India's Biennale Effect: A Politics of Contemporary Art 9781138203525, 9781315413495

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
List of illustrations
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART I Is art enough?
1 The Indian biennale effect
2 The making of the Indian artscape
3 ‘The Biennale was not the issue’: an interview with Riyas Komu
4 The cultural politics of ‘Whorled Explorations’
PART II Making work
5 Making a biennale: Art Interrupted
6 Curation as dialogue: Jitish Kallat in conversation
7 Painterly explorations and the social gestus of contemporary art
8 End of empire
PART III Beyond the event
9 ‘A people’s biennale’: a democracy of visual culture?
10 Towards a new art education
11 Regional effects: the rise of large-scale art events in South Asia
Index

Citation preview

INDIA’S BIENNALE EFFECT

India’s Kochi-Muziris Biennale has been described as one of the most significant newly emergent biennales, alongside Shanghai, Sharjah and Dakar. However, there have been few sustained and critical studies of these events as specific sites of production and reception of contemporary art. This book, engaging with the Kochi Biennale, provides detailed examination of what the editors term as the ‘biennale effect’ – a layered contestation of place, economics, art and politics. It presents a close reading of the unique context of the biennale as well as sets out a broader critical framework for understanding global contemporary art and its effects. Replete with illustrations, this book will serve as an important and rare resource for scholars and researchers of contemporary art, art history, visual cultures and media studies. Robert E. D’Souza is Head of Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK. Sunil Manghani is Reader in Critical and Cultural Theory, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK.

‘The Kochi-Muziris Biennale put India on the map of international contemporary visual culture. But the Biennale is much more than a global art event. India’s Biennale Effect draws out the Biennale’s greater complexity, revealing a movement of contemporary Indian citizens showing and telling their own story’. Chris Dercon, Director, Tate Modern, London, UK ‘This book is more than a source for “India’s first biennale”. It is a thoughtful, revisionist consideration of the received accounts of “biennale culture”, as it has been articulated in The Biennale Reader, and by writers such as Hans Belting, Jacques Rancière and Nicholas Mirzoeff. D’Souza and Manghani provide a context to consider the relation between the visual and the “grounds of the political”, and to articulate what it means, in Gandhi’s image, to have “the cultures of all the lands” blow through the house, without tearing it down’. James Elkins, E. C. Chadbourne Chair of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA ‘With a focus on the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, founded in 2012, India’s Biennale Effect maps the complex and shifting interrelationships among local cultural heritage, a regional art market and global cultural circulations that define the special nature and potential role of the biennale in India’. Ranjit Hoskote, co-curator, 7th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea ‘While the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is rooted in site specificity, its editions are capable of addressing audiences far beyond the city in which it takes place – to places where people across the globe can have a conversation. This book is the result of such conversations, yet equally explores the various competing and complementing frames and directions through which such dialogue must flow’. Marieke van Hal, Founder of the Biennial Foundation ‘More than the number of visitors or the media attention it receives, the success of a biennale should more importantly be measured in terms of its reverberations within the worldwide artists’ communities as well as by its scholarly impact. With its in-depth academic writing, both thoughtful and entertaining, India’s Biennale Effect is a testament to the latter and an important read for anyone interested in the arts’. Thomas Girst, Head of Cultural Engagement, BMW Group ‘India’s Biennale Effect is situated at the heart of critical debates around global art history and contemporary artists’ practice. It offers an array of fascinating insights into the unique conjunction of people, place, time, politics, economics and aesthetics that constitutes India’s first Biennale’. Frances Morris, Director, Tate Modern, London, UK

INDIA’S BIENNALE EFFECT A politics of contemporary art

Edited by Robert E. D’Souza and Sunil Manghani

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Robert E. D’Souza and Sunil Manghani; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Robert E. D’Souza and Sunil Manghani to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book. ISBN: 978-1-138-20352-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-41349-5 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of illustrations Contributors Acknowledgements

vii x xiii

Introduction

3

R O B E RT E . D ’ S O U Z A AND S UNI L MANGHANI

PART I

Is art enough?

23

1 The Indian biennale effect

25

R O B E RT E . D ’ S O U Z A

2 The making of the Indian artscape

58

D H R I TA B R ATA B HATTACHARJ YA TATO

3 ‘The Biennale was not the issue’: an interview with Riyas Komu

76

R I YA S K O M U , R O BE RT E . D’S OUZ A AND S UNI L MANGHANI

4 The cultural politics of ‘Whorled Explorations’ RYA N B I S H O P

v

97

CONTENTS

PART II

Making work

113

5 Making a biennale: Art Interrupted

115

H AT T I E B OW E R I NG, ROB E RT E . D’S OUZ A AND S U N I L M A N G H ANI

6 Curation as dialogue: Jitish Kallat in conversation

132

J I T I S H K A L L AT, ROB E RT E . D’S OUZ A AND S UNI L MANGHANI

7 Painterly explorations and the social gestus of contemporary art

160

S U N I L M A N G H ANI

8 End of empire

180

R O B E RT E . D ’ S OUZ A

PART III

Beyond the event

209

9 ‘A people’s biennale’: a democracy of visual culture?

211

S U N I L M A N G H ANI

10 Towards a new art education

231

A N A N N YA M E HTTA

11 Regional effects: the rise of large-scale art events in South Asia

255

A M I T K U M A R J AI N

Index

274

vi

ILLUSTRATIONS

I.1a Kochi-Muziris Biennale poster on a wall in Fort Kochi, 2012 I.1b ‘Biennale City’ poster, Fort Kochi, 2014 I.2 ‘It’s My Biennale’ campaign posters I.3 ‘Surrender to the Taste of Europe’ advertising poster, Kochi International Airport, July 2014 I.4 The international container terminal in Vallarpadam in Kochi, 2012 I.5 The Ship of Tarshish, by Indian artist Prasad Raghavan at Aspinwall House, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2012 I.6 Life Is a River (2012), by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto I.7 Multichannel video installation by CAMP, an artists’ collective from Mumbai, Pepper House, 2012 I.8 Stopover, an installation of spice grindstones by Indian artist Sheela Gowda and Christoph Storz, at the dockside of Aspinwall House, 2012 I.9 Posters from the Kochi-Muziris Biennale found on the streets of Kochi, 2012 1.1 LOOKHERE, charcoal wall portraits of local Keralites, by Australian artist Daniel Connell on the exterior of a local tea shop 1.2 Black Gold, installation of pottery shards by Indian artist Vivan Sundaram at Aspinwall House at the first Biennale 1.3 The Democratic Youth Forum India (DYFI) offices of Fort Kochi 1.4 Hand-painted statement, artist unknown, on the exterior of a local wall in Fort Kochi 1.5 Political flag suspended from car on the freeway out of Kochi 4.1 Khalil Rabah, Biproduct, 2010 vii

1 2 6 9 12 13 14 15

16 22

31 39 43 49 54 98

ILLUSTRATIONS

4.2 4.3

Kader Attia, Independence Disillusionment, 2014 106 Jitish Kallat, ‘The World Is (a) Flat’, from personal notebooks used in preparation for the curation of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2014 107 5.1–5.51 Film stills from Art: Interrupted. Directed by Hattie Bowering, Wild Beast Media FZE, 2015 119–131 6.1 From first page of the first notebook of Jitish Kallat in preparation for the Biennale, dated midnight, 16 October 2013 134 6.2 Mark Formaneck, Standard Time (2007) 140 6.3 Janine Antoni, Touch (2002) 141 6.4 Mark Wallinger, Construction Site (2011) 142 6.5 Sketch from Kallat’s notebook regarding installation of Pors and Rao’s work 143 6.6 Pors and Rao, Teddy Universe (2009–11) 144 6.7 Navin Thomas, Long Live the New Flesh (2014) 145 6.8 Sketch from Kallat’s notebook regarding installation of Yoko Ono’s work 147 6.9 Sketch from Kallat’s notebook regarding installation of Unnikrishnan’s work 149 6.10 View of Yoko Ono, EARTH PIECE: Listen to the Sound of the Earth Turning (1963/1999), and NS Harsha, Punarapi Jananam Punarapi Maranam (2013) 153 6.11 Sketch from Kallat’s notebook 159 7.1 Madiha Sikander, Roses Are Red, gad rung on paper, 7 inches × 4.6 inches × 0.6 inches 2010. Exhibit from ‘Reading Room’, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Collateral Event, 2014 163 7.2 Parvathi Nayar, panels from The Fluidity of Horizons (2014), an installation of drawings on wooden panels and sound 165 7.3 Nikhil Chopra, La Perle Noire II: Aspinwall House (2014) 170 7.4 Francesco Clemente, Pepper Tent (2014) 172 7.5 Francesco Clemente, Pepper Tent (2014) [Detail] 173 7.6 Francesco Clemente, Pepper Tent (2014) [Detail] 174 7.7 Nikhil Chopra, La Perle Noire II: Aspinwall House (2014) 177 8.1 Robert E. D’Souza, End of Empire, 2015. Collateral project installation, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Fort Kochi 182 8.2–8.7 Documentation photographs of the installation and production of Robert E. D’Souza’s End of Empire, Collateral project, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2014 184–204

viii

ILLUSTRATIONS

8.8 9.1

9.2

9.3 9.4 9.5 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 10.8 10.9

Crashed Hindustan Ambassador car outside the DDA Shopping Complex, Sheikh-Sarai, New Delhi, 2011 Mural painting under way on the walls of the Kochi Biennale Foundation offices in lead-up to the launch of the Kochi Biennale Foundation offices, December 2014 Venue prepared for the BMW-sponsored Art Talk, as part of the launch of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, December 2014 Installation photograph of Ho Rui An, Sun, Sweat, Solar Queens: An Expedition (2014) Fort Kochi, July 2014 ‘Absence/Presence’ graffiti. Fort Kochi, July 2014 Mohammed Ali warehouse, Student Biennale venue Student Biennale venue before its renovation College of Art and craft Khallikote, Odisha B.K. College of Art and Craft. Bhubhaneswar, Odisha. Sculpture department B.K. College of Art and Craft, Bhubhaneswar, Odisha. Painting department Students from B.K. College of Art and Craft, Bhubhaneswar, Odisha at the local bus stand Kedarnath Majihi, from College of Art and Craft Khallikote, showing me one of his electric sculpture works Bhibuti Prusty, a student of B.K. College Bhubaneswar, working in the studio Kedarnath Majihi and Baruna Behera working on their site-specific installations at the Students Biennale venue in Kochi

ix

206

212

212 216 225 226 232 234 235 237 239 243 245 247

250

CONTRIBUTORS

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He co-edits the journal Cultural Politics and associated book series as well as the ‘Global Public Life’ sections of Theory, Culture & Society. Bishop also co-edits the book series ‘Technicities’ on critical theory as pertaining to technoculture in relation to art, design and media. His books include Barthes/Burgin (with Sunil Manghani, 2016); Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film (2013); and Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology (with John Phillips, 2010). Hattie Bowering is an award-winning producer/director living between India and the UAE. With over fifteen years of experience working across media, she focuses on documentaries, cultural programming and commercial projects with a clear interest in arts, culture and social development. Previous credits include the Emmy-award winning The Mona Lisa Curse for Channel 4 with art critic Robert Hughes; Damien Hirst: The First Look for Channel 4 and Tate Modern; films for Imagine (BBC arts series); Brand: A Second Coming with Oliver Stone and Russell Brand; and the BAFTA-winning feature documentary Touching the Void. Robert E. D’Souza is an artist, designer, and Head of Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He has exhibited art and documentary works over a period of more than twenty years that focus on a recent history of social and economic change in India. Recent publications include Barcelona Masala: Narratives and Interactions in Cultural Space (2013) and Outside India: Dialogues and Documents of Art and Social Change (2012), which considers artworks from his exhibition Outside India at W+K Exp Gallery in Delhi in relation to the contemporary Indian art scene.

