The Kochi Muziris Art Biennale

As a study tour for our Art and Design classes we had the opportunity to visit the Kochi Muziris Art Biennale!! It was an OSM experience and all of us luvd it!! Later at school we were each asked to do a written assignment on it and mine is what follows... 

The city of Kochi was dumbfounded a few months ago by a sudden gust of strange, foreign smells and tongues. Kochi has been a centre for tourists for a long time now but the city has seen none like the ones that came recently. They, unlike the usual tourist of Kochi who simply laze around, were here for work – hard work and that too on something the city had never really been connected to – art!! India’s first art biennale ‘The Kochi Muziris Art Biennale’ was taking place here and that is no mere an event for the country.   The organisers of this biennale had to carefully pick 14 venues around the city keeping in mind the city's historical importance and the biennale's theme of Muziris, the ancient port city of Muziris. Muziris, what the locals like to call the “first Kochi” was the trade centre of the region, mainly popular for its export of spices. And so after years of negligence, the old, battered down warehouses of Fort Kochi were buzzing with activity again.

A biennale artwork unlike the exhibits in museums and galleries, are site-specific and the artists have to design and plan their exhibit according to their given setting. The artist lives in to his setting, understands its historical and cultural importance, adds a bit of himself and comes up with his final work. In the case of the Kochi Biennale, the artist would view his setting as the sea, the port, the people, their history and anything that he sees and feels define Kochi.

Each work has an idea to convey, a story to tell. A political, social, cultural or historical statement is made with the work. It would express the views, beliefs and emotions of the artist towards the theme he/she worked on. A work that I really felt captured the feelings of its artist had a made up grave with candles over it below a wall art of a cruelly bruised baby. The installation was voicing the intense pain felt by the girl who fell victim to the recent Delhi rape case.

 

 The artists participating in the biennale have used different ways to represent their ideas. There are photographs, paintings, sculptures, installations etc. Installations were found in plenty in the Art Biennale as it is one form of art that provides a space to bring in all our five senses to work. An installation in the Aspinwall (one of the venues) for example had the artist using spices (for smell and sight) to make music (for sound) with our touch. This work is also important for its ability to have been able to incorporate the cultural reference of 'spices' into the art piece.

The photography exhibition put up by Atul Dodiya really caught my eye. Having had an interest in this subject now for sometime, the photos really interested me. It was not just the interesting way he exhibited it but also because of its rather informal approach. Some were pictures that even an average person with just the basic sense of photography would probably delete from his camera. They were quite personal and natural ones and by just looking at it you would know that the people in it were not posing for a photo to be put up in the Biennale but this truthfully just added to the charm. You would notice that though they may not be perfect there was a beauty in each of the photographs, there was a natural composition to it, there was a lot of truth revealed in the subject's unpreparedness. What i like most of this exhibition is that it was able to convey the artist's perception of the Biennale wonderfully. Being natural, being unique and most importantly being yourself - after all that's what the Kochi Biennale is all about!