The first work as you enter Aspinwall House, the main venue of the second Kochi Muziris Biennale 2014, is Charles and Ray Eames’ 1977 essay film, ‘On the Relative Scale of Things.’ A camera zooms out every ten seconds to the power of ten from a couple lying in a park in Chicago, then inwards into the body, “the subatomic merges with the galactic” and sets the tone of this biennale. As physicist Philip Morrison narrates, “This lonely sea, this galaxy of dust, is what most of space looks like. This is normal, it is the richness of our neighbourhood that is abnormal.”
And what a neighbourhood Fort Kochi is. Curator Jitish Kallat, an artist who hails from Kerala, draws on this richness, specifically of the period between the 14th and 17th century in Kerala’s history, when mathematics held sway even as the coast was conquered via the sea. In ‘Whorled Explorations’ artists responded to this brief: between the ‘subatomic and the galactic’. Their works zoomed in to the microscopic and homely (Prajakta Potnis’ kitchen science and politics, Sarnath Banerjee’s comic graphic tale, Parvathi Nayars’s microscopic abstractions, Susanta Mandal’s bubble half globes, Dayanita Singh’s takes the photograph off the wall only to remake ones of photographic melancholy and memory) and zoomed out (Sahej Rahal’s lab of experimentation saw alien forms grow seemingly uncontrollably, N.S. Harsha’s breathtaking, majestic, unfurling space swirl, the length of the warehouse’s wall, Dinh Q Le’s oceanic room of photographs as memory waves around a video of a burning ship, Valsan Kolleri’s inverted laterite pyramid ‘sun dial’ at Cabral’s yard).
In many ways, the first biennale was more of a risk taker with no appointed curator and no funds to speak of - chaotic, it held spectacular works that filled and soared in the warehouses of Aspinwall - one recalled Subodh Gupta, L.N. Tallur, Vivan Sundaram, Amar Kanwar. It thrilled and captured an audience instantly. This biennale saw a settling in - the newness of the spaces now over with, still visceral enough to be explored with works that may not have been spectacular in their filling, but nevertheless evoked wonder, often in understatement - precisely, quietly, but equally breathtakingly.
What was the same, was the splutter in the biennale’s start - again the crisis of funds saw artworks being held up at customs, equipment for the new media works not forthcoming, pending payments holding up work. The “coming soon” signs or watching artists and installers battle time to put up work has now become almost a hallmark of KMB. While art lovers will forgive, it is the donors that founders, artists Riyas Komu and Bose Krishnamachari need to worry about. Rightly entering into a private - public partnership with the state, still, working with the government can be frustrating. The last minute panic caused by promised funds not being released, saw a desperate fund raising drive among private donors. With India’s inadequacy of institutional support in contemporary art, the biennale stands in for institution, as not only the most important event in the contemporary calendar but as a teaching tool by what it presents in this peer review for artists. The audience engagement at the last biennale was an indicator to all those who decried that the “masses” wouldn’t understand. Given the chance, they did - upto 4 lakh engaged with contemporary art. That this recurring model must survive was the subtext in most viewer’s thoughts.
Yet, to see it being made in front of one’s eyes is privy to see the process, one enters into a belonging; a responsibility to make it happen is then thrust on the viewer. Whatever the low rumblings of discord in India’s art factions, it is infused by biennale camaraderie and collective want. It overwhelms the personalities and the failings - a silent knowing that but for artists, no one else would attempt what the Indian art world has tried to, since 60 years of Independence. In its format, the Kochi biennale is unique.
If there is a star artist in this biennale, it is one whose works you will not see. But as curator, artist Jitish Kallat is the glue that binds. There are “runs” in a walkthrough of this biennale where one work builds into another, till at the end, ocean and skies and the plottings of man overwhelm, and the exploratory 14th - 17th century resonate in the contemporary interpretations. One such starts from the beginning: the Eames essay film leads one to Mona Hatoum’s ‘breathing’ circumference of lights and Nataraj Sharma’s sentinel like imaginings of earth shapes, to unknown terrains - Madusudhanan’s 90 drawings that reads like frames of a surreal film, to Aji V.N.’s foreboding, mysterious charcoal landscapes to Marie Velardi’s brilliant interventions on paper - a scroll formed as a timeline of sci-fi literary and film excerpts; to Susanta Mandal’s bubble making contraptions drawing sibilant half worlds and ends in Adrian Paci’s strong video masterfully installed - one sits in a container like space and is transported to the high seas (beyond the projection wall) as a Chinese made copy of a classical statue manufactured in China is shipped to its destination.
The second “run” occurs diametrically opposite the yard. Manish Nai’s indigo compressed jute is a formal face off to his ethereal markings of a stellar sky, Neha Choksi’s sublime video Iceboat, a melting, romantic, haunting negation, reflected (through Dinh Q Le’s memory laden room of loss) in Marie Velardi’s Atlas des Iles Perdues’ - ‘Pacific Ocean’ is an immersive, understated indictment of climate change. In between are ties that bind, works that speak across rooms, palimpsest laden histories of colonial times told in many ways (Kader Attia, Wendelien van Oldenburgh, Sissel Tolaas).