x

CONTRIBUTORS

Amit Kumar Jain is a dedicated arts professional since 2003, currently working at Saffronart, India. He has been associated with various initiatives in the art industry, which include the Devi Art Foundation (2006– 10) as its Head of Programs and The Savara Foundation for the Arts (2011–12), where he served as its Director – Special Initiatives. More recently, Jain’s curatorial interests have led to the curation of ‘Reading Room’, an exhibition of book art, which has been shown in Sri Lanka, India and the United Kingdom. He also curated the third edition of the Colombo Art Biennale (2014) and serves on its advisory board. Jitish Kallat is an internationally acclaimed artist, living and working in Mumbai, India. His works take form in a wide variety of media including painting, sculptural installations, animation, video and photography. He has exhibited widely at museums and institutions across the world, including Tate Modern (London), Martin Gorpius Bau (Berlin), Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Arken Museum of Moderne Kunst (Copenhagen), Institut Valencia d’Art Modern (Spain) and the Gemeente Museum (The Hague). He has exhibited at numerous biennales and triennales, including in Havana, Gwangju and Kiev. He was the curator and artistic director of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014. Riyas Komu is an artist based in Mumbai, India. He completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Fine Arts at the prestigious Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai. He is co-founder of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and the Director of Programmes of Kochi Biennale Foundation. Sunil Manghani is Reader in Critical and Cultural Theory and Director of Doctoral Research at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He is an Associate Editor for Theory Culture & Society and Journal of Contemporary Painting, and author/editor of numerous books and volumes, including Image Studies (2013); Image Critique & the Fall of the Berlin Wall (2008); Painting: Critical and Primary Sources (2015); and Farewell to Visual Studies? (2015). He was co-curator of ‘Barthes/Burgin’ at the John Hansard Gallery, and co-author of the accompanying book, Barthes/Burgin (2016). Anannya Mehtta is a curator-researcher based in New Delhi, India. After completing her master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Delhi in 2004, she went on to study film at PCFE Prague during 2005– 06. She joined the Devi Art Foundation in 2010 where she worked as an assistant curator for five years. In 2012, Mehtta was awarded the Curatorial Research Fellowship at the Delfina Foundation, London. In 2014, xi

CONTRIBUTORS

she was selected for the Asian Curators’ Program in Japan supported by the Japan Foundation, and worked on the Student Biennale at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014–15. Dhritabrata Bhattacharjya Tato is a Delhi-based writer and cultural historian, and Editor of Sahapedia: Online Encyclopedia on Indian Art and Culture. He holds a master’s in French Literature from Calcutta University and an MPhil degree in Intercultural Relations from the Université de Paris III – Nouvelle Sorbonne, Paris, France. He recently published Sufism: Its Spirit and Essence (2015) and contributes regularly to major Indian dailies and magazines on art, current affairs and spirituality. He also has several translations to his credit. Tato founded the non-profit, Daastaan Culture Lab, a publishing and art initiative to promote creative and artistic expressions.

xii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The writing of this book, which has sought to bring together a number of different voices and perspectives, has very purposefully involved a good deal of conversation and collaboration. We are extremely grateful to each of our contributors – Dhritabrata Bhattacharjya Tato, Riyas Komu, Ryan Bishop, Hattie Bowering, Jitish Kallat, Anannya Mehtta and Amit Kumar Jain – for providing wonderful material and for their care and patience in helping us develop this book from a mere idea to a tangible object of thought. Of course, beyond our contributors, there are many others who have been supportive and influential in the making of the book. The book begins life in the offices of Wieden & Kennedy, in Delhi, following conversations with the creative director, V. Sunil (a trustee of the Biennale). His generosity of thinking has been invaluable. Likewise, we are greatly indebted to everyone at the Kochi Biennale Foundation. Special thanks go to Bose Krishnamachari and Shewtal Patel, as well as Gautam Das whose support, along with his team, has been excellent, helping us to be in touch with many different people involved in the Biennale and also to access the Foundation’s archives. We are grateful to the Biennale photographers, Swanoop John, Aby P. Robin, Mohammed Roshan, Dheeraj Thakur and Sangeeth Thali, for enabling us to use their work, without which we could never have properly shown the reader what the Biennale really looks like. We are grateful to many people living locally in Fort Kochi; in particular we wish to thank Magic Johnson (whose insight into how the Biennale unfolds upon the streets was one of the best introductions we could have had), and David Jose, whose thoughtful collaboration in the making of End of empire (Chapter 8) was fundamental to the work as social practice. Finally, a big note of thanks to our editor at Routledge India, Shoma Choudhury, who has provided us with insight and encouragement from the start. Rather than an end point, we hope this book only extends our dialogue and collaboration with all involved.

xiii

Figure I.1a Kochi-Muziris Biennale poster on a wall in Fort Kochi, 2012. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza.

Figure I.1b ‘Biennale City’ poster, Fort Kochi, 2014. Photograph: Sunil Manghani.

INTRODUCTION Robert E. D’Souza and Sunil Manghani

This book began life as an essay, ‘The Indian Biennale Effect’ (D’Souza, 2013), which was published in the journal Cultural Politics towards the end of 2013 – less than a year on from the inaugural Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India’s west coast port of Kochi, in the state of Kerala. As the journal’s strapline puts it, Cultural Politics ‘explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture’. Alongside photographic documentation, the essay provided a historical and political contextual account of the inauguration of the Biennale1 and its ‘effects’ – which could be understood in terms of its impact on and relationship to the local and regional economy; the identity of Kochi as a locality for inhabitants, tourists and traders; the recent history of radical political modernization; the turn towards a new internationalism through the liberalization of markets and the rise of India’s contemporary art scene (in the metropolitan centres of Mumbai and Dehli); and the growing critical discourse about a globalized biennale culture or phenomenon as considered by scholars, critics and curators. The essay was a timely publication. Outside of the usual art reviews and magazine articles, little, if any, critical writing had appeared about the Biennale – despite it being arguably the largest such event in the South Asian region. Dubbed ‘India’s first biennale’, it had launched auspiciously on the twelfth day of the twelfth month of 2012. Its initial development (particularly with regard to state finance) led to highly publicized political resistance. It was ‘against all odds’ (as the Biennale’s Foundation has described it) that the first event was successfully staged. Since then, it has been widely referred to as a ‘people’s biennale’. In part this relates to the specific political context of Kerala, a region known for its long history of social action. But equally, it reflects the Biennale’s artist-led curatorial approach and the state of the local infrastructure that prompted genuine ingenuity and commitment on the part of local, national and international artists and the wider community of Kochi (more of which is explored in Chapters 1, 3 and 9). 3

ROBERT E. D’SOUZA AND SUNIL MANGHANI

Picking up where the original Cultural Politics article left off, this book sets out to provide a detailed examination of India’s ‘biennale effect’ – a layered contestation of place, economics, art and politics as charted specifically in Chapter 1, and then expanded upon in various directions in the subsequent chapters (see Overview). The Kochi-Muziris Biennale has been described as one of the most significant newly emergent biennales, alongside Shanghai, Sharjah and Dakar. However, aside from theoretical debates about art biennales as a global format, very little sustained and critical attention has been given to these events as specific sites of production and reception of contemporary art. Drawing on direct engagement with the Kochi Biennale, and ongoing collaboration with its founders and key participants, the contributors to this book provide a range of voices and perspectives, which get at a closer understanding of the Biennale and its significance to wider debates of contemporary art and large-scale art events in a global context. In doing so – in taking a measure of the Biennale’s various effects – the different accounts take us beyond the art, beyond the mere occasion of exhibition, to provide a critical and contextual reading of the biennale format, to consider how it might properly be thought of as part of the fabric of a wider public sphere.

Placing the Biennale At first glance, Kochi is a somewhat surprising location for India’s first biennale, being outside of the recognized centres of Indian contemporary art. Yet, the region of Kerala plays host to a number of global cultural events, including a well-established international film festival, theatre festival and a literary festival. The decision to host the Kochi-Muziris Biennale came in effect from the top. Kerala’s cultural minister approached artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, asking them ‘to suggest an event that would reaffirm the state’s position on the cultural map’ (Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2012: 16); and the final decision was made in the prime minister’s office in New Delhi. However, the initial approach by the cultural minister to two practising artists was significant. Both Kerala-born, astute to the context they were working in, they took an artist-led approach, forming community with both participating artists and local residents and traders. It is an approach that has proved distinct for this particular Biennale and its relationship to the state (see Chapter 3). Like any other densely populated, fast-growing city in the world, Kochi is overcrowded and suffers all the usual problems of urbanization. Yet it is also culturally ‘rich’. It has a highly literate society and is host to significant populations of differing faiths, including Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Sikhism and Buddhism. The city’s cosmopolitan roots, as 4

INTRODUCTION

the centre of India’s spice trade, dates back to ancient times when Muziris was a thriving port, and its more recent political history with a long-term Communist government has maintained a very lively, politicized populace. If it is possible to stage a biennale that is more than mere global spectacle, Kochi would seem as good a place to start. Of course, it was never simply a matter of curating an art event. Having to establish a biennale from scratch required dealing with politicians, bureaucrats, business people, journalists, vendors, contractors, volunteers and the local community more broadly. ‘[I]n a country like India,’ the founders note, ‘where art has a long history and which has produced some of the finest contemporary visual artists, the “culture of biennale” [was] yet to catch on. The word “biennale” . . . yet to be popular on the street’ (Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2012: 35–36). They were determined not to let the Biennale be elitist, and established a ‘Let’s Talk’ programme to re-engage the media and to connect directly with the local community: We printed brochures in Malayalam and distributed among [the] general public. We shot photographs of . . . autorickshaw drivers, street vendors, shopkeepers and pedestrians with ‘It’s My Biennale’ posters. We went into college campuses, schools, art clubs and organized many cultural and literary programmes in parks and other public places. Theatre Sketches, a theatre group which performs cameo, improvised plays, travelled in Ernakulam and neighbouring districts to spread the word about the biennale. (Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2012: 36) The initiative paid off, as one of the most visible elements of Kochi’s inaugural Biennale was its heterogeneous audience. However, what visitors arrived to was by no means a well-orchestrated event. The late withholding of funds was one significant pressure, but so was the relatively poor infrastructure. There was a general lack of technical experience and the use of derelict and former colonial buildings made the preparation of exhibition spaces extremely challenging. Even as delegates made their way round the opening of the exhibitions, wall captions were still being applied and catalogues being printed. As outlined in Chapter 1, attending the Biennale launch in 2012 was to witness a work-in-progress, not least with both Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu engaged hands-on with all aspects of the work involved to bring the exhibition spaces to fruition on time (or at least as close to on time as possible). This hands-on approach and the rawness of the exhibition spaces have been seen by many as a refreshing riposte to the ‘non-spaces’ we typically associate with art fairs and biennales around the world. 5

Figure I.2 ‘It’s My Biennale’ campaign posters. Photograph: Swanoop John. Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation.

INTRODUCTION

The widespread phenomenon of art biennales is a feature (a symptom even) of late twentieth-century globalization. The pervading view is that: [p]roduced by itinerant curators and nomadic artists who pay lip service to local concerns while addressing an increasingly mobile global spectatorship, biennials resemble multinational corporations in the sense that their sphere of action, power, and control transcends national boundaries while they are selectively benefiting from national frameworks of support and validation. (Blom, 2009: 23) Caroline Jones (2010) has spoken of a ‘biennale culture’ that stems from the empire exhibitions of the nineteenth century, and which re-positioned the artwork as a purely aesthetic experience, which she equates with the contemporary idea of ‘experience marketing’. The links with tourism, heritage and city ‘branding’ are of course evident enough. Biennales are undoubtedly enmeshed in global models of consumption, but the political and historical narratives surrounding them are arguably rather more nuanced and plural (Martini, 2009). In fact, referring to a single biennale event or organization as a unified entity is itself a convenience. This book takes up the task of an extended analysis of a single biennale to offer a complex (and at times contested) reading of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and its effects. However, in doing so, from a close, embedded account of the Kochi Biennale, the aim is to connect with and challenge the broader discourse surrounding biennale culture and politics. Biennales are associated with the emergence of ‘global art’, and synonymous with ‘contemporary art’, which has challenged a Eurocentric view. As Hans Belting puts it: Global art is no longer synonymous with modern art. It is by definition contemporary, not just in a chronological but also . . . in a symbolic or even ideological sense. It is both represented and distorted by an art market whose strategies are not just economic mechanisms when crossing borders, but strategies to channel art production in directions for which we still lack sufficient categories. (Belting, 2009: 39) In 1982, when Salman Rushdie wrote his famous Times article, ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’, he was setting out an argument that concerned clear differentials of centre and periphery. His pun on the title of 7

