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| Kochi: The Arabian Sea beyond the biennale locations |
“I
was imprisoned for eleven years. In my cell, I saw the moonlight but not the
moon… We aspire towards a freedom that
will lead us towards creating an art without fetters. This unfettered art will
be our moonlight.”
~
Zarganar, artist from Myanmar, 2012
It is early March. We
are in Kerala as art aficionados. Pouring sweat, we walk through Jew Town to a
background score of waves lashing the rocks. After three days across 3,00,000
sq. ft. of mainly site-specific art by 80-plus artists from 24 countries at the
ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), due to conclude on March 13, we need time
out.
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| Mandalay House: Type 'Justice' |
Our encounters with art
deconstructed, then reconstructed in terms of ideation and execution, have been
soul-deep, even searing, at the first Indian biennale’s 14 locations across
Kochi, Mattancherry, Ernakulam, and the legendary port of Muziris. At
saturation point, mere sculptures and paintings seem almost passé. Instinctively,
we freeze – and almost turn away – when we chance upon KMB’s logo metres away from
the 16th century Paradesi Synagogue.
But we emerge from Mandalay
Hall in Jew Town electrified by a video loop of Zarganar, Myanmar’s most famous
comedian, sharing his life behind bars. Close by, a taped note invites us to
type ‘Justice’ on a rickety Corona typewriter. The result on paper reads: ‘O-u-t-r-a-g-e.’
We feel inextricably altered, connected to a global network of art, as protest,
as politics.
The biennale impacted
individuals as deeply as the host city of Kochi, with its cosmopolitan, multicultural
history as focus. From December 12, 2012, the mega-show redefined disused colonial
warehouses and bungalows, never open to the public before, as sites of artistic
exploration. Alongside, it celebrated current excavations at Muziris, the
ancient port buried by a 14th century flood. Today, Kochi – declared
a Biennale City by its mayor – is no longer a dot on the Spice Route, or the
Indian gateway to Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. Galvanized by the KMB’s
three lakh footfalls by February 28, the Kerala government has pledged to build
100 galleries in 100 panchayats. Is an art revolution underway?
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| Bose paints a Tata Nano to raise funds |
Post 20-plus curatorial trips
abroad and 124 studio visits, KMB’s artistic director/ co-curator Bose
Krishnamachari points out, “Biennales democratize art, taking it from the
confines of galleries, and mix it with people and places, removing the elitist
tag… Recent studies have proved their soft power and economic contributions to
the host city.”
The biennale venues throng with
designers from Montreal and Chennai, artists from Vadodara and Bengaluru,
curators from Mumbai and Kolkata, in addition to anthropologists from New Delhi.
In Kochi, even idiappam vendors and
fisherfolk refer to the KMB today. A middle-class family with adult children
recently took a train to the biennale from south Kerala on the recommendation
of their barber. Hotel bookings have soared by 80 per cent. Like us, most
entered the biennale as sceptics, but left as converts.
Artist Riyas Komu, co-curator of
the biennale, notes, “Anything that happens in Kerala gets discussed, equally
by a professor or a barber. So, Kochi is the perfect venue for an Indian
biennale.”
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| Subodh Gupta installation, Aspinwall |
However, this artist-led
initiative met major obstacles en route, raising troubling questions: Why does India have an art market
infrastructure, but inadequate museums? Why was the government-sponsored Triennale-India,
founded in 1968, last held in 2005?
The Kerala Government’s initial
Rs. 5 crore allocation was mired in media mayhem. Local trade unions had to be
mollified to unload artwork. Miffed local artists vandalized art, including
installations by South African artist Clifford Charles.
But the Kochi Biennale Foundation
trustees deftly transformed protest into pride. Through theatre sketches in
rural Kerala. Through outreach programmes at schools. Through a campaign with
shopkeepers, auto-rickshaw drivers, even pedestrians, each holding a poster in
Malayalam: “It’s my Biennale.” Pushed to the wall, the foundation raised the
requisite Rs. 13.5 crore through corporate donors, embassies, and the art
community.
The
community includes feted Indian artist Subodh Gupta. His boatload
of found objects at the 160,000 sq. ft. trading compound of Aspinwall House, reflects socio-economic
transformations that mesh into Kochi’s stories. “For the artist, his boat is
the universe that floats leisurely upon the waters of destruction to reach the
land of regeneration,” writes Gupta on the wall.
