Saturday 14 November 2015

Art Goes Global - Kochi-Muziris Biennale


Art Goes Global  –  Kochi-Muziris Biennale





           



Kochi-Muziris Biennale is India’s most prestigious art festival and exhibition – the country’s answer to the Venice Biennale and Art Basel. It is an event to which collectors, gallery owners and artists return every two years. 




The 2014 KMB has attracted a million footfalls and has succeeded in taking art to the streets, ancient warehouses and sea forts of Kochi.                                                                                            


In such a short span, KMB has acquired a reputation for being an art event of global standards.  Kochi-Muziris Biennale brings in aspects of tradition and folklore that Kerala is famous for.  There are so many collateral events associated with KMB - dance, drama, theatre et al. Kochi-Muziris Biennale is genuinely a landmark in the artistic world.

KBF (Kochi Biennale Foundation) was founded in 2010 by artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu.  The next edition was after two years in 2014 curated by artist Jitish Kallat.  Sudarshan Shetty has been appointed as artistic Director and the curator for 2016 KMB (Kochi-Muziris Biennale). 

Incidentally, all the curators hitherto are from JJ School of Arts ( Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Arts), Mumbai.  The first two editions had Keralites as curators and the third edition 2016 KMB has a curator in Sudarshan Shetty from the neighboring town of Mangalore.  Kochi-Muziris Biennale is organized once in every two years in Kochi and its hinterlands.  Kerala’s population which has an enviable 100% literacy is the most apt choice to appreciate and make the event a successful one on par with the international biennales.  There are a sizeable number of art enthusiasts across Kerala.  The first edition of KMB had 94 artists from 23 countries participating in it and the location spanning across the City of Kochi, Wellington Island, Bolgatty Palace and the outskirts of Kochi. Million visitors from the state and across India and the world took advantage of the first two editions of KMB.  The third edition of 2016 is slated to be even bigger scale than its predecessors.  The space has been created to suit the appreciating art lovers from across the globe. The Students’ biennale and Children’s biennale is a part of 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

Biennale is Italian for "biennial" or "every other year" and can be used to describe any event that happens every two years. It is most commonly used within the art world to describe large-scale international contemporary art exhibitions, stemming from the use of the phrase for the Venice Biennale, which was first held in 1895.

The Kochi-Muziris Biennale


 

 

 

 

The Kochi-Muziris Biennale is an international exhibition of contemporary art hosted in the city of Kochi, India. The Biennale draws on the rich tradition of public action in Kerala to become a platform for cultural and artistic engagement.

It would not be amiss to say that the Kochi-Muziris Biennale cannot be held elsewhere. There is an intimate relation between the idea and the ambition of the Biennale and its location in Kochi. Kochi has been and continues to be home to diverse communities both from within India and outside. This cosmopolitanism of Kochi possibly derives from its continuity with the ancient port of Muziris, today covered and preserved by mud and mythology. It is the strength of this alternative cosmopolitanism that the hyphenation of the Biennale seeks to invoke.

The inaugural edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale opened on December 12, 2012 and ran for 96 days till March 13, 2013. Curated by artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, the Biennale featured 94 artists from 23 different countries, including 44 artists from India.

The second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale opened on December 12, 2014 and ran  for 108 days till March 29, 2015. Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014 was curated by Jitish Kallat.