ROBERT E. D’SOUZA AND SUNIL MANGHANI

the Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back, was significant, as the whole idea of ‘writing back’ required the re-appropriation of a language that was not one’s own. The periphery had to write outside of itself in order to restructure the asymmetrical relationship it had with the centre. Rushdie was dealing with the very same question of the revered Indian author Raja Rao (writing in English), who sought to grapple with conveying one’s own spirit in a language that was not one’s own. For Rushdie, however, there was a new sense of optimism and inventiveness. Today, it is easy enough to consider the development of a biennale culture – as it has spread across the globe – as yet another ‘writing back’. Indeed, the rise of the art market outside of Europe is frequently read in postcolonial terms. Belting’s observations of his ‘Global Art and the Museum’ conference held in India, in 2008, are of this nature, with India’s colonial past reported still as a live issue. ‘Counter-narratives increasingly replace narratives of Western modernism with different concepts such as the return to national narratives of Indian art,’ he points out, yet, a general agreement among participants appeared to hold ‘that colonial history still unduly dominates the cultural topics in India and guides the attention to long time experiences with foreign art, while native traditions and aesthetics have little space in today’s art history’ (Belting, 2009: 47–48). Nevertheless, these observations do not necessarily stand up to the broader logic of global and contemporary art, nor, in the case of India, to the particular context, within which the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has emerged. On arrival to Kochi in the very early stages of researching this book – indeed before it was even envisaged a book – we held an initial meeting with an artist at the Kochi airport. As we sat in the ‘non-space’ of the airport’s nondescript café it was hard not to notice a large advertisement for European travel: ‘Surrender to the Taste of Europe’. Despite the stereotypical gaze of such an advertisement, and indeed given our eagerness to be in Kochi and not a European city, it was difficult to see this poster as anything but the spectre of the decaying allure of elsewhere; a desperate call to action, to write back to a now de-centred destination. This, then, was the Kochi we had arrived to: a city enmeshed in the global, yet confident in its own language. The question we had to ask ourselves was whether it was legitimate for us – as new arrivals to the city – to be the ones to convey the spirit of the place, to adopt the new language of the Biennale (these dilemmas are given further consideration in the opening of Chapter 3). Importantly the book has been devised through extended dialogue with a number of participants of the Biennale and from numerous visits to the city to gain an ethnographic view of what goes into making a biennale – or to borrow a phrase of Riyas Komu, to ‘taste the salt of Kochi’ (Chapter 3). 8

INTRODUCTION

Figure I.3 ‘Surrender to the Taste of Europe’ advertising poster, Kochi International Airport, July 2014. Photo: Sunil Manghani.

Through the object The art biennale is a global genre, with all the complexities of globalized economics and politics. The idea of art as ‘contemporary’ and/or as ‘experience’ is something to be challenged and contextualized. As Thomas Fillitz (2009: 124) notes, ‘[a] striking feature of art biennials is the obvious interconnection of art production’. In contrast to the museum, for example, which collects art, a biennale is about generating ‘contemporary’ work and 9

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placing these in networks of circulation. There are inevitable contradictions at work, but equally as products of globalization each individual biennale offers its own site of engagement, which in turn can become a tool for a critical understanding of the interconnections at stake. To echo Siegfried Kracauer’s remarks in the 1920s on the developments of mass culture (and its internationalization), in seeking to critically assess (and take up our position within) globalization – through phenomena such as the biennale – the process surely ‘leads directly through the center of the mass ornament, not away from it’ (Kracauer, 1995: 86). This is by no means to suggest a looking on from afar, to critically ‘judge’ sites of engagement, but rather for the sites themselves to be looking outward, to be critical points of conjuncture. The significance of ‘location’ is something that all biennales share, and all biennales differ over. As Monika Szewczyk (2009: 28) suggests, the location and locating of the biennale ‘is to be understood as both a noun and verb (i.e. a process that has to continue), and how it relates not just to the “event”, but also to the geographies it helps to imagine and render’. It is both as noun and verb that this book seeks to situate and re-articulate the Kochi-Muziris Biennale as a documented past and future return. As discussed in the opening two chapters of this book, it is important to place the Kochi Biennale within the broader context of India’s rapid economic growth and its associated social and cultural effects. The opening up of the country’s protectionist economy in the early 1990s had a huge impact on the art scene, with many artists quickly becoming ‘valued’ international names. For some, economic liberalization was seen a step back to Western imperialism; taking this view the Biennale might well be construed within a corporatist model, as a form of experience marketing. Others, however, have viewed the changes as necessary to India’s identification as a global trading nation. Both D’Souza (Chapter 1) and Tato (Chapter 2) demonstrate how the Kochi Biennale is a timely intervention for India’s changing contemporary global identity. On the one hand, it fills a vacuum in India’s infrastructure for the display and experimentation of contemporary art, yet equally it is bound up with a longer history of cultural diplomacy and later, after economic liberalization, the more subtle and expansive notion of soft power. As D’Souza’s account sets out, the ‘biennale effect’ has to be understood as a set of complex, overlapping historical situations for India. These begin to cohere with India’s first entry into the Venice Biennale (as late as the 54th edition in 2011), but then take shape much more viscerally with the inauguration of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. As part of understanding the contemporary conditions of India’s ‘First Biennale’, and along the same lines of what has been termed ‘altermodernity’ (Bourriaud, 2009), it is important to distinguish between a Western and an Indian period of modernism. Over the last twenty years, a new, 10

INTRODUCTION

hospitable context has rapidly emerged for Indian artists. It is a period in which cultural readings of India have needed to shift from a postcolonial discourse, to one attuned to the global, economic considerations of a new world order. Within this context, contemporary Indian artists have not needed to position themselves so much with being ‘modern’ on a national level, but rather have been able to garner wider international recognition and acceptance. As a corollary to this, the Biennale – which again, importantly, has not operated through the art world establishment of Mumbai or Delhi – has provided a new platform for Indian artists that is as much local as it is global, or altermodern in its purview. The account given in this book of India’s ‘biennale effect’ is broadly optimistic, but attuned to the paradoxes and heavy-handed forces of globalization. As with any other globalized art scene, India’s is an art market, pegged to the ebbs and flows of capitalism. Thus, just as we might understand India’s present need for the Biennale as a confluence of differing economical, political, social and cultural forces and byways, it is important to consider if the Biennale as a critical forum can still offer a place of ‘difference’ and resistance to the forces of globalization, which, as with anywhere else, threaten India with both cultural homogenization and conservatism, even fundamentalism. As Blom (2009: 25) argues, a form of ‘contestatory strategy’ has emerged among many biennales that seeks to work against the globalist mode of the biennale and works ‘both with and against instrumentalizing forces on regional and national levels’. The strategy is ‘site-specificity’, which for years, she notes, has been ‘the preferred way of anchoring all the mobile forces invested in a biennale’s production in something indisputably and concretely local’. Kochi’s first biennale, quite understandably, took this approach, providing an underlying rationale which cut across economics, history, politics and culture. The full title, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale makes explicit reference to the ancient city of Muziris that was buried ‘under layers of mud and mythology after a massive flood in the 14th century’ (Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2012: 20). The site of this original port of Kochi has recently been excavated as part of a national project, the Muziris Heritage Project, which is intricately linked to an initiative, working with UNESCO, to formally recognize its place within the maritime ‘silk road’. The use of the old colonial buildings immediately triggers relational aesthetics, and certainly some of the most striking exhibits for the Biennale’s first iteration were explicitly about the site of Kochi. The Ship of Tarshish by the Indian artist Prasad Raghavan was a finely crafted metal sculpture of a container ship (like a giant Tonka toy), which was on show at Aspinwall House. The title alludes to a Hebrew biblical reference to a place or city between which there was trade by sea. Crucially, the backdrop to the sculpture – through 11

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Figure I.4 The international container terminal in Vallarpadam in Kochi, 2012. This view of the shipping lane can be seen directly from the Biennale venues of Pepper House and Aspinwall House, and indeed impacts strongly on the visitor’s sightline when viewing many of the artworks. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza.

the arched windows of Aspinwall House – was a view across the water of Kochi’s vast port, the country’s newest international container terminal in Vallarpadam. A similarly evocative work, due to its use of real, pungent spices and which again overlooked the existing shipping lanes transporting the same local spices internationally, was Life Is a River, by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto. The installation consisted of suspended local fabrics filled with spices of clove, cumin and turmeric, which were hung from the ceiling of a former colonial warehouse. At Pepper House, another old colonial building, a video installation was shown by Collaboration Around Micro Politics (CAMP), an artists’ collective from Mumbai. The videos record the imports and exports at the local port harbour in Kochi, documenting the work cycles and repetitive labour of one of the main historic port hubs in the city while mirroring a globally occurring cycle of movement through trade. And Stopover, an installation of traditional grindstones by Indian artist Sheela Gowda and Christoph Storz, was laid out at Aspinwall House. It was possible to walk among the grindstones like redundant rocks. With the shift to electrical grinders, the installation offered the legacy of abandoned 12

INTRODUCTION

Figure I.5 The Ship of Tarshish, by Indian artist Prasad Raghavan at Aspinwall House, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2012. The title alludes to a Hebrew biblical reference to a place or city between which there was trade by sea. The backdrop to the sculpture is the country’s newest international container terminal in Vallarpadam across the water. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza, 2012.

utensils as a reminder of change and of the ‘daily grind’ and hard manual labour of everyday life for the majority of Indians. Interestingly, Blom poses a challenge to site-specificity. Echoing perhaps the aforementioned reference to Kracauer’s suggestion to work through the ‘mass ornament’, Blom positions the phenomenon of the biennale as a ‘place’ within globalization, which warrants investigation: if biennials actually contribute to the construction of one big place (the global, media-dependent megacity), then only an engagement with the specificities of that place can provide a set of realistic tools with which to understand the positioning and meaning of the various geographical locations that play host to the different biennials. By the same token, a counter-discourse of biennial politics or an imagination of the biennale’s potential needs to start from these parameters. (Blom, 2009: 25) 13

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Figure I.6 Life Is a River (2012), an installation of sewn and suspended local fabrics filled with spices of clove, cumin and turmeric by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, hung from the ceiling of the vacant warehouse in Moidu’s Heritage, a colonial-period storage facility owned by a coconut-fibre company. The work overlooks the shipping lanes of the boats that are still transporting these local spices internationally. Photograph: Mohammed Roshan, 2012. Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation.

It is important to remain vigilant to the biennale as a ‘mediated event culture’ and to understand how a biennale is situated as part of the social fabric. For Blom (2009: 26), this requires ‘an in-depth consideration of biennial temporality or – even more pertinently – biennial memory’. Given the biennale’s biannual structure, the dilemma is always for an itinerant crowd to descend upon the site of the event and then disappear again, taking the memory of the event with them. As charted in Chapter 3, this is a concern well-noted by the Biennale organizers, and indeed the Biennale itself (as event) is only really a part of what is intended by the Biennale’s effect all year round. As Blom notes, we are familiar with ‘the museum as a form of archival practice that must be thought in the context of a more general organization of social memory’. Yet, the biennale ‘memory’ remains ‘an as yet unexplored topos’. Her concern is that ‘biennial memory is restricted to the archiving of catalogues and other documentary material, which is isolated as a special line of production that does not really 14

INTRODUCTION

Figure I.7 Multichannel video installation by CAMP, an artists’ collective from Mumbai, at Pepper House, 2012. The videos record the imports and exports at the local port harbour in Kochi, documenting the work cycles and repetitive labour of one of the main historic port hubs in the city while mirroring a globally occurring cycle of movement through trade. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza.

impinge on the curatorial and artistic event themselves’. The task, then, is to approach the biennale as a ‘new mediatic urban structure that operates across (and beyond) geographical territories’ and understand that it represents ‘a new form of social memory’ that should be investigated and rethought as a site for intervention and reorganization’ (Blom, 2009: 26). Pivotal in any consideration of the ‘biennale effect’ is an understanding of the delicate negotiation between the ‘one big place’ of the biennale format and the specificity of its location. Scholars, critics and curators each have an intellectual role to play in critically challenging this space, but equally so does the broader community that make up a biennale. As developed in Chapter 1 (and later in Chapter 9), we can take our cue from the writings of Jacques Rancière (2009) on the ‘emancipatory effect’ of art. The ‘event’ of the Kochi Biennale might take us back to a discourse emerging postindependence seeking to characterize art in India as going beyond capitalist spectacle, and even, with the contemporary art as articulated through the 15

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Figure I.8 Stopover, an installation of spice grindstones by Indian artist Sheela Gowda and Christoph Storz, at the dockside of Aspinwall House, 2012. The traditional grindstones were used domestically as part of the traditional preparation of spices but are now redundant with the trend for electrical grinders, leaving a legacy of abandoned utensils as a reminder of change and of the ‘daily grind’ and hard manual labour of everyday life for the majority of Indians. The grindstones become significant memorials in Fort Kochi, a key historic spice-trading port and nexus of global trade. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza.