Buoyantly afloat, the biennale leaves
behind upgraded pan-Indian art-handling and shipping facilities, all shipshape
for 2014. And a network of supportive mentor-curators including Sarat Maharaj
(South Africa), Thierry Raspail (France), Adriano Pedrosa (Brazil) and Hans
Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Gallery, UK). Chris Dercon, director of the Tate
Modern gallery, London, frames the KMB against the globe’s 150-plus similar
expositions: “This is probably a biennale which is able to redefine and
revaluate the life of biennials in general.”
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| Atul Dodiya photo installation, Aspinwall |
Was the compliment justified? We
felt it was. For Bose and Riyas aligned art and locations impeccably, ensuring
about 50 percent pan-Indian representation. For instance, Atul Dodiya’s
photo-installation, ‘Celebration in the
Laboratory,’ is spread out amidst peeling plaster, chipped tiles and random
railways signs. His subjective portrait gallery embraces the who’s who of
contemporary Indian art, including M F Husain, K G Subramanyan, and Nilima
Sheikh, shoulder-to-shoulder with critics, curators and gallerists.
Outdoors at Aspinwall, swaying
palms smile as giggling, pigtailed schoolgirls in blue tunics clamber up gunny-bags
to peer into Srinivasa Prasad’s outsize, suspended ‘cocoon’ of thorny bamboo, binding wire and
steel cable. As they whisper in wonder, demystified art becomes a desirable
experience. For, to Prasad, Kochi was “the perfect template to create beautiful
artwork.”
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| Carlos Garaicoa's tapestries, Durbar Hall |
A ferry ride away, we gawk at Cuban
artist Carlos Garaicoa’s tapestries at the renovated century-old Durban Hall,
his videos melding the weaves with revolutionary squares in his faraway land. Within
the black drapes at Rose Street Bungalow, we watch Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s
documentaries of dissent.
Seated on the wooden floor at Moidu’s
Heritage Plaza, a former coir godown, we tune in to Australian artist Angelica
Mesiti’s ‘Citizen’s Band,’ a
four-channel video installation of extraordinary adaptations of traditional
music to new environments. Such as Cameroon-born Lois Geraldine Zongo’s akutuk or water percussion in a Paris
swimming pool. Or Mongolian Bukhu Ganburged playing his morin khur or horsehead fiddle while throat-singing in downtown
Sydney. Over 21 minutes, geographies collapse. Transiting cultures sans visas, we
are in tears.
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| Mesiti with the water drummer on video, Moidu's |
KMB’s spice-inspired olfactory
work reaches its acme with Brazilian Ernesto Neto’s udder-like cotton
installation at Moidu’s, overlooking the Arabian Sea. We can smell, touch and
almost see aromatic turmeric, cumin and cloves through the yoking of the global
and the local as he perfects the genius of simplicity.
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| Ernesto Neto's spice installation, Moidu's |
At Dutch-style Pepper House,
Nairobi-born, Amsterdam-based Ibrahim Quraishi salutes the 1960s Fluxus
anti-commerce movement with his installation of white ‘Islamic Violins.’ Crafted in
Pakistan, perfected in the Netherlands, they are accompanied by video in Kochi.
How does one gauge the
impact of this Kochi Biennale? Perhaps by this story doing the rounds in
Kerala. Of two children overheard at dusk at Edapally. One says to the other,
‘Let’s play now. I am Bose. You are Riyas Komu…”
As for Bose and Riyas,
they are already immersed in a grand dream of a Rs. 72 crore edition in 2014.
At Aspinwall, Bose frenetically paints a donated Tato Nano in his unmistakable
style, to be auctioned at a fund-raiser. Coming up? Perhaps a commissioned
borderless curator in tune with the cultural sensitivity of Kochi, which still
hosts 13 communities. Perhaps 15 public sculptures on the road from the airport
to Fort Kochi.
Post-biennale, the
world views Kochi both as a historical mother-lode and a site of infinite
possibilities. If, like Zarganar’s moonlit art, this mega-show does not define
India as a global contemporary art port of call, nothing ever will.
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| Ibrahim Quraishi's 'Islamic Violins', Pepper House |
* * * * * * * *
My article was originally published in The Hindu Business Line on March 8, 2013:
