bamboo poles,
punctured - symbolically puncturing time - to spout a fountain, orchestrating a
confrontation between several overlapping episodes from Malabar's history, from
the trade links to transformative cultural influences. Other well-known artists
like Mona Hatoum, Hema Upadhyay, Charles and Ray Eames, Gulammohammed Sheikh, K
G Subramanyan, Valsan Koorma Kolleri, Sahej Rahal, Nikhil Chopra, Mona Hatoum,
Navjot Altaf, William Kentridge and others show their works too, spread across
eight venues, that include dedicated areas for the children’s and students’
biennales.
The second edition of the KMB evokes sharply
the dual transience and permanency of time and space in the works it has chosen
to include. What perhaps best sums up not just the biennale, but in some sense
the art in life itself is Martin Creed's as usual quirky work, Work No 232:the whole world+ the work = the
whole world (2000). The ambiguity
he presents makes you want to try to ponder, as you stand before Darbar Hall,
if art works are inseparable from the world or not or whether the 'whole world'
is any different a place by the addition of the work. The 'work' could be
replaced by any human endeavour and the same questions could be asked again.
Would it matter? That such questions arise is what perhaps makes the biennale,
or any place with art, matter.
Martin Creed
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