The first two editions of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, held in 2012 and 2014, had a combined draw of nearly a million visitors. Drawing on the rich tradition of public action in Kerala, the Biennale has established itself as a centre for artistic engagement in India. Along with hosting the Biennale, the Kochi Biennale Foundation also conducts numerous other socially and culturally relevant art and educational projects.
The Kochi-Muziris Biennale is an international exhibition of contemporary art being held in Kochi, Kerala every two years. The first edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale began on 12/12/12 and was set in spaces across Kochi, Muziris and surrounding islands. There were shows in existing galleries and site-specific installations in public spaces, heritage buildings and disused warehouse structures. Indian and international artists were invited to exhibit artworks across a variety of mediums including film, installation, painting, sculpture, new media and performance art. Through the celebration of contemporary art from around the world, The Kochi-Muziris Biennale seeks to invoke the historic cosmopolitan legacy of the modern metropolis of Kochi, and its mythical predecessor, the ancient port of Muziris. Alongside the exhibition the Biennale offered a rich programme of talks, seminars, screenings, music performances, workshops and educational activities for school children and visitors of all ages. In cooperation with the Muziris Heritage Project, The Kochi–Muziris Biennale seeks to link the past with the modern day present. The ancient city of Muziris, located 30 km from Kochi, was a prosperous seaport and financial centre in the 1st Century B.C. Believed to have been washed under the sea during the 1341 AD Periyar river 1flood, Muziris was a key link in the Indo-Roman Empire and Indo-Greek trade routes. Muziris drew legions of Roman, Greek, Chinese, Jewish and Arab traders from across the sea, whose influences, architectural and cultural, are still to be found in the area. The region is unique as it is said to be home to India’s first church (Mar Thoma church), first mosque (Cheraman Juma Masjid) and the oldest European monument (Portuguese fort). Today a series of archaeological sites remain which are currently being excavated and restored by conservation architects with the support of the State Government of Kerala and Indian Central Government. The archaeological and historical data gathering on ‘Muziris’ provides evidence to show that it was a veritable business and cultural centre, with far reaching international associations dating back more than 2000 years. Realizing its potential impact, the Government of India initiated an ambitious project to encompass a larger area including North Paravur and Kodungallur Taluks, which have various protected monuments. Today, the area is replete with numerous monuments from this era which speak volumes of its rich heritage.  These heritage and archaeological activities have been designed in a manner that involves local communities and encompasses wider development goals. The Muziris Heritage project is not about tourism alone, it is about making a significant difference through conservation, restoration, history, environmental projects, research, development of crafts and art forms, occupation and other community activities.

The 1st Kochi-Muziris Biennale’s Curators’ note












KBF founders Riyas Komu and Bose Krishnamachari


There couldn’t have been a better space than Kochi for symbolic free speech; a space for expressions created and leveraged by the various social activist movements. Kochi is the confluence of heterogeneity, a city where more than 30 non-‐Malayali communities have, over the centuries, come to find refuge, trade, proselytize and much else, only to develop roots and integrate into the local society. It is to this shore that one would bring in the practice of contrasting problems or adverse imagery with constructive imagery to create a force, specificity, confidence and conviction sometimes lacking in the more general, wishful, positive images. Critical imagery can only have its genesis in a shared space where celebrations of ethnicity or historical themes can collapse into metonymic utterances that cancel the distinctions between places and boundaries, aesthetics and politics, between life and art.
Kochi-Muziris Biennale explores the possibilities of blurring the boundaries, in a geographical region where boundaries are blurred in a local and cosmopolitan way, where the surroundings offer inspiration by way of the character of the place one can exhibit in. It can generate response to something that is already there as a public space in the neighborhoods, where perceived political content has been a major determinant of what survives and of what gets created as art in the first place.
Kochi’s cosmopolitanism is one that has been worn by generations in Kerala as a badge of honor even as it has led to a series of struggles, time and again, generating a curiosity about current realities, a complex one. It is one that is at the crux of the civilizational crisis — one that is economical, ideological and, thereby geo-‐political. The compendium of these complexities is what gives this biennale a context and an enquiry. It is a quest that brought the world to these shores and it is the allure of possibilities that inspired great thinkers and saints to embark on numerous adventures — of the body and the mind. The trails they have left behind needs treading upon at this juncture to make a provocative investigation into the entrails of all the conflicts that we see around the world. Conflicts that lend a modern explanation for the mutual distrust and misgivings that pervades in not just the immediate society but also snapping at the delicate fabric of India’s assertion as a nation-‐state and the globe that is ironically celebrating its flat character at the same time.
It is in this backdrop of an earnest enquiry that we propose to make Kochi the repository of emerging ideas and ideologies, an occasion to explore a mechanism to process, reflect and rewrite history, different histories, local, individual and collective that would confluence at Kochi. The Kochi Muziris Biennale proposes to open a new discourse, one that will explore a new, hitherto unknown language of narration.

Bose Krishnamachari & Riyas Komu
Curators
Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012

Curatorial Note of 2nd Kochi-Muziris Biennale


                                                             The interview of  Jitish Kallat



Two chronologically overlapping, but perhaps directly unrelated, historical episodes in Kerala during the 14th to 17th Centuries become parallel points of departure for Whorled Explorations. Drawing from them, allusions to the historical and the cosmological recur throughout the exhibition like exaggerated extensions to gestures we make when we try to see or understand something. We either go close to it or move away from it in space, to see it clearly; we also reflect back or forth in time to understand the present. Whorled Explorations draws upon this act of deliberation, across axes of time and space to interlace the bygone with the imminent, the terrestrial with the celestial.




         



      





From the 15th century, the shores of Kochi were closely linked to the maritime chapter of the ‘Age of Discovery’, a tale of grit, greed and human ingenuity, as a string of navigators arrived here after traversing­­ large uncharted portions of the planet seeking spices and riches. The era heralded an age of exchange, conquest, coercive trading and colonialism, animating the early processes of globalization. This drama of search, seduction and subjugation decisively altered the cartography of the planet. Within the shifting geography were sharp turns in history where we find, in an embryonic form, several of the themes we inherit in our world today.

The 14th to 16th Century was the time when astronomer-mathematicians belonging to what came to be known as the Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics, were making transformative propositions for understanding our planet and locating human existence within the wider cosmos. They were making mathematical breakthroughs, amongst them treatises on trigonometry and calculus. Acknowledging this vibrant history, Kochi might serve as an interesting site to invoke the mysterious expedition of our planet Earth, our shared dwelling hurtling through space at a dizzying velocity. None of the interdependent co-habitants of this twirling tenement seem to experience its speed or comprehend its direction; a productive state of uncertainty from where we may investigate several questions about our existence, take stock of our collective conflicts and ecological footprint, even as we continue to examine our place in an ever-inflating cosmos.

Whorled Explorations is conceived as a temporary observation deck hoisted at Kochi. The exhibition draws upon a wide glossary of signs from this legendary maritime gateway to bring together sensory and conceptual propositions that map our world referencing history, geography, cosmology, time, space, dreams and myths.



Jitish Kallat


Artistic Director
Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014

Kochi Biennale Foundation proudly announces Sudarshan Shetty as the artistic director and curator of the third edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale.






             

        






Interview of Sudarshan Shetty

The official announcement was made at the capital city of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, by the State Minister for Culture, KC Joseph in the presence of Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament, K Chandrika, Mayor of Thiruvananthapuram, Tony Chammany, Mayor of Kochi, M A Baby, former Minister for Culture, MLAs, top Government officials, Trustees of Kochi Biennale Foundation and other dignitaries from the world of art and culture.

While announcing the curator, the Minister for Culture, KC Joseph, emphasized the State’s commitment towards the Biennale. He also said: “The biennale as a contemporary art project has renewed India’s cultural positioning and has placed Kochi and Kerala on the global cultural map. Two successful editions of Kochi-Muziris Biennale have shown Kochi Biennale Foundation’s ability to conduct an event of such cultural significance. The government of Kerala will extend full support in the coming years.”

After the announcement by the Minister, Sudarshan Shetty said: “Kochi-Muziris Biennale had seemed like an impossible dream. It is certainly a matter of privilege to be chosen by the Artistic Advisory Committee including the co-creators of the Biennale.” Speaking on the vision for the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, he said it will be something close to the heart and will look back at aspects of a shared past. He added that he is immensely happy to work towards the vision of a “People’s Biennale”.  He hopes his background, study of various cultural streams, love for history and contemporary politics, and his exposure to global art will come handy as he talks to artists around the world to participate in biennale.

Shetty says, “People are attracted by some drama initially, before they seriously begin interacting with art and understanding it beyond surface level”.  Shetty continues, ‘The good thing is that the foundation gives you a free hand to design the show”.  

The son of a Yakshagana artist (a performance art from Southern Karnataka), Shetty has often combined the fantastic with the macabre in his larger-than-life mechanical installations such as the 9000 kg double-decker bus with wings on show at the Maker Maxity building in Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla complex.
 
Speaking at the occasion, Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament, said “We are in for a treat as we have a curator who uses various medium to capture human sensibilities. We are fortunate to have an artist of such wide range, exposure, experience and international repute.”  

