The new port of call for art

Vandana Shukla

Kochi has harboured millions of ships through its long maritime history. One can see the myriad cultures that docked here through a millennia, thrive. Now, it has woven an art show around the sharp turns of history brought about these journeys. The number of visitors queuing up at the ticket window of Kochi Muziris Biennale-2014, close to a month after its inauguration, indicate, Kochi could soon become the Mecca of art. Graffiti have appeared on the walls leading to Aspinwall House, the main venue, made by some unknown artist. It is a prelude to expect the unexpected, which is in the right spirit of an art biennale.

India’s first art biennale, in its second edition, spread across eight main venues of Fort Kochi, Mattancherry, Irnakulam and a few islands, has aroused curiosity in the global art world for its fresh format. The first chapter was visited by close to a million people. This year, curator Jitish Kallat has selected works of 93 artists from 30 countries that broaden the visual experience by incorporating artistic expressions using smells, sounds, words, and touch with diverse and rich materiality. The works are free from the demands of market imposed by galleries and museums. Biennale exhibits are not for sale.

The theme Whorled Explorations, is befitting. Kochi is closely linked to the maritime chapter of the age of discovery, its map changed rapidly in the 1500, triggered by the colonial struggle of the Portuguese, the Dutch and then the British.

Aspinwall House, a 150-year-old seafront spice warehouse, turned into a laboratory of art, resonates with its own maritime history, creating interesting cross currents. All the 69 works exhibited here interrogate, analyse and present — aesthetically — the past and present explorations of the civilizational crisis at different points in history. The canvas, for lack of a better expression, since contemporary expression of art has broken free from the two dimensional framed space, is global here.

Out of the morgue of museum

Dinh Q Le, a Vietnamese artist, evokes the trauma and desperation of people from across history that embarked on treacherous journeys to flee violence. He was driven away during the intense fighting between Vietnam and Kambodia’s Khmer Rouge, at the age of 10. His family fled in boats to Thailand. In his installation Erasure Le includes a broken boat, and debris arranged with thousands of photographs, left behind by families who fled the war. Flickering within this sea of memories is the video of a replica of 19th century ship. The powerful image connects the contemporary debates around immigrants and asylum seekers.

In her highly abstract installation using water, light and air, Iqra Tanveer, of Pakistan, Wave II, captures the powerful elements of nature, believed to be beyond capture, for example — the ocean. The installation consists of a rectangular transparent container filled with water, positioned behind an opening in a wall. Within this frame, waves move vigorously, constantly altering the surface of the water and the light that filters through it, like a mini ocean, creating an ocean by the human will!

Descension, by Anish Kapoor, winner of the 1991 Turner Prize, invites by the gurgling sound of waters that travel through the corridors. As you reach the large hall, a black water vortex greets you with its ferocious, constant churning. In his own words, Kapoor doesn’t want it to be seen as an art work, he wants the viewer to experience the phenomenon. The work is an outcome of his engagement with emptiness, as the concrete state of objects. A 12-feet-deep hole churns water with a motor propeller to destabilise our perception of solidity of the ground we stand on. In its state of flux and motion, it confronts the viewer with force and an unknowable interior. Kapoor’s father was a hydrographer with the Indian Navy and was posted in Kochi about 40 years back.

Found on the lost trails

Xu Bing’s Background Story interrogates our habits of visual perception. This Chinese artist uses the play of light and shadow to create a work that resembles classical Chinese painting, by arranging a few leaves, twigs and discarded materials on a translucent screen. When viewed from the other side, it creates a fantastic illusion — identical to a classical painting. The simple brilliance of Ryota Kuwakubo’s train ride, Lost # 12 leaves one mesmerised. This Japanese artist creates a kinetic sculpture with assorted objects found in the markets of Kochi to create a phantom landscape. A small, light-point source fitted to the front of a moving train runs slowly over rails laid on the gallery floor. When illuminated at close range by the moving train, the tiny objects placed next to the track produce a mesmerising procession of shadows that rise and fall, rescaling the relationship of the objects with viewer’s body, integrating their experience with the journey. Art is no more to be a ‘seen’ object, the viewer’s experience of art spells contemporary art.

On the first floor of Aspinwall House, the widows bring in a bit of sea, adding a fresh dimension to the works displayed. Sudhir Patwardhan’s Building a Home: Exploring the World, investigates the twin human impulses towards migration and settlement. The highly evocative texts on this triptych insert the legend of Babel, referring to the centrality of language in human history and our ability to perceive and interpret the universe with its help.

Muhanned Cader’s landscapes, freed from the rectangular frames within which they are usually imprisoned, are a hangover from our colonial past, says the artist. His freed landscapes take myriad shapes; he imagines the first frame came when the man looked at the world through the mouth of a cave.

Puncturing time

In the backyard of Pepper House, another 19th century spice warehouse, Gigi Scaria’s sculptural installation Chronicles of the Shores Foretold, is composed of a giant bell, hoisted by bamboo poles. It was lifted in a performance by the traditional dockyard workers Mappila Khalasis, to draw together multiple histories and mythologies of labour, religion and maritime trade. The bell, a symbol of time and mortality is punctured by Scaria, letting the backwaters seep through it, symbolically puncturing time.

Benitha Perciyal’s fragrant sculptures of the early Christian apostles are cast in incense and are fragmented. The fragility of incense and its capacity for constant regeneration turns The Fires of Faith sculptures into a simultaneous act of mending and restoring, she seems to be piecing together the fragmented pieces of history. While in Sumakshi Singh’s interactive installation, the viewer can alter the narrative by moving through this illusionary labyrinth. The 70-feet long maze, made of hanging scroll paper has maritime voyages, birds, whirling planets, including the viewers, entering and leaving, seeking their spot in this illusionary manuscript. Voyages of the external world are to be the reflections of the inner journeys, through which we locate ourselves in space, time, cultural histories and in our own narrative, says the artist.

Neha Choksi’s emotionally charged video Iceboat exhumes narratives of doomed voyages as much as of the ones that made it. Dressed like a renunciate, she rows a boat made of ice on the vast ocean. The boat melts, releasing her into the womb of water, yet she calmly persists in her endeavour to stay afloat despite the inevitability of collapse and decay. As you step out of the Pepper House, you hear the ship’s hooter docking nearby. A reminder — we are all on a voyage, explorers.