Kochi Biennale, that it can be a driver of social change and a progressive force for the representation and tolerance of differing identities in society (see Chapter 3 and 6). If the Biennale is to be affective in its effects, it needs to be a productive force in and with society. As Rancière puts it, ‘art has to provide us with more than a spectacle, more than something devoted to the delight of passive spectators, because it has to work for society where everybody should be active’ (Rancière, 2009: 63).

Overview The book is divided into three parts: (1) Is art enough?; (2) Making work; and (3) Beyond the event. The majority of the chapters are based on the editors’ multiple and ongoing visits to India and sustained dialogue with 16

INTRODUCTION

the Biennale’s founders, artists and curators. In addition, specific chapters have been contributed by individuals with a keen interest in the Biennale and who draw upon direct experiences related to the event. Part 1, ‘Is art enough?’, establishes the key debates and context to the Biennale. As noted earlier, the opening two chapters provide key critical and contextual accounts. Chapter 1, in particular, ‘The Indian biennale effect’, provides a thorough and engaged account of the book’s underlying premise of the ‘effects’ of the Biennale, which, going beyond the art itself, must be located within India’s recent history of radical political modernization and in the context of the state’s attempts to establish itself in terms of internationalism and contemporaneity via the arts. This historical and political contextualization is then taken back further in Chapter 2, on the rise of the ‘Indian artscape’, which situates India’s evolution preindependence in developing its ‘cultural diplomacy’ through to contemporary ‘soft power’ configurations. The themes and issues raised in the opening two chapters resonant with Chapter 3, which presents a narrated interview with the artist Riyas Komu, the co-founder the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and co-curator of its first iteration. Komu suggests early on in this dialogue that the ‘Biennale was not the issue’, by which he means at least two things. First, establishing the Biennale was always much more than simply establishing a venue for contemporary art. It involved layered engagement and alignment of economic, political, social and aesthetic concerns – all of which played out on local, national and international levels. Second, however, and perhaps more importantly, the Biennale was always intended as much more than an ‘event’ that recurs every two years. For Komu, the Biennale represents so much more than the art. The artworks on display were never an end point, but rather part of a larger social project. Finally, taking a more macro view, though working inductively through specific artworks, Chapter 4 plays with the title of the second edition of the Biennale, ‘Whorled Explorations’, to consider wider, global perspectives, notably the Cold War context, through which the efficacy of contemporary art is measured – and arguably found wanting, if only as a necessary form of critique. Taking its coordinates from the project’s social dimension, the Biennale has often been described as ‘productionist’, referring to its artist-led curation and impetus to produce work specifically within the context of the city and region. Part 2, ‘Making work’, provides specific accounts of this model. Chapter 5 is a visual essay based on Art: Interrupted by Hattie Bowering, a film documentary that follows the preparations for the inauguration of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012. Incorporating film stills, segments of dialogue and additional critical commentary, the chapter provides candid insights into the production process of several notable 17

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Indian and international artists, all set against the backdrop of the lowbase infrastructure of the first Biennale. Chapter 6, ‘Curation as dialogue’, turns attention to the second edition of the Biennale in 2014, with a live interview with its curator Jitish Kallat. The interview was conducted several months after the close of the Biennale, so allowing for a moment of reflection, though as is apparent in reading the dialogue Kallat remains intimately embedded in the ideas and the actual installation of the event, able to track through in his mind various ‘sightlines’ as they were staged on site through his direction. The chapter also includes a number of sketches and documentary evidence from Kallat’s notebooks and files, which, when combined with his conceptual reading of the ‘work’ of the curator, artist and visitor of the Biennale, reveal the complex interplay of practical and intellectual processes in crafting the Biennale. Chapter 7 continues with an exploration of the second edition of the Biennale, but in this case offers a critical account of its ‘painterly explorations’. Painting at the Biennale in 2014 was surprisingly conspicuous, particularly when understood in its expanded sense. Following an account of some of the different painting practices on display, the article draws upon the term ‘social gestus’ (the critical demonstration and curation of gestures) to suggest a reading of global, contemporary art that is concerned with the coordinates and situating of gestures as an entire form, and which is critically revealing of itself. Finally, Chapter 8 sets out the political, social and historical narratives surrounding End of Empire, a collateral artwork that D’Souza installed as part of the second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The sculpture, which had previously been assembled and shown in 2012 in Delhi was rebuilt (and wholly re-conceptualized) in Fort Kochi working contingently with a local craftsman, associates and friends as part of a relational and participatory practice, with the artwork finally being installed in a public parking space on the streets of Fort Kochi. In concluding Part 2, on ‘Making work’, this chapter very keenly draws out an understanding of the social production of art, developing as an important underlying theme for the book a consideration of the labour of art; the labour it takes to make, exhibit, encounter and debate art. Part 3, ‘Beyond the event’, considers the wider impact felt by the Biennale, beginning with Chapter 9, which examines the rhetoric surrounding the Biennale as a ‘people’s biennale’, as a democratic force. In doing so, the chapter seeks to frame questions of local, national and international identity in terms of a shifting discourse from art history to visual culture, with the latter opening up possibilities for new visual ‘literacies’ that break out of hierarchical structures associated with the fine arts and museum practices. Drawing on the writings of Jacques Rancière, the chapter concludes by arguing the Biennale acts through a 18

INTRODUCTION

complex visual culture to present a sight/site of ‘disputes’, ‘which begin even before you enter any one single venue, or even any one of its iterations’. Chapter 10, ‘Towards a new art education’, offers an account of the Kochi Student Biennale 2014, as seen through the work of the one its curators. The chapter offers an overview of contemporary student art practice and its relationship with institutional art education. Based on interviews with staff and students involved with the Student Biennale, and echoing in part the account given in the preceding chapter of new ‘literacies’ of visual culture, a key finding is that students are exploring new art practices despite their education and not because of it, and that the Biennale provides a venue not only for showcasing work, but also for re-energising the outlook of Indian art education. Finally, Chapter 11, ‘Regional effects’, considers the wider proliferation of large-scale art events in South Asia, including the India Triennale, Asian Art Biennale, Colombo Art Biennale, Kathmandu International Art Festival, Dhaka Art Summit and of course the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. This chapter puts into focus the various models that exist in South Asia, their individual patronage and funding, their format and their impact. It concludes by raising difficult questions for the future and sustainability of the largescale art event. It is suggested, for example, building on the cosmopolitanism of the Kochi Biennale, that a single South Asian Biennale might ‘tour’ the region, but which only brings to the fore the immediate tensions and realities of the actually existing borders between countries, ideologies and cultures. Alternatively, a single unifying event could take place in a fixed location and provide pavilions (on the model of the Venice Biennale) to all of the countries of the region. Such an idea similarly raises a number of difficulties and question marks. The chapter is a fitting point on which to end the book – not so much as a conclusion, but rather for posing further points of departure (in recognition, as it were, of the perennial concerns that the biennale format brings to the fore). This book, like both a telescope and a microscope, pushes and pulls the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in its various real, historical, conceptual and imaginary states, allowing for a number of critical trajectories to take place. The aim has been to trace what we term the ‘biennale effect’ – to understand how the format of a recurring, large-scale art event can both bring into focus (and is derived of) a nexus of art, politics, development, social action, histories and place. Thus, the chapters of this book – as a set of plural voices – present a broader critical understanding of the Kochi Biennale, which in turn helps further question the emergence of other global sites of art production, dissemination and reception. Crucially, it has been important to get close to this Biennale, to understand it from the ground up, rather than consider it from the vantage point of the dominant 19

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discourse on the nature of global art. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale can certainly be discussed in terms of its economic effects; its impact on tourism and local development echoing the so-called Bilbao effect, whereby world-class cultural institutions can be seen to put a city on the map. Yet, the Kochi Biennale represents a great deal more. It has by no means adopted an ‘off-shelf’ model, which we might think of as the ‘survey show’ and events preoccupied with curatorial practice. Kochi, being outside of the metropolitan sphere, has seemingly allowed for a renewed freedom to experience art, with less separation of art and everyday life, and with artists themselves engaged in the making of the event. Unlike the Venice Biennale or Documenta, which we might characterize as ‘legitimating forces’, the Kochi Biennale suggests of an invitation to ‘build it’ rather than be placed within it. Riyas Komu (Chapter 3), for example, speaks of the Biennale being different every time, being made from scratch with each iteration. And Jain (Chapter 11) even speculates on a roaming South Asian biennale, predicated very much on the model of Kochi. Thus, rather than merely giving a purpose (and a stage) to contemporary art, The Kochi Biennale might be said to give ‘reasoning’ back to art, to re-imagine critical dialogues and to rejuvenate a belief in art as a critical and affirmative practice. This book, then, seeks to go beyond the art itself, beyond its spectatorship. At its best, a biennale is greater than a collection of its material objects and sites of display: It bears social connections, it addresses the surrounding local and global politics, it impacts upon educational contexts and it forges new narratives. What remains to be seen, of course, is whether the Kochi Biennale can sustain itself as a progressive force, or whether its own success will place too great a pressure upon it. Indeed, given the complexities of politics, economics, aesthetics and geographies, all as tributaries merging forcefully upon the single point of a biennale, can any such event truly sustain? Perhaps Kochi – which declares itself the ‘Biennale City’ – offers one way of thinking about this problem, by offering a venue for contemporary art that is radically (un)sustainable.

Note 1 Biennale is Italian for ‘biennial’, meaning ‘every other year’. Both words are used interchangeably to describe an event that happens every two years, and most commonly refers to large-scale international contemporary art exhibitions, of which there are many hundreds around the world. The origin of the term stems back to the first Venice Biennale held in 1895. Throughout this book the Italian term is adopted to reflect its usage in the title of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. In some cases, where citations are made to prior literature the Anglophone term

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may appear. Also, in the final chapter of this book the author pushes the term to include a wider range of ‘perennial’ events.

References Augé, Marc (1999) An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Belting, Hans (2009) ‘Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate’, in Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 38–73. Blom, Ina (2009) ‘On Biennial Practice: The Global Megacity and Biennial Memory’, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader: The Bergen Biennial Conference. Bergen, Norway: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 23–26. Bourriaud, Nicholas (ed.) (2009) Altermodern: Tate Triennial. London: Tate Publishing. D’Souza, Robert E. (2013) ‘The Indian Biennale Effect: The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012’, Cultural Politics, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 296–312. Fillitz, Thomas (2009) ‘Contemporary Art of Africa: Coevalness in the Global World’, in Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 116–134. Jones, Caroline (2010) ‘Biennial Culture: A Longer History’, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader. Bergen, Norway: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 66–87. Kochi Biennale Foundation (2012) Against All Odds. Kottayam: DC Books. Kracauer, Siegfried (1995) The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Martini, Vittoria (2009) ‘The Era of the Histories of Biennials Has Begun’, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader: The Bergen Biennial Conference. Bergen, Norway: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 9–13. Rancière, Jacques (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, trans. by Gregory Elliot. London: Verso. Rushdie, Salman (1982) ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’, The Times, 3 July 1982. Szewczyk, Monika (2009) ‘How to Run a Biennial (with an Eye to Critical Regionalism)’, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader: The Bergen Biennial Conference. Bergen, Norway: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 27–32.

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Figure I.9 Posters from the Kochi-Muziris Biennale found on the streets of Kochi, 2012; Armando Miguelez Poster (left), Layout 2 (right). Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza.

Part I IS ART ENOUGH? An artist can be committed, but what does it mean to say that his art is committed? Commitment is not a category of art. This does not mean that art is apolitical. It means that aesthetics has its own politics, or its own meta-politics. [. . .] Moreover, a ‘committed’ work of art is always made as a kind of combination between these objective politics that are inscribed in the field of possibility for writing, objective politics that are inscribed as plastic or narrative possibilities. – Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 2004, p.60 The opening section of this book comprises four chapters, which set out some of the key critical terms, providing political and historical context to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The chapters are brought together under the title of ‘Is Art Enough?’ – a deceptively simple question that can be read various ways. Global contemporary art can certainly be challenged for its complicity within global, capitalist forces, which would lead us to suggest art is not enough a form of resistance. Yet, equally we could take the question more optimistically, to ponder: Might art still have a role to play beyond the economic, rationalist advances that surround it? The dialogue with Riyas Komu, in Chapter 3, reveals a number of ways in which, in the context of Kochi, and Kerala more broadly, art is being seen to play an important role in reimagining the political. Nonetheless this account is positioned knowingly within the complexities of our global contemporary condition, all of which is specifically examined and critiqued within the opening two chapters of this section, while the final chapter provides a reading of specific artworks shown at the second Kochi Biennale – which again, extends the question of whether or not art is enough, or to what degree it supplements our ability to picture the world.