Shetty (b. 1961) completed his BFA in painting from Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai in 1985. Moving from painting exclusively to installation early on in his career, Shetty explores the fundamental ontological challenges presented by our immersion in a world of objects. His installations are developed around a rigorous grammar of materials, mechanical exposure and unlikely juxtapositions of things that may belong to culturally distinct spheres. Moreover, Shetty’s object language eschews narrative as well as established symbolism. He has exhibited widely in India and around the world. 

His recent shows include ‘Mimic Momento’, Galerie Daniel Templon, Brussels, 2015, ‘Constructs Constructions’, curated by Roobina Karode, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, 2015, ‘A Passage’ Staatliche Museum, Schwerin, Germany, 2015 ‘every broken moment, piece by piece’, GALLERYSKE, New Delhi, 2014, ‘The pieces earth took away’, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, 2012, ‘Critical Mass’, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, 2012, ‘Indian Highway’, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2012, ‘The Matters Within: New Contemporary Art of India’, curated by Betti-Sue Hertz, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2011, ‘Paris-Delhi-Bombay’, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2011, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, curated by Walter Vanhaerents and Pierre-Olivier Rollin, Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels, 2011, ‘India Inclusive’, World Economic Forum, Davos, 2011, ‘Contemplating the Void’, curated by Nancy Spector, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2010, Vancouver Biennale, Vancouver, 2009, and several others. Sudarshan Shetty was also a participating artist in the inaugural edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale curated by Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu in 2012.
              


                      
                                                               The wood carving art

Shetty was unanimously chosen by an Artistic Advisory Committee, appointed by the Kochi Biennale Foundation for the third edition. The Committee comprised artists Amar Kanwar, Atul Dodiya, Bharti Kher and Jyothi Basu, art critic and curator Ranjit Hoskote, patron Kiran Nadar, gallerist Shireen Gandhy along with Kochi Biennale Foundation trustees Sunil V, Riyas Komu and Bose Krishnamachari. The committee stated that the role of Sudarshan Shetty will be vital in furthering the social commitment, through arts, of the Biennale and the Foundation.

The talks and seminars series titled History Now seeks to complement the central exhibition at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014. The project brings a range of subjects and thinkers into contact with each other to address historically relevant issues impacting on our world today.  This initiative intends to further the intellectual and cultural objectives of the Kochi Biennale Foundation and to pursue its specific interest, which is to explore several centuries of cosmopolitanism associated with the port city of Kochi. The globe is being continually re-mapped by shifting cross-currents of trade and labor, ideologies and visions, solidarities and conflicts.  The ‘Now’ of the talk series treats the contemporary as an urgent object of inquiry.

About Kochi Biennale Foundation




The Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF) is a non-profit charitable trust engaged in promoting art & culture and educational activities in India; primary amongst them the hosting of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. KBF works around the year to strengthen contemporary art infrastructure and to broaden public access to art across India.

The Kochi Biennale Foundation is also engaged in the conservation of heritage properties and monuments and the uplifting of traditional forms of art and culture.

KBF was founded in 2010 by artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu.

Artists’ Cinema is a project that will bring the most interesting video art from around the world to Kochi. The project will be curated by eminent personalities from the world of cinema and art. The programme for each week is to be curated by a different person, allowing a diversity of styles and visions to come together. The curators will be selected by an advisory board that includes Amar Kanwar, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Amrit Gangar, Bina Paul Venugopal and CS Venkiteswaran.

The screenings will take place in the evenings from 6:30 to 8:30 at a specially designed screening space within the Pavillion at Aspinwall House, Fort Kochi. Artists’ Cinema will run for the 100 days during the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014.


Student's Biennale 2016






The Student’s Biennale, part of the Kochi Biennale Foundation’s educational initiatives, seeks to extend and strengthen art educational practices and infrastructure in India. The Student’s Biennale is alternative platform for BFA and MFA students from art-colleges in India to produce and exhibit work and for developing a professional pool of curators. The intention is to expose graduate and post-graduate art students as well as young curators to the processes of contemporary art-making and exhibition-making.

The project will be led by 15 young curators, who will work with students at art schools around India. The curators will be trained by an advisory and mentor group towards a Student’s Biennale exhibition that will run parallel to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016.

The first edition of the Student’s Biennale exhibited works by students from 37 art institutions and ran for the duration of the 2014 Biennale at two sites in Mattancheri.


CHILDREN’S BIENNALE   -





The Children’s Biennale is an initiative of the Kochi Biennale Foundation to contribute to the development of art education in India. It is an attempt to engage young learners and initiate them into art appreciation and art-making. This is intended to be platform for all stakeholders – learners, facilitators, parents and institutions – come together to explore fresh perspectives on and innovative methods of art engagement. The Children’s Biennale will have specially designed programs with a focus on conceptual learning through art. The programs will be inclusive and is meant for learners with different needs and of multiple age groups. This edition of the Children’s Biennale will include pre-visit and post-visit workshops in local schools, guided tours designed for specific age groups, and working with local schools for differently abled children to design and develop need-based engagements such as touch tours for the blind and workshops for facilitators. In addition to this, the Biennale will host learning groups from across the country and have online engagements that can be facilitated remotely for groups unable to visit the Biennale.



CULTURAL  PROGRAMMES –






      





                  




Curated by Keli Ramachandran and heralding the arrival of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014, the cultural programmes will commence a month before and continue throughout the entire duration of the Biennale. The Matilakom Chilappatikaram Festival and venues of the programmes which are spread across the Muziris region – Kochi, Kodungallur and Thripunithura – reflect the larger narrative of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

The cultural programmes will feature traditional artforms of Kerala, like Panchavadyam, Ottanthullal, Chavittunatakam, Daffmuttu, and Oppana. The programmes are to be curated by renowned performing arts expert Keli Ramachandran.

In addition to these, there will be contemporary theater events, movement arts performances, and music concerts.

Visual arts


Vincent van Gogh: The Church at Auvers(1890)

The visual arts are art forms such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, photography, video, filmmaking and architecture. Many artistic disciplines (performing arts, conceptual art, textile arts) involve aspects of the visual arts as well as arts of other types. Also included within the visual arts are the applied arts  such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design and decorative art.

Art world



Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is the most popular attraction of the Louvre


The art world is composed of all the people involved in the production, commission, presentation, preservation, promotion, chronicling, criticism, and sale of fine art. Howard S. Becker describes it as "the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produce(s) the kind of art works that art world is noted for" (Becker, 1982). In her book, Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton describes it as "a loose network of overlapping subcultures held together by a belief in art. They span the globe but cluster in art capitals like New York, London, Los Angeles, and Berlin." Other cities that can be classified as "art capitals" include Beijing, Brussels, Hong Kong, Miami, Paris, Rome and Tokyo; due to their large art festivals, followings and being centers of art production.





















The Venice International Film Festival is part of the Venice Biennale. The famous Golden Lion is awarded to the best film screening at the competition.

Venice's first International Biennale of contemporary art took place in 1895. This year's exhibition will be the 52nd.



The Great Exhibition in The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, in 1851, the first attempt to condense the representation of the world within a unitary exhibition space.

The Venice Biennale as an archetype


The structure of the Venice Biennale in 2005 with an international exhibition and the national pavilions to showcase the talents.

The Venice Biennale, a periodical large-scale cultural event founded in1895, served as an archetype of the biennales. Meant to become a World Fair focused on contemporary art, the Venice Biennale used as a pretext the wedding anniversary of the Italian king and followed up to several national exhibitions organised after Italy unification in 1861. The Biennale immediately put forth issues of city marketing, cultural tourism and urban regeneration, as it was meant to reposition Venice on the international cultural map after the crisis due to the end of the Grand Tour model and the weakening of the Venetian school of painting. Furthermore, the Gardens where the Biennale takes place were an abandoned city area that needed to be re-functionalised. In cultural terms, the Biennale was meant to provide on a biennial basis a platform for discussing contemporary art practices that were not represented in fine arts museums at the time. The early Biennale model already included some key points that are still constitutive of large-scale international art exhibitions today: a mix of city marketing, internationalism, gentrification issues and destination culture, and the spectacular, large scale of the event.

 

International biennales

The term is most commonly used in the context of major recurrent art exhibitions such as:
            

















I was a curious enthusiast to the first two editions of Kochi-Muziris Biennale.  I consider my inability to make it to the venue for the first two editions as an unfortunate loss and look forward to the forthcoming KMB event.

The art is in my blood as there are artists, writers and directors in the family and feel elated and proud to be an art lover and JOHNNY’S BLOG truly deserve to cover Kochi-Muziris Biennale.


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