The first time I saw Anish Kapoor’s ‘Descension’, water swirled in a shallow, circular well, at ground level it lay at one’s feet, disappearing into a self created void in the centre, a dark swirl contained, controlled. The second time I saw it, someone had cranked up the motor - it swirled angrier, splashed out a bit with every rotation, white froth skimmed peaks of water. Looking out to the sea beyond, this couldn’t have been sited better, just inside the pier - evocatively Kapoor brought the sea inside, still retaining an artist’s concern of form and matter and colour, despite the intruding cautionary railing.
Xu Bing’s copying of a Ming dynasty artist’s Xu Ben’s landscape painting using shadow play - recreating the scene using leaves, fibres and discarded material -pushed ways of seeing and making, in a vast cinematic display. A comment too, on Chinese 16th century explorations to this coast, and now, as the reproduction factory of the world.
Nikhil Chopra’s ‘La Perle Noire II: Aspinwall House’ saw his now familiar transformation during a performance finally find a perfect fit. The 50hour performance saw the drawings fill the walls of confinement, the subject then transformed into a grand, departing ruler. Mithu Sen’s ‘I have only one language, it is not mine’ saw an unscripted performance, with Sen interacting over 3 days with children in a Kerala orphanage. Reduced by software to a drawing-like poignant video, it inadvertently raised ethical questions of ‘what after’ an artist’s engagement thus.
Down the road at Pepper house, Benitha Percival’s fragrant, sculpture studio castings harks to St Thomas’ landing at Muziris, Prajakta Potnis plays with the transience of projected images and the permanence of brick engravings, even as her ghostlike drawings bridge that temporality. Her domestic implements and vegetable mise-en-scenes riff against a Cold War Nixon-Khrushchev dialogue that took place in a mod ular kitchen at a trade fair. Bharti Kher floors the attic with ‘Three Decimal Points\Of a Minute\Of a Second\Of a Degree’. Kher suspends a series of wooden triangles with an angular pendulum, all sized differently, they play with scale as an ensemble as well as playing off each other Seen against the passing scene outside, it is at once a maritime plotting tool as well as a reference to the colonial measuring of India’s rivers, mountains and plains for their worth to Empire; mariners we are all.
Rafael Lozano- Hemmer’s interactive sound piece at David Hall subverts national anthems and proportionate defence spending into a symphonic graph. It speaks well to K.G. Subramanyam’s mural ‘War of Relics’ where folklore meets contemporary conflict in a hybridity that matches Kochi’s past and present. Michael Stevens, Vsauce (like Vodka shots, it peppered the venues) never worked here, but Guido van der Werve’s video Nummer acht: Everything is going to be alright, had a man walking on thin ice, a looming ice breaker ship ten metres behind him. Ironically it summed up the precarious beginning of this biennale.
At Kashi Art Gallery, the Raqs Media Collective’s ‘Log entry before the Storm’ starts out as a promising experiential trip but flummoxes with direct references in subsequent rooms, the immersive play of light and sound and color disturbed by image and text. CSI Bungalow had architect Bijoy Jain’s process and concerns in materiality precede Arun KS’ controlled, multilayered work and Hamra Abbas’ precision, disrupted by a dismal install.
I waited in vain to see William Kentridge’s videos and Mona Hatoum’s drawings, go up at Durbar Hall, to see Janine Antoni, Mark Formanek, Katie Paterson, Chen Chieh-jen, Martin Creed among others that still weren’t installed by the time most left. They are being installed slowly but perhaps keeping the artists to a more manageable number would have been prudent. Another issue was the stop-start of anything that needed electricity. Video works would stop, Ryota Kuwakubo’s shadow-throwing train lay in darkness often, Theo Eshetu’s kaleidoscopic Anima Mundi mesmerized when on, but lay in a drab non-function most of the time.
Francesco Clemente’s imagery filled tent seemed more suited to desert than sea, and I rather wished for Hans op de Beeck ‘Sea of Tranquility’ that played in Art Basel Unlimited: it would have resonated more rather than the drawings on display.
The seminar ‘Terra Trema’ conceptualised by Geeta Kapur started off by a recant of Kochi’s cosmopolitanism (Rajan Gurukkal) countered by the cosmopolitanism in language - the absorbing of foreign words in Malayalam (N.S. Madhavan) - the latest being ‘binnale’. Reem Fadda was a passionate Mid East voice in the usefulness of art in strife and the new ways of engaging curatorially with what is happening in the Mid East. The opening film of the Artists_Cinema program had John Abraham’s Amma Ariyan in the segment curated by Ashish Rajadhyaksha. After several stop-starts, it was screened from midway; once over, it was played from the beginning - still it was fascinating to see the familiar Fort Kochi streets come alive in rigorous communist times.
Still, nameless-and-faceless or not, here’s my choice:
not to shut up. To sing on, inspite of attacks,
to sing (while my dreams are being murdered by facts)
praises of butterflies broken on racks.
- Salman Rushdie, 6 March 1989
Rushdie may have spoken of another reality, but in this almost magic realism in Fort Kochi, this broken-in-bits biennale dreamed on; battered by facts, what was achieved despite, won’t shut up.
Kallat delivers a satisfying show, not one where spectacular pieces scream but allows a breathing together, for smaller works to shine, for forgotten spaces to be lit again - it’s a panoply of little stars in one big sky.