1 THE INDIAN BIENNALE EFFECT Robert E. D’Souza In early 2012 I first became aware of the development of a forthcoming biennale in India through a series of conversations with V. Sunil, one of the trustees of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, as we discussed the difficulties and complexity in India of getting the level and scale of art event off the ground. The idea of this proposed Indian biennale caught my imagination both because of the issues raised here in these conversations connected with a global discourse on the biennale format and also because of the national complications of a disparate situation for Indian contemporary art and artists across such an expansive country. It seemed a brave pursuit when you considered the complexity of the situation with the need to navigate between conflicting local and national politics, a divided and fragmented arts scene and the financial backing needed to develop an event of this nature with the symbolic capital that launching India’s first biennale might encompass. It was also seen as questionable that the premise for this biennale was based on the ambitions of two Indian artists without the apparent experience needed in launching an international facing art event, let alone without the necessary conditions needed to support an event of this ambition in a small city like Kochi outside of the nationally recognised cities as India’s destination for its first biennale. Portentously I wrote about this impending event and its potential in a publication I was working on at the time, weaving together the few details of this biennale into a final chapter titled, ‘Outside Art: Art, Location and Global Tensions’. Here I speculated on the possibility of this latest addition to the global biennale format by considering the pronouncements of the curatorial note and positioning that the artist-cum-curators had published on the biennale’s website prior to its launch: I have here considered the motivations behind contemporary artists’ concerns to look beyond the production of artworks towards ideas connecting art with society and everyday life. The new 25

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Kochi–Muziris Biennale, launching in Kochi in 2012, heralds a return to a significant international engagement for India. . . This biennale has set out its international outlook: ‘[t]hrough the celebration of contemporary art from around the world. . . invoke the historic cosmopolitan legacy of the modern metropolis of Kochi, and its mythical predecessor, the ancient port of Muziris’. . . this event might be a key opportunity in India . . . to connect internationally on home ground and help banish predisposed ideas of India and its art while bringing artists, curators, critics and collectors to India to experience India and its art from the ‘inside’. (D’Souza, 2012: 157) Travelling to India from the United Kingdom to visit the launch week of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in December 2012 (the auspicious date of its launch was set as 12 December 2012), I arrived in Fort Kochi not only as an observer of art and this particular new biennale but to also consider it through the lens of these critical possibilities raised in my earlier writings. As I negotiated the city in the opening week I recognised the emerging significance of this opening event and for the co-founders the enormity of personal risk and expectation from the many parties involved who had a stake in its success. The success of the event in its opening also became highly contested with so many expectations that might never be realised in the opening week, when all eyes would be on the Biennale and where there would need to be a heightened acknowledgement of its success as a measure of effectiveness and of approval. Although there were many issues and problems in this opening week, it was the resolve of all concerned, the concerted efforts and collective support that extended the ‘biennale effect’ across the city far beyond the actual art. While I fully embraced the situation of the Biennale I began to piece together the wider unfolding narratives of peoples and places, documenting what was unfolding around me and not just by passively observing the various effects of the event but reflecting on what the biennale might mean as a model and medium of change. Using my time in Fort Kochi I met with artists and organisers, and attended seminars, talks and performances, connecting and collating these experiences into material that I would later be able to contextualise and develop into a critical review. Of underlying importance was to understand the event as a historical moment in India’s developing art scene and burgeoning environment of competing biennales. By understanding the particular effect(iveness) of this Biennale within a wider narrative of India’s social, economic and political changes witnessed over the last twenty-five years of visiting India is also to understand India modernising postindependence and through a global positioning through culture. In visiting this new biennale I not 26

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only hoped to view how an event of this scale might be realised against competing arguments for needs both nationally and internationally, but also to observe how India might respond to the issues around increasingly homogenised biennale formats being developed against Indian arts’ particular needs rather than in competition for global recognition. With the competing critical pressures on the Biennale, it is important to understand also how any transformative effect of a biennale might manifest itself in this particular situation especially as Kochi was a surprise Indian city to launch a biennale from, outside the metropolitan centres of Indian contemporary art already established in Mumbai and Delhi. I wanted to explore how this particular choice of Kochi was strategically important because it engaged in such a direct way with its particular regional legacy of communism, activism, intellectual and critical resistance and historic cosmopolitanism to impact on the legitimacy of the event and how this might in turn condition India’s opportunity on this global stage. Through my experience of visiting the Biennale launch in Fort Kochi and of surveying the art, artists and a widespread public and community in active participation not just in terms of art spaces but spilling across the city ignoring conventional spatial boundaries, I might consider this event in terms of cultural phenomena. My writing on the Biennale manifested itself into a journal article, ‘The Indian Biennale Effect: The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012’ (D’Souza, 2013), which was published in Cultural Politics in 2013. This chapter draws upon the observations made in that article, written through the experience of visiting the Biennale’s opening week, while considering it against these more recent historic changes in India while contemplating its future, drawing on thoughts and readings made on numerous subsequent visits and in the light of the Biennale post the launch as it has become a more established fixture moving towards its third edition in 2016.

Biennale discourse One key consideration for me in writing ‘The Indian Biennale Effect’ was to locate this new Biennale against a recently growing biennale discourse and to acknowledge a developing critical backlash among artists, curators, academics and art critics of the growing global proliferation of this format. An important marker of this growing discourse can be found in the collected writings and texts that emanated from the Bergen Biennial Conference that was established in Norway in 2009 in response to the critical mass of interest, study and involvement in art biennales globally. The following weighty anthology The Biennale Reader published in 2010, which is still the most comprehensive collection of biennale writings to date, collects together many parallel thoughts and concerns from curators, theorists 27

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and academics from across the globe, with many of these contributors also participating in the many biennale projects past and present. It was evident that in these collected writings that both art-historical through to sociopolitical contexts were being acknowledged in a wider understanding of biennales and the shift beyond their positioning as art phenomena, particularly in the growth of biennales in the global south in the 1990s that configure with shifts in the economic global growth rates from west to east, itself a situation precipitating many new concerns. In her writing on the biennale phenomena, Sabine Vogel acknowledges that ‘[t]he growing international networking of national markets and societies, the liberalization and the politics of deregulation, the technological advances in transport and communication created the prerequisites for a global export of the “biennial” and an increasing exchange of art’, and what these biennales have in common is a ‘very close connection between art and politics, which is the dominant feature of these exhibitions. Thus the history of biennials must be read as a “history of art and politics”’ (Vogel, 2010: 11). While this body of writing is acknowledging past critical arguments and art historic debates, there are also reconsidered and re-evaluated theories and analysis espoused by philosophers like Theodore Adorno through to Jacques Rancière, which are regularly referenced in relation to the political status and relationship of culture and art rather than focus on previous critical and theoretical preoccupations with multiculturalism and postcoloniality. Many of these philosophical and political discourses can be a useful critical tool for those involved in the development of these formats especially when considering the potential problematic effects of the phenomenal growth, indirect economic possibilities and acceptance of the biennale format as an ‘industry’ but also in critically expanding the idea and purpose of the biennale against global shifts. In respect of these global shifts, much has also been written in reference to biennales in the global south, which have taken on the mantle of challenging the orthodoxy of the ‘white cube’ model of exhibiting art, while challenging the old order and the growing market driven nature of the global art world and its rampant appetite for the commodification of culture (Øvstebø, 2010; Vogel, 2010; Kapur, 2011; Hoskote, 2012a,b,c, 2013; Block, 2013; Lee, 2013). In The Emancipated Spectator, for example, Rancière marks out a position against state domination and the exploitation of art while extolling the power of art to ‘resist’ these forces. In doing so, he reclaims the artist’s position vis-à-vis the spectacle and as a political action: We claim to have taken our distance from such utopias. Our artists have learnt to use this form of hyper-theatre to optimise the spectacle rather than to celebrate the revolutionary identity of art 28

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and life. But what remains vivid, both in their practice and in the criticism they experience, is precisely the ‘critique of the spectacle’ – the idea that art has to provide us with more than a spectacle, more than something devoted to the delight of passive spectators, because it has to work for a society where everybody should be active. (Rancière, 2009: 63) Through such a critique, we might reason for the need for biennale formats to operate critically as a space outside of the existing commercial and national art structures, that in turn might ignore many of the difficult and critical art practices, issue-based art and emerging artists in favour of more accessible and popular art forms as part of the constrictions that come with the national and corporate funding of institutions. Indian curator, writer and theorist Ranjit Hoskote (2012b: 179) writes that ‘[i]t has been fashionable to decry the biennale as spectacle. Equally, it has been argued contrariwise that the biennale represents a vital platform for an inquiry into contemporary art and its cultural and political conditions, and a new form of sociality that brings artists, curators and viewers together into revitalized interrelationship.’ Beyond my critical observations of the first Biennale my personal involvement has expanded and in the second edition in 2015 I attended and contributed to the event both as an artist producing a collateral art installation on the streets of Kochi (see Chapter 8) and as an academic through the Biennale talks programme, which allowed my initial published writing ‘The Indian Biennale Effect’ to be extended into a more dialogical approach in the public forum of the Biennale’s ‘History Now’ seminars and talks. Here I was able to reflect post the launch Biennale upon critical dialogues around the potentially transformative nature of the Biennale Kochi. Here the format and implementation of the Biennale programmes were discussed both from the perspective of a participating artist and in terms of the attendant critical issues that abounded especially in relation to the expansive role of the Biennale in respect to the city and the locality. It is clear from more recent interviews conducted with Riyas Komu post the second edition of the Biennale (see Chapter 3) that both as an artist and Biennale founder he is aware of the need for the Biennale to have the confidence to address wider critical issues within the actual forum and format of the event itself. This is an aspiration that prefigures the next edition in 2016. The need to reflexively discuss and investigate the arguments and relevance of the particular approaches utilised in Kochi in exhibiting in a local context, developing a public and opening this up to a global audience at the Biennale might necessitate a deeper understanding of the relationship between art 29

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and place and that this discursive approach might actively engage different voices expanding the audience into an awareness of the temporal possibilities and condition of the Biennale. I also had a sense at the time of writing my original journal article that this event needed to be understood outside of writing about the art per se and to produce an account that did justice to the scope and effect of the event. By writing I might also give some insight in understanding the complexity of the situations that have unfolded as a result of the Biennale, while considered from outside, how this event could be understood in terms of both cultural impact and a particular Indian political situation. By critically considering the multiple histories and potentials of this particular Biennale and by historically ‘retracing’ its roots, the aim has been to gain an understanding of the complex political pasts and futures of this unique event in terms of a series of intertwined histories that the Biennale’s artist-cum-curators Riyas Komu and Bose Krishnamachari had so eloquently co-opted as part of their original conceptual conceit for the first edition of this Indian Biennale and which had played out to great effect at its opening.

The biennale effect Before we can understand what the ‘biennale effect’ in India might be, one must understand the conditions and contexts that have effectively rippled out and have helped propel this particular biennale into effect. First we have to historically understand the national drive to achieve international recognition for India postindependence and how this has become a very tangible part of the political drive of the state, as part of its assertion of a new, modern identity through soft power. The significance of the launch of the Indian biennale must be considered against the last few decades where there has been an increasing internationalisation of Indian art in response to globalisation and the subsequent anxieties this internationalisation has engendered especially in what might be recognised as regional inequalities. The arts in India have responded to the resulting social and political issues through a diversity of engagements, including a recognition of the shifting distribution and reception of contemporary Indian art in a more globalised ‘art world’, and changes in the form and content of art produced, particularly in the key metropolitan cities where these developments have had the greatest impact. To understand what has been occurring specifically through the last two editions of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the subsequent ‘Indian biennale effect’, I must locate the situation of art subsuming this event within India’s recent history of radical political modernisation and in the context of the state’s attempts to establish itself in terms of internationalism and contemporaneity via the arts. The impact and effect of the 30

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Figure 1.1 LOOKHERE, charcoal wall portraits of local Keralites by Australian artist Daniel Connell on the exterior of a local tea shop. During the KochiMuziris Biennale, the artwork was defaced utilising burnt coconut husks, an attack that was accorded some significance as a particularly localised signal of opposition to the work. The artwork itself is an intervention in public space, with an implied endorsement by the festival that could be seen as evidence of the cultural imperialism that some locals felt it had brought to Fort Kochi, as it proclaimed itself a ‘festival of international contemporary visual art’ (Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2012). The vandals’ gesture can be seen as fulfilling the potential for public artworks to be politicised and localised and, in this case, do so by subverting the artwork’s and artist’s authority. When considered against Kerala’s active Marxist past, this gesture becomes redolent of the kind of fringe conceptual or performance art that was missing from the first biennale and a more radical gesture of politics that Rancière might approve of. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza

Indian Biennale on the formerly Communist city of Kochi is an important context particularly in the contradictions and paradoxes raised through India’s hosting of this global art event set among the financial and political issues that were at stake for those that launched the Biennale. It can be seen that much was to be gained by looking geographically to the periphery in India in the city of Kochi to launch a new biennale posing an immediate counterpoint to the metropolitan elites and existing structures and 31

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networks of art in India. Making a biennale in Kochi was truly an example and opportunity to challenge and rupture any existing status quo through a national ‘biennale effect’, creating a more independent and alternative space for art while suddenly giving Kochi a national and international focus through art. The local ‘effect’ of the Biennale in Kochi can be traced back to the ascent of Indian artists and art within an international scene, which paralleled the country’s rapid economic growth and foreshadowed a growing international interest in Indian arts that can be seen as one of the benefits of the economic reforms of the 1990s. The economic liberalisation has allowed an alignment of commerce through the market with a contemporary and more internationally focused Indian art world that in turn is making art work that speaks more directly of universally understood issues of globalisation. The ‘biennale effect’ might also be seen as the sum of these many converging situations resulting in ‘India shining’, a phrase previously coined as a previous political marketing slogan in reference to the economic optimism of India in the 1990s that helped shape the boom in investment in contemporary Indian art. The extension of interest in Indian art paralleled this economic boom while becoming in turn an ‘effect’ of India’s growing global economic activity, paving the way and creating the conditions and international interest for some of those Indian artists represented at the Biennale, who have benefitted and developed their international profiles in this period. The critical reception of the KochiMuziris Biennale for some can be linked intrinsically to this free-market capitalism conflated into globalisation for India and that these developing situations already in existence are a legacy that many of those involved in the Biennale have already been conditioned by and that have allowed for the Biennale’s development whether they are opposed or not to these conditions or the ‘effect’ of the imperialism of the market economy. We can also see the corresponding and related momentum and effect from India’s entry, a first, into the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, which builds and is followed by the launch of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Both events have become key markers of India’s positioning onto a global platform for art, reinforcing each other whilst allowing for a new global understanding of India through contemporary art, another ‘biennale effect’ and articulation of its wider national ambitions. Opinions of course differ on the commercial benefits of ‘India shining’ again through art, another ‘biennale effect’ where inclusion in the Biennale for artists on one hand becomes part of the homogenisation of capitalist globalisation and on the other serves to bolster artists’ profiles and value of their work and for their galleries, while for some cementing or growing their global profile, connections and global value as artists. The power of this Biennale has also been in its ability to be 32

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able to resist these market forces, which in turn means credibility, another commodity in the critical world of art that also serves to feed the purpose of the global economy of art. While the underlying theme of my original article refers to the ‘Indian biennale effect,’ I would describe this as the ability of the biennale to engender change beyond the spectacle of event, which in this growing contemporary discourse and critical writing on the biennale format has been described widely as the ‘biennale phenomenon’ (Øvstebø, 2010; Hoskote, 2012a,b,c; Hal, 2013; Lee, 2013; Kapur, 2014). While there is much written in consideration around the growth in number of biennales globally and the more recent proliferation of new events and the emergence of biennales in the global south outside of the established historic Western centres of art production and less-privileged geographies of those afforded to key international art events such as Documenta and the Venice Biennale, there is still a need to consider their ‘effect’ in more detail. Yongwoo Lee, president of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation, also talks of a situation that might have seemed unthinkable in the past and that, in relation to the newer Kochi-Muziris Biennale, can be considered as part of a global ‘biennale effect’ where: This expansion of biennials and the shift in its operational environment has initiated the second and third wave in the history of biennials, driving an enormous change in power relationships within the existing art world. Along with the positive and negative evaluations of biennials in the context of contemporary art, the effect produced by biennials is generating an unprecedented context that provides a substantial contribution to the discourse of cultural production and consumption. (Lee, 2013: 10) Significant to the measure of the ‘biennale effect’ is the numbers of visitors and the breadth of the audience and this is often claimed by event organisers, funders and local government as a measure of success, and it has been notable that the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale have both been attracting significantly more visitors than the Venice Biennale. Corinna Dean (2015) notes of the 500,000 visitors to the Biennale’s second edition and furthermore cites its curator, Jitish Kallat, who remarks how ‘[a]rtists are moving back and collectives are forming, such as a recording studio, cafe and artists workshop’. As Dean puts it: ‘Its effects transcend its three-month run.’ These notable audience figures might be attributed to a more expansive audience made up of larger contingent of local visitors and not just reliant on the middle–class, informed, cultural 33

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consumer or the wealthy global ‘art tourists’. The huge local audiences might be considered as another phenomenon that is certainly another ‘biennale effect’ and one that critiques the insular nature of many other contemporary art events. The need to engage and to develop a sense of community and opportunities for local inclusion has been important to both Gwangju and Kochi-Muziris Biennales developing new relationships between local audiences and maybe non-art audiences who feel able to engage their curiosity whilst also engaging artists to have a deep engagement with the city and its social and historic fabric. The need to measure this effect becomes important and that an event might have significant contributions beyond giving an opportunity to new art and artists, which validates the event in terms of its pulling power and draw, which might mean the difference in future funding as well as developing the various media narratives that will strategically promote and market the event both in real time and in the future, which become imperative to sustain interest and support. Sabine Vogel also expands on the proliferation of the biennales, art fairs and auction houses as an effect as a contemporary driver of the expansion of the art world (outside of the West). She importantly asks the question of the challenges of the volume of biennales and artists have for the art critics, who are relied upon to make sense of this world for a public: ‘How can art critics live up to the Universal claim to understanding and qualitative criteria if every new art scene brings with it new historical and intellectual referential networks? Who knows enough about the main philosophical and religious traditions, texts, and the iconography of China, India, and Latin America to judge the works at biennials intelligently?’ (2013: 258). Lee Weng Choy (2011) turns the lens to consider a biennale effect as the format making us rethink the biennale and what ‘biennales want from us’ and how we have to develop new needs and pressures on the format. Foremost is a need for critical attention and Choy having recently attended numerous Asian biennales, while considering this growing ‘biennale demand’, sees this, in the main, as being driven by governments and institutions who want them and organize them to the demands of local populations, from the art world and artists, curators and critics. Finally Choy (2011: 213) considers the demands that biennales make on ‘audiences, consumers, participants, patrons, stakeholders, students, and critics,’ as part of their widening effect. The opportunity again arises for the possibility of biennales to be sites to rethink approaches where it might be, ‘recognized that underlying these ethnogeographies are dense and reflexive historico-geographies . . . What if we recognized that what biennales truly want of us is to look at them, not in a flash, but slowly? And to see them as emergent traditions–at least, to contemplate that possibility as a horizon’ (221). The biennale effect can also 34

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be seen in these critiques as the growing critical effect developing around and through biennales on the actual biennale format itself. It is acknowledged that biennales have contributed actively to a discourse and rethinking of art practices as knowledge production and also in terms of altering a global hegemony of art. The shift in global positioning of the contemporary growth in the biennale format means that more of the newer non-Western biennales are influencing the global art world from what were the former peripheries. It is these seemingly peripheral sites where a focus on the biennale as a site for artists to engage with and to try and effect changes in the social and political realities outside of the institution of art is a contemporary reality (Kochi, Havana, São Paulo, Istanbul and Gwangju Biennales). Like Vogel on critically considering the global currents and transitionary forces of globalisation on art, Terry Smith (2013) talks of the contemporary conditions that the biennales exist within that exert an effect on artists, curators and commentators. Smith lists at least ‘three discernable phases: a reactive anti-imperialist search for national and localist imagery; then a rejection of simplistic identarianism and corrupted nationalism in favour of a naïve internationalism; followed by a broader search for an integrated cosmopolitanism, or worldliness, in the context of the permanent transition of all things and relations’ (2013: 188). We might consider Kochi against the growing writing on international arts festivals and biennales that gives a collected and growing cultural and economic significance to these events and where Delanty (2011: 190) notes that, ‘this internationalism is increasingly being reworked as a cosmopolitan condition in which the national context is of diminishing importance.’ This might be considered as a direction that the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has engaged with in its own redrawing against the internal national politics in India for the arts while removing itself from a national geographic periphery by placing itself on a global platform through the global dimension of art where its alignment to ‘Cosmopolitanism encourages the development of new ways of thinking that go beyond disciplinary boundaries and which challenge more broadly the very notion of borders’ (Delanty, 2011: 196). At the same time, the regenerative powers associated with bringing a biennale to Kochi, another ‘biennale effect’, sought to achieve some unity between the activities of art and life by utilising the wider city as a space to intervene and respond to rather than only conventionally house the event. One of the incredible ‘effects’ of this Biennale has been how art has helped traverse the domains between public and private space in the city while at the same time interrogating the effects and neglects of urban regeneration, of the re-imagining of space and its possibility realised through artistic potential at a time when investment in the city was not occurring and the local economy was stagnant. By choosing the city of Kochi, the co-founders 35

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are also taking issue with the disparity in the broader national picture where the polarising effect of economic activity and focus is on already established centres such as Mumbai and Delhi with thriving art infrastructures a byproduct of the confidence in these cities as global economic centres. In this case the coastal city of Kochi might be considered as disadvantaged economically, suffering a downturn in the global shipping trade, local political instability and social disadvantage and thus lacking the infrastructure and economic situation in making an art event a potential for investment. Instead the Biennale has created a territory in Kochi, which has permitted the critical nature of artists and artworks to question the very ideas of space and place allowing for the emancipation of many of the disused and crumbling buildings of a bygone era that had been rendered as rejected historic and physical manifestations of a wealth and power built on the global economies of a past colonial trade. This made the Biennale’s focus on Kochi not only as a venue but also a desirable global travel destination to situate national and international art an important strategy to critically develop without the usual commercial pressure that might be found in a highly developed urban or metropolitan city and the expectations that might be expected from an urban audience. Of course the economic ‘effect’ of the Biennale on the city also becomes a means to leverage economic opportunities around the success of the Biennale and those ‘Quick to spot a marketing opportunity’, which, ‘Kochi’s mayor recently dubbed it the “Art City” and, of course, developers are hot on the heels to capitalise on the art buzz, with billboards springing up announcing ‘Invest in Biennale City’ (Dean, 2015). One might say that the Biennale by choosing Kochi has become a key investor in the city; again one of the ‘biennale effects’ of this investment might well become the sustained influx of visitors into the city and as an art infrastructure grows, it brings with it opportunistic investment into the city but also paradoxically ushers in rising rents as artists and art professionals relocate, drawn by the critical mass of a developing art scene. The growing potential for work directly and indirectly attributed to the draw of the Biennale is the start of a pronounced and growing creative economy in the region needed to satisfy the needs of a large international art event that is developing longer-term local initiatives beyond the Biennale period. Papastergiadis, who has written widely on the challenges of the biennale format (with essays appearing in major catalogues such as the Biennales of Sydney, Liverpool, Istanbul, Gwangju, Taipei, Lyon, Thessaloniki and Documenta 13), discusses the growing capitalisation of culture through the biennale. These critiques are useful in considering the pressures on the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and Papastergiadis and Martin (2011), in citing George Yúdice’s recent theories on the changing role of culture in an increasingly globalised world, help us understand how this Biennale has 36

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become a successful biennale model. A further consideration of culture as a valuable resource has gained currency: ‘In this new era of cultural expediency, culture no longer simply serves as a realm of legitimation, but, rather, must itself be legitimated on the basis of its explicit and social and economic utility. Ironically enough, it is the states’ withdrawal of funding from social programmes that provides the “condition of continued possibility” for non-profit arts and cultural activities’ (Papastergiadis and Martin, 2011: 45). When considering this statement against the prevailing economic conditions in India where there are issues of impoverished state funding and limited state-sponsored institutions, these same economic possibilities of capitalising on culture are now increasingly being explored by attracting sponsorship from global entities while using ideas of the forces of regeneration and cultural economic benefits to inspire more confidence and financial support from the state is a strategy of Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The increase of global interest shows that there might be potential in art and cultural development as a wider regeneration project, which has been spurred recently by successful projects such as Tate London and the opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which have been seen as great success stories with the phenomenon described as the ‘museum’ or ‘Bilbao or Guggenheim effect’. That these art/culture projects might be a driver in urban development and economic regeneration make them of interest to local governments, businesses and those who might gain economically by attracting tourism while commercially developing associated heritage and mass culture industries draw new income to and from these sites of neoliberal regeneration. As such,, ‘there has been . . . substantial critical assessment of the “Guggenheim effect”. . . including critical assessment of the potentially exclusionary and polarizing nature of its gentrification effects’ (Cameron and Coaffee, 2005: 46–47). One of the ‘biennale effects’ in India has been a re-engagement with debates that consider the relationship of politics to the formation of artistic identity, as well as the consideration of the perceptions of India that are revealed through contemporary art through this international art mechanism of the Biennale. Some of the contemporary critiques of the global biennale format have discussed the individual attributes of art and compared those with its possibilities as an active social force, an idea that Riyas Komu returns to often when we have interviewed him and discussed the Biennale over the last few years (see Chapter 3). These ideas are here applied to the radical potential/effect of the Biennale in India, something clearly not lost on the artist curators from Kerala launching this international event and who have knowingly channelled the opportunity of the Biennale to create an ‘effect’. These curators while understanding the need to espouse tourism as a benefit to the local politicians and business people 37

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of Kochi and Kerala were clearly beyond developing only an art tourism spectacle but rather keen to draw on the alternative perspectives that art might bring to a community both in the city of Kochi and beyond, built on a radical history of politics and radical ideas. Thinking again back to the political effect of the Biennale we might consider as Rancière did in The Emancipated Spectator that by improving our comprehension of art we also deepen our grasp of the politics of perception, something that the Biennale potentially induces through a process of ordering and disordering of the very social order of art and this engagement of art as politics at every level being one of the ‘biennale effects’ (see also Chapter 9). There is a need here to explore the Kochi-Muziris Biennale beyond what is proving to be a crucial addition and an alternative to the diverse range of existing global biennale events and where we recognise that there is need to critically understand this particular ‘biennale effect’ with a particular set of conditions that makes this distinctive Biennale worth studying, critically unpacking and considering as part of this wider and growing body of writing on the phenomena of biennales. One of the ‘biennale effects’ will be for contemporary Indian artists, as this Biennale affects the shifting grounds of the Indian art world as art moves from the margins to the centre of public acceptability through a growing and positive public and media reception of the event as a visible success. The question now will be if the young up-andcoming Indian artists at the Biennale, many of whom shared the stage with an older politicised generation resistant to conform, be able to resist the opportunity to become the new establishment and benefit economically as they are welcomed by the needs of the institution and the state. To resist such forces and effects will be difficult and while India has staked its claim at Venice and Kochi by challenging existing hegemonies along the way, the ‘biennale effect’ is strong and the warnings of Rancière ever more prescient.

India plays host to the world Biennale culture, or the biennale condition, is no longer merely one among many of the features of global contemporary art; it has become, in a profound and constitutive way, its primary matrix. (Hoskote, 2012c: 21)

Looking back to the Biennale’s launch, we can trace the multiple and emerging needs for India to develop a major art event. In the Indian Biennale story we need to begin with an idea precipitated by an invitation in 2010 from the then Communist state of Kerala from the then minister of culture M. A. Baby to Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, two Kerala-born artists of recognition nationally and growing significantly internationally, 38

Figure 1.2 Black Gold, installation of pottery shards by Indian artist Vivan Sundaram at Aspinwall House at the first Biennale. The terracotta fragments used within this installation are recovered from the archaeological site at Pattanam, the site of the flooded ancient seaport of Muziris. The landscape produced becomes an imaginary topography on the floor, creating associations with national myth-making that the festival curators have loosely played with as part of the name and identity of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Opposite is an installation, Untitled, of a Kerala fishing boat by the Indian artist Subodh Gupta. The traditional Kerala fishing boat has been filled with cooking pots, chairs, bicycles and quilts, lashed together with chains, and suspended from a girder in this former shipbuilding yard, serving both as a local symbol and as a globally recognised symbol of economic migration, denoting the physical movement of goods and commodities as part of the global economic narrative of a wider cultural exchange. Many of the works found at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale reference and are informed by ideas and theories of the city, of social and public space, and of broader socio-economic issues affecting modernisation in India. Questions about how such modernisation is funded, and who ultimately benefits from it, are heightened within this once Communist state, where an active socialist agenda has shaped the political landscape. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza.

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‘to suggest an event that would reaffirm the state’s position on the cultural map’ (Iqbal, 2012: 16). The personal histories, relationships and trajectories of these artists connect many of the key protagonists who have both supported and have contributed to the formation of this Biennale. Tracing their early start as artists in Kerala before going on to study at the prestigious Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai in the 1990s gives some sense to why these co-founders of the Biennale have wanted to return to their origins, understanding the potential of Kochi as a centre to develop the Biennale from. It is clear their journey and this narrative are defined as they developed their experience and profiles as artists, establishing studios in Mumbai, forged networks in India and beyond and where Bose Krishnamachari started seriously curating young up-and-coming Indian artists. It is important to note that in the build-up to the development of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale that Riyas Komu had also been invited as an artist to participate in two key established international art events that would have informed his thinking in terms of a global scenario where divergent approaches to the biennale format could be seen in stark contrast here between the East and the West. His inclusion as one of two Indian artists selected by curator Robert Storr for the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 (India did not have its own national pavilion at Venice until 2011) and his inclusion in the Gwangju Emerging Asian Artists Exhibition in South Korea in 2010 are significant precursors to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The significance of the Gwangju Biennale was its growing importance as one of the key contemporary biennales in Asia, which Ranjit Hoskote has written widely about (Hoskote became an important figure in the recent narrative around a growing international interest in Indian art and artists both as a contemporary curator and a critical writer of the Indian art scene and notably previously curated the Gwangju Biennale in 2008 and the first Indian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011). Hoskote describes Gwangju as the ‘biennial of resistance’ (2013: 145) because of its model of social and political led curation, which builds on the country’s recent turbulent and violent history of civil uprising against the military regime with the Biennale also becoming a sustained memorial to the Gwangju massacre that occurred in 1980. This very political of biennale events is described by the World Biennial Forum as ‘establishing itself as a highlight of the international contemporary art circuit’ (2013: 181). Hoskote (2012b: 183) also notes in his writings in the first Biennale publication, Against All Odds, that: The gestation period for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has involved extensive discussions and consultations between the founders and a wide range of participants in global biennale culture: curators, politicians, theorists, critics, managers, artists, civic bureaucrats, 40

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industrialists, foundations. . . They have acquainted themselves not only with the visible manifestations of such international festivals but also with the vast infrastructure that supports and sustains such endeavors, which usually remains invisible. (Hoskote, 2012b: 183) As one of the supporters of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Hoskote himself would have been one such invisible aides, bringing experience to the cofounders from his curatorial role in 2008 of the Gwangju Biennale in the build-up to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale’s development. Without the usual curatorial concept, Komu and Krishnamachari developed the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, focusing on an artist-led approach that would be underpinned, ‘[t]hrough the celebration of contemporary art from around the world, . . . to invoke the historic cosmopolitan legacy of the modern metropolis of Kochi, and its mythical predecessor, the ancient port of Muziris’ (Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2012: 3). The artist/curators’ positioning of Kerala’s unique history in India is important in terms of framing the Biennale as a key ancient site for global trade, the Communist and socialist character of the state and the articulation of progressive policies. In this respect, the curators ensured that the message was asserted that, ‘What India needs is an international platform for contemporary visual arts. . . more connectivity with the international art discourse. . . more global awareness of Indian arts, and greater local awareness, understanding and appreciation of contemporary art in India’ (Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2012). The written pitch by the curators recognised the benefits that the biennale format might bring and was as much an assertion to local state funders as it was to a global art audience. Rejecting only national representation and inviting forty-nine Indian artists with twenty-nine international artists to create work in private spaces in Fort Kochi, the curators hoped to address some of these issues. As there was no single space within Kochi equipped to accommodate an event of this nature and scale, nor the funding to establish exhibition-level spaces, the use of derelict and former colonial spaces became an essential part of the curatorial turn and not just a subversive statement against the usual elitism of the institutional or museum-level space. By the second Biennale in 2014, it was clear to see how some of these spaces have been further maintained and developed as a by-product of the Biennale’s investment, use and re-appropriation evidencing a growing confidence in the economic possibilities of re-engaging these spaces. To attend the Biennale’s launch in 2012 was to witness a work in progress, the grand ambition of two artists as curators/organisers dealing handson in the displaying of works while negotiating the vagaries of a crumbling infrastructure of historic spaces. Delays to the Biennale were attributed to 41

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the late withdrawal of some of the expected state funds from a now nonCommunist local government, sensitised to the criticisms of local pressure groups. The Biennale had a difficult birth, with financial strain, a paucity of professional art infrastructure, and a highly unionised workforce (a legacy of previous state communism) to contend with. This was coupled with inexperienced technical support and specific artistic demands: the many video displays, projections, and lighting needed for the more complex sited artworks were an added strain. The construction, let alone the launching, of exhibitions across citywide sites was visibly challenging. The effect of this was not wholly detrimental to the event, lending a grassroots feel in the communal problem solving, which I could see still being played out well after the launch. It seemed apt in this deeply socialist state to see the visibility of the labour needed in the ‘production’ of art, which, in other circumstances, might have been a less effective avant-garde gesture or performance but here seemed both honest and a welcome antidote to the selfconscious performance of reality. Many lessons learned and time prevailing meant that the Biennale team was better equipped in December 2014 in terms of skills, experience and logistics while better knowledge of the spaces allowed for a more strategic planning of artworks than time or money previously allowed. While it was clear that some international visitors were perturbed by the unfinished nature of the Biennale spaces and the lack of censure, it was also clear that this situation radically located this particular Biennale as being uniquely Indian while acting as an antithetical gesture to the homogeneity and the clinical choreography of similar Western art events visited. What was also refreshingly apparent was the diversity of the audience: not just the usual suspects and VIPs of the international pack of art tourists, critics, curators, artists and media that would normally be present, but a very democratic and largely local contingent that comprised local workers, schoolchildren and a very general public. Although subsequently, through the success of the first Biennale, the second in 2014 brought the inevitability of the influx of the art ‘jet set’ as another manifestation of the politics of globalisation that an event like this attracts and also has to resist, not least when seen in the context of this small Kerala city. Fortunately the lack of physical barriers or initial entry fee made for a more accessible event, while the reappointing of redundant historical spaces, with many works a response to the locality, made visiting the Biennale both an inclusive and a democratic proposition. Interestingly, after much debate among the organisers, the decision was made to introduce a low-level entry fee for the Biennale in 2014, angering some in terms of the potential to exclude local visitors. These charges have brought in much-needed revenue to generally help fund the event rather than a device to control the audience or to capitalise on the level of interest. The Biennale organisers are still mindful of 42

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the balance that they need to achieve and the continuous external critique that Miwon Kwon describes in understanding the precarious balance in situating site-specific art. ‘This kind of continuous relationship between a place and a person,’ she writes, ‘is what many critics declare to be lost, and needed, in contemporary society. In contrast, the “wrong” place is generally thought of as a place where one feels one does not belong – unfamiliar, disorienting, destabilizing, even threatening’ (Kwon, 2004: 163).

Critical pasts To understand the critical path that has led to the establishment of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale we need to look at India’s recent past. Twenty years ago, India was near bankruptcy as successive postindependence governments had failed to lift the country from its third-world status

Figure 1.3 The Democratic Youth Forum India (DYFI) offices of Fort Kochi. The DYFI is the youth wing and the largest youth organisation in India and is part of the Communist Party of India, which is India’s left-wing Marxist political party. The DYFI opposes economic policies of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, as well as all imperialist aggression against the Third World. The DYFI offices are covered with the art of Che Guevara, a popular image across Kerala, which sits happily with religious iconography and photos of Bollywood action heroes in public and private spaces across India. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza.

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and had instead built up excessive international debt from loans taken out from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. This critical situation became the trigger for radical economic change. The pressures in 1991 on the Indian government to create reform through economic liberalisation can be seen as an end of the postindependence project started in 1947 under the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. Opening a once protectionist national economy to the possibilities of global free-trade markets has, among its many effects on everyday life in India, helped to economically and culturally valorise contemporary Indian art in the emerging globalised art scene. This has propelled many contemporary Indian artists like Jitish Kallat (who became the second artist curator of the 2014 Biennale), Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher into new national and international territories and generated a renewed interest in the Indian ‘modernists’ and ‘progressives’, including F. N. Souza, M. F. Husain and S. H. Raza, who set the collective mandate of political activism, intellectual vigour, and radical critique that has become a legacy to a successive generation of Indian artists. The economic success and optimism that followed reform in India can be expressed in the nationalistic marketing slogan of ‘India Shining’, which captured the mood of India’s new economic status during the political campaigning of 2004 and as Kapur observes, ‘[i]n India the progressive element in the programme of the metropolitan (or simply urban) artists is once again mediated via nationalist aspirations’ (2011: 197). It was, in the main, the economically energised cities of India that became these ‘shining’ national beacons of India’s reversal in fortunes, and it was in these centres of cosmopolitanism, synonymous with a more globalised outlook, that the effects of liberalisation and rapid urbanisation were primarily felt. The main beneficiaries of these changes have been the wealthy and the growing urban middle classes. However, these same cities are now facing growing financial inequality, tensions of class and caste and problems stemming from social and political difference – a situation exacerbated by an increasing subaltern workforce swelled by poor rural migrants seeking their fortune. Both the economic benefits and the problems inherent in globalisation have had a profound effect on contemporary art and artists, helping to define a new international consideration of contemporary Indian art. Some have argued that economic liberalisation has allowed back into India the Western imperialism that Nehru’s protectionist and nationalistic policies had previously deflected. Others see this economic globalisation as a benefit that has allowed a ‘new’ India to be realised, one in which the positive outcomes of economic growth could potentially benefit all by expanding opportunities and one that the Kochi-Muziris Biennale can be seen to have benefitted from. 44

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A contemporary understanding of the Biennale must take into account this legacy of recent radical historical change in India: not only the redrawing of the colonial world map but also the national modernising agenda, which, though first envisioned under Nehru, has been realised through recent economic changes that have hastened India’s rise as a global economic power. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale might be described as a timely assertion of India’s contemporary global identity as part of a new agenda to forge a national identity not just economically but through ‘soft power’. What is apparent from this Biennale is that overlapping histories of radical political change, intersecting with social and artistic development, have made this situation possible, while the success of Indian contemporary art becomes manifest within this Biennale and its particular geographical setting. My attendance at the launching of India’s first global art biennale is, therefore, prefaced by the question of the impact of these widespread social and political changes, both on the intentions of the Biennale and on key artists whose work is itself a commentary shaped by these changes. While this new addition to the growing list of global biennales can be seen as another move in India’s pursuit of global recognition, it can also be read as a conscious effort to elevate Indian art in terms of aligning it with a global and contemporary ‘culture industry’. Such an alignment can be understood in terms of the dialectical forces of globalisation that encompass a network of global art market structures, of art production and consumption, replete with the issues this brings, and in fact, the Biennale in India has triggered much critical discussion about the disparity between those who most likely will benefit from it and those who most likely will be left behind. While the landscape in the last twenty-five years has been radically altered for many young and emerging artists in India, the impoverished national state sector, which is generally both conservative and slow to respond to rapid change, is now usurped in terms of recognition and credibility by the new commercial art fairs, private institutions and galleries still located in the main in Mumbai and Delhi. The growth of both individual Indian and international investors and collectors of contemporary Indian art has been funded on the back of neoliberalism, in the form of India’s economic liberalisation, and as sociologist Pascal Gielen (2009: 10) notes ‘every globally operating artistic actor – thus benefits from pleasures afforded by todays widespread neoliberal market economy. He or she grabs every opportunity, if desired, to tell a critical, engaged or unique story’ – a comment that might describe the pressures placed on the co-founders to also develop a wider narrative to pitch the idea of the Biennale from politicians to sponsors. These interconnected dynamics of political change and economic drivers have also helped support the international presence of contemporary Indian art, and it can be seen that the old modernising agenda under the 45

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Nehru-led state has now been supplanted by the agendas of the new art enterprises supported by private commerce. It is these new drivers that are complicit in the current stage of ‘modernisation’ of the arts in India. There are, of course, multiple readings of the term modernism and it is important here to understand the term outside of the West. The Indian art historian and curator Geeta Kapur, for example, has attempted to intellectually rationalise modernism as both a social and a historical condition unique to India, which she articulates as being understood as an alternate matrix to that used in any Western art historical model and asserts that historically in India, ‘culture was sought to be institutionalized precisely in order to carry out the overall mandate of modernization’ (Kapur, 2000: 202) seen under Nehru’s active agenda of change. In terms of the effect on the current situation of art in India, modernism, in the case of India, is best defined within an understanding of the particular political situation of Nehru’s social and intellectual modernisation agenda as a nationalist cause for Indian artists. With Nehru’s sense of urgency about the modernisation of India, art suddenly became part of a national agenda of reinvention and, importantly, liberation from the traditional colonial art education established by the British. Nehru’s hubris, in the rush to implement his plan, was to think that modernity might quickly be reached in India through rapid change, which would form a new modernist national identity. While this condition could not be constructed as part of his moment of radical historical change, his agenda did make an avant-garde possible in India at that time. This has had far-reaching consequences in developing an idea of the contemporary in India, at least until the forces and attractions of globalisation became too difficult for a new India to resist. When the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is written about, it is often compared to the Nehru government’s failed attempt at a biennale-type event modelled on the then successes of the São Paulo, Venice and Paris Biennales. Nehru’s Triennale-India was launched in 1968 as an initiative sponsored by the Indian Ministry of Culture, through the Lalit Kala Akademi, with a progressive and international outlook. Historian Chaudhuri while considering the effect of international influence on modernism in India concludes that ‘the impact of the style of European modernism was intensified by the belief that its internationalism suited the experience of modernity and would further the modernization of public spaces and cultural life’ (2010: 942). The Triennale-India promised an alternative expression of India’s modernisation project, with early editions bringing key international experimental and conceptual artists to India. Criticism both internal and external (John Berger sent a letter to the Akademi in 1968 advising they overthrow the hegemony of Europe and North America by rejecting this international event), and ensuing political pressure to support indigenous 46

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and traditional arts, forced the Akademi into becoming less experimental, leading to more parochial events and a loss of initial purpose. This failure due to too much state control of cultural development was replicated in subsequent failed attempts in developing a new biennale format for India centred in Delhi and led by Geeta Kapur. The fruition of the idea of a biennale that was not only a national event but also an international one, though predominantly for Indian artists, has finally managed to be realised in Kochi. So this cultural experiment of the state was seen as a failure, and the state’s ability to support shifts in artistic thinking and practices, as well as a key moment in the modernising agenda, was wasted. This failure to set postcolonial India on a par with the mainstream international art world, where radical ideas were then moving towards postmodernism, would have a long-lasting effect on the arts in India and India’s status within the global arts setting until now. It also becomes clear why those artists who had experienced the radical changes within the developing modernist art movements, outside of postwar India, embraced Marxism. That, in India, Marxism ‘may now be the only organized movements to speak the language of modernity’ (Kapur, 2000: 298) also helps us make sense of the ontology of socialism of Nehru’s modernising agenda. This was an agenda crucial to those artists who wanted to define themselves in India and internationally beyond traditional or craft-based art forms or the complex relationship of caste hierarchy and custom, which were seen as anathema to change. Setting the Biennale in Kerala acknowledges the important relationship that Marxism has had with Indian art and the effects of this relationship in the contemporary Indian situation. The distinction between a Western and an Indian period of modernism becomes important in understanding the situation for Indian artists who have emerged in the last twenty years, a period in which India has been a nation defining itself, not postcolonially, but globally and economically, as part of a new world order and the velocity of ‘International modernism, which had made only a hesitant entry into India before Independence, gathered speed after 1947. . . . in the 1970s. . . a reflection of greater politicization of art. . . the period when global modernism came under attack as subcontinental artists began to reassert their cultural identity’ (Mitter, 2001: 203). This is an important distinction for the contemporary Indian artist who does not need to deal so much with being modern on a national level but, instead, with gaining acceptance or recognition within the wider dominant global centres for artistic production. It is here that the development of a biennale event becomes a gateway for Indian art and artists to develop a recognised global presence within a localised Indian structure, thus achieving a balance between the binary of local/global discourse while acting as a modernising force both critically and intellectually within India. 47

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It might also be seen critically that India’s emergence onto the international platform might have more to do with the fickle global interest of art investors looking beyond the West to find financial opportunities. Boosted through recent reappraisals in the West through major survey exhibitions, contemporary Indian art, synonymous now with the more globalised outlook of Indian artists, has become a more acceptable market for the moment. The new mobilities and global potentials for Indian artists are considered in an essay in the catalogue for the Danish exhibition India: Art Now (2012), one of many recent exhibitions of contemporary Indian art. The essay by Ranjit Hoskote considers the paradox of opportunity, noting that, for Indian artists, ‘the local situation encodes specific kinds of difficulties and impediments for them. At home, they must continue to confront a conservative market that is unresponsive to innovation and departure’ (2012a: 61).

Global futures We can understand the wider topographical contexts of this Biennale and its situation in Kochi through a particular reading of a recent history, and through the rapid social and economic changes occurring in India, all of which inform a complex narrative of an emerging modern Indian nationalism into globalism. However, what might this mean for how we consider India through this Biennale? The cultural terrain has shifted since the time of the original Triennial-India relatively to the time of this latest incarnation of the Biennale in terms of the effect of the forces of global economics, which relate to changes in global and national migration for India and of the networking that has brought sites of global cultural production closer together. The ability now to realise a large-scale and international biennale event is testament to the extent that current modes of communications are able to bring together the diverse global cultures of art, allowing a new de-territorialised forum in the biennale format, one that enables ideas and practices to be shared as well as rapidly assimilated and disseminated across global networks. The shifts in the centres of art production mean that for Kochi and some of the newer biennales that they ‘no longer strive for this “affiliation with the West” but rather back a regional community’ (Vogel, 2010: 112), a dimension that gives the Kochi-Muziris Biennale a future position to further develop the Biennale in tandem with a growing alternative global framework. One might consider the sponsorship and collaborations with global sponsors as an example of this future when companies such as BMW and Google (through their art projects) give substance to their interest in India as a market via the Biennale event. The Biennale can be seen as an attractive entry point for businesses able to tap simultaneously 48

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Figure 1.4 This hand-painted statement, artist unknown, on the exterior of a local wall in Fort Kochi was surrounded by several commissioned street art projects and acted as a potent device when you consider what the first Kochi-Muziris Biennale’s legacy might be for local artists. During the festival, other unofficial and spontaneous additions to the festival’s sanctioned street art appeared, evidence of public and political activism and wider subcultural activity in response to the Biennale in a state with one of India’s highest literacy rates, which itself is a by-product of the state’s Communist education policies. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza.

into an international and local audience who are part of an interconnected global economy with both sides seemingly advantaged reciprocally by their mutual validation. For these global entities, arguments against the uniqueness of place or fixed representations of place might not be considered in the global future that the Biennale could represent. Instead, being tethered to Kochi might be thought of as, ‘not so much multicultural as it is multicentred, hence the global spread of the biennial phenomenon’, and leading to the question as to whether the ‘biennale effect’ or its ‘interconnectedness should be foregrounded over the uniqueness of place’ (Sheikh, 2010: 162). There are many paradoxes that might mitigate against the seeming benefits of these changes, as the assimilation and consumption of art subsumed into a global melting pot speeds up, and notions of radical or critical thought 49

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are subsumed by the need to provide a new or novel take on a recognised product. It is crucial to recognise the relationship that the developing art scene in India has with the art market and the capitalist models of consumption and production, which can be seen to have asserted themselves as part of the contemporary biennale structure. A review of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale must, then, acknