Artist Sudarshan Shetty’s curatorial note for the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale begins with the story of a boy who goes to meet a sage. He sits for hours in a still, dark room as she meditates. “Then, gathering the world into the pupil of her eye, the sage looks up… through the layering of visions, the sage creates multiple understandings of the world, speaking those to the young traveller in front of her,” writes Shetty.
In keeping with this curatorial vision, titled Forming in the pupil of an eye, the present edition of the biennale presents artworks that essentially create multiple, layered worlds and urge viewers to move between them. There is the past and the present, there is utopia and dystopia, there is reality altered by sound and scale—and there are several still, dark rooms, that like the boy in the story, might compel viewers to seek their own interior worlds.
Performative and participative pieces feature strongly in the biennale programme, including the highly political Composition on Water (2016) by theatre practitioner Anamika Haksar, which is based on texts by Dalit writers. But through the vast vocabulary of the event, there are two tropes that stand out. Shetty’s predisposition to poetry and language is evident not only in the inclusion of writers and poets such as Sharmishtha Mohanty, Raúl Zurita and Ouyang Jianghe (known as one of the “Five Masters from Sichuan”) but also in an unusual experiment in which the Argentinian writer Sergio Chejfecs presents pages of his novel Baroni on walls through the city. And then there’s water, particularly the idea of a river, which finds its way in several works. Both language and water stand for a fluidity that Forming in the pupil of an eye seeks to embody.
The biennale, which opened on December 12, brings together works by 97 artists from 35 countries. The artworks are housed in heritage buildings, abandoned warehouses and galleries across Fort Kochi and Ernakulum, even spilling on to streets and rickshaws.
Vogue picks the must-visit works from the four principal venues of the biennale (Aspinwall House, Pepper House, Anand Warehouse and Cabral Yard).
The Sea of Pain (immersive installation with text and seawater, 2016) by Raúl Zurita
Venue: Aspinwall House
Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, announced as the first artist of the biennale, has created an immersive installation in which warehouse architecture meets text and sound. “Don’t you hear me? In the sea of pain… Won’t you come back, Never again, In the sea of pain?”—Zurita’s words are printed on one wall and viewers are encouraged to take their shoes off and wade through a stretch of seawater to read the poem in its entirety.
In the past, Zurita has written poems into the sands of the Atacama Desert (No shame nor fear, 1993). The Sea of Pain is dedicated to one particular casualty of the Syrian refugee crisis—five-year-old Galip Kurdi, whose brother Aylan Kurdi became the icon of the Syrian crisis. Here, the act of participating—literally, getting your feet wet—breaks down the dam walls of empathy.
Image: Rohit Chawla
River of Ideas (sculpture and video installation, 2016) by Chittrovanu Mazumdar
Venue: Aspinwall House
A floor above The Sea of Pain, is a bridge that invites you to walk over a river of fire, composed of hundreds of tiny electric bulbs. At first, Chittrovanu Mazumdar’s large-scale installation evokes the Phlegethon, the mythical Greek ‘river of fire’. But it is an amalgamation of many ideas and many rivers, from the Seine to the Ganga, and hidden ones such as the Saraswati, Mazumdar points out.
Taking up a large, dark room, the Franco-Bengali artist’s primary installation is accompanied by sound and four complementary mixed media works, which can be seen as portals to the future or tantric altars to the past. Rendered in Mazumdar’s distinctive palette of black, red and gold, navigating the River of Ideas is an intensely sensorial and provocative experience.
Image: Rohit Chawla
The Pyramid of Exiled Poets (mixed media architectural structure and recordings of poems, 2016) by Aleš Šteger
Venue: Aspinwall House
The Slovenian poet, novelist and essayist Aleš Šteger’s pyramid-like structure is installed in the courtyard of Aspinwall House, seducing visitors with its central location and its title. It is a mythic archaeological site, its form referencing the Great Pyramid of Giza, but instead of relics of kings and glory, it is a resting place for the poetry of Publius Ovidius Naso, Dante Alighieri, Bertolt Brecht, Czeslaw Milosz, Mahmoud Darwish, Yang Lian, Joseph Brodksy, Ivan Blatny and Cesar Vallejo.
Walking into its pitch dark interior, redolent of earth smells, the haunting sounds of the foreign language poems are the only guides. You might stumble but do refrain from using your cellphone torches. For as the biennale guide says: “What forms in the pupil of our eyes as viewers also comes about in the sounds we hear in our ears and in the textures we feel with our hands and feet.” And the darkness can be a helpful ally for all of the above.
Image: Rohit Chawla
Prime (piped sound and wood, 2016) by Camille Norment
Venue: Aspinwall House
The Norwegian artist Camille Norment is interested in how music and sound is embedded in society. Her installation at the biennale, in a room facing the sea, washed by ambient light and sound, comprises a series of benches emanating looped recordings of deep, resonant voices murmuring pre-lingual compositions. The voices are similar to humming (originating from the African American church practice of moaning). It might remind viewers of Amar Kanwar’s Listening Benches (2013) but in this case, as you sit on the benches, you feel the sound vibrations in your skin and body. It is language at its purest, evoking something bodily and visceral.
Image: Rohit Chawla
Sourcemouth: Liquidbody (three-screen film and sound installation, 2016) by Hanna Tuulikki
Venue: Pepper House
One of the most effective dialogues between the traditional and the contemporary is this audiovisual installation by Scottish artist, composer and performer Hanna Tuulikki, who collaborated with the Kutiyattam exponent Kapila Venu. At the heart of the work is a gestural sequence known as Nadi Varnana (River Description) from Kutiyattam–a form of Sanskrit theatre practiced in Kerala, and one of India’s oldest living performing arts. Through exaggerated gestures made with the eyes and hands, it represents the river cycle as a sequence of codified movements: the first rain on the mountain top, rivulets becoming mountain streams, fast flowing river, and the slow meander to the sea.
Tuulikki adapts the traditional sequence into a performance-to-camera, creating three interlinked films. In the first, her silver-painted figure traces each stage of the river’s journey. Projected onto a second screen, the second film is a closeup of Tuulikki’s eyes. And on a third screen, her disembodied lips mouth instructions for the performance. One video stops when the other begins, creating an endless flow between the old and the new, the body and the mind, and language and rhythm.
Image courtesy: Hanna Tuulikki
Inverso Mundus (video installation, 2015) by AES+F
Venue: Anand Warehouse
This was the work Vogue singled out in the December issue and while the Russian collective’s practice is well documented online (including a preview of Inverso Mundus), seeing the dystopic fantasy play out on a larger-than-life screen in the biennale’s most charming venue is an experience not to be missed. As the title suggests, Inverso Mundus depicts a world upside down. There are scenes of absurd utopias: fish fly, female inquisitors torture men on Ikea-like structures and students punish teachers. Drawing from 16-century engravings on the lines of “the world upside down,” in this interpretation, popular medieval scenes appear as everyday episodes of contemporary life.
Comprising conceptual architects, photographers and designers, the group’s work has developed at the intersection of photography, video and digital technology.
I asked the artists if they’ve heard of the Hindu notion of kalyug. “Our idea is that now we live in a permanent apocalypse. This is not apocalypse; this is not even post-apocalypse. It’s a way of being,” says AES+F’s Lev Evzovich. The canny thing about housing this work at Anand Warehouse is that on stepping out of the room one immediately confronts a breezy deck on the backwaters. It is a particularly beautiful location, which makes travelling back from dystopia even more pronounced.
Image courtesy: AES+F
Dwelling Kappiri Spirits (lace curtain, aluminum, wood, light and forever burning cigar, 2016) by Gabriel Lester
Venue: Aspinwall House
Kochi was a centre for slave trade in the 16th century. And while not much remains in Fort Kochi and Mattancherry to remind people of the African slaves who once lived here (Kappiri is the local slang for African slaves), Amsterdam-based artist and filmmaker Gabriel Lester’s installation speaks of that history. The legend goes that when the Dutch pushed the Portuguese out of Kerala in the 17th century, Portuguese traders buried their riches under large trees and sacrificed their African slaves so their ghosts would guard the treasure.
Lester has a propensity for capturing breeze, a previous installation Melancholia in Arcadia (2011) featured billowing Great Gatsby-like curtains stranded midair. His installation here features a tilted wooden room with six white curtains frozen in time. But inside the house, a forever burning cigar—an offering to the Kappiri spirit—signifies the passage of time and ushers the harrowing history into the present. Lester’s work with film spills over here with the idea of a real-life freeze frame. The scenography points to what has happened (a strong breeze blew through) and what might happen (the house may fall over). But some things, like the cigar, will burn forever.
Image courtesy: Gabriel Lester
Calls (Bells, fork, wineglass, horn, electric magnet, ribbon, cloth, coil, suitcase etc. 2013-16) by Yuko Mohri
Venue: Aspinwall House
Yuko Mohri’s inventive sound installation takes up a white-tiled space, a former laboratory in Aspinwall House. Tokyo-based Mohri makes kinetic-sonic sculptures that draw on the Japanese belief in the return of the dead to ‘call’ on their descendants. She gathers discarded objects which move in response to magnetic fields and force. In an appropriate laboratory setting, Mohri uses ideas of gravity, magnetism, light and wind to animate her work.
Like Hanna Tuulikki and Gabriel Lester, Mohri’s work is a contemporary response to folk beliefs and customs. She uses the idea of ‘circuits’ in metaphoric ways, to create sound but also to connect the spirit world and the physical world.
Image: Rohit Chawla
Garbh (mixed media sculpture with holy ash, 2016) by GR Iranna
Venue: Aspinwall House
GR Iranna’s giant egg sculpture is composed of holy ash or vibhuti or bhasma and made even more impressive by its placement in the small room it occupies. The title alludes to a womb but its material is derived from what remains when ritualistic wood is burnt or even the burning of a body after death—immediately drawings links between life and death. With little space for the viewer to navigate around the work, it prompts other sensorial dimensions, such as touch, temperature and smell, to come to play.
Image courtesy: Kochi Biennale Foundation
12:30 (mixed media sculptures, 2015) by Sirous Namazi
Venue: Aspinwall House
Sirous Namazi’s installation comprises portraits of domestic memories. Some are broad memories like a stack of metal foldable chairs, a handsome carpet, television, a bathroom basin. Some are more tender: a mirror with its silver backing delicately flaking off.
12:30 is the evocation of an absent home. It is a bold gesture to rebuild what has been confiscated. Namazi’s installation is a remembering of the key moments that led to his family’s escape to Sweden from Iran in 1978 as a result of the persecution of the Baha’i faith in Shiraz. It is his attempt to represent individual objects of his childhood home, the fragmented memories creating a fractured but reassuring sense of whole. The different objects are presented as precious museum artefacts. It also points to the fact that no matter how much we try to remember, there is always something lost.
Image courtesy: Galerie Nordenhake
Secret Dialogues (charcoal on transparent sheets, 2016) by C Bhagyanath
Venue: Aspinwall House
C Bhagyanath presents a portrait of the self in the world, making the transparent apparent. He draws from the ancient folk forms of Theyyam in his native north Kerala, a living practice that has been ongoing for centuries. Secret Dialogues is very much a story of layers and a conversation with the viewers throughout the duration of the biennale, when the artist will inhabit a studio space and continue to create drawings on translucent sheets.
Image: Rohit Chawla
I make new the song born of the old (video projection and sound recording, 2016) by Sharmishtha Mohanty
Venue: Aspinwall House
The title of this year’s biennale, Forming in the pupil of an eye, is derived from a work by Mohanty, a longtime creative collaborator of Shetty’s. As with others such as Raul Zurita, Ouyang Jianghe and Sergio Chejfec, she too spatially reconsiders her text.
Mohanty’s poetry is projected on a door opening out to the sea, spilling on to the floor below. The words disappear, some reappear, building layers of meaning. Crucially, the text appears to flow down from the door to the floor. You might look away, you might step out of the room, but the poetry loops on. And it stretches into infinity.
Image: Rohit Chawla
Note: The biennale includes performance works and collateral events around the city, neither of which have been covered here. Some artworks were awaiting installation at the time of the writer’s visit.
The biennale is ongoing till March 29 2017. Visit Kochimuzirisbiennale.org for maps and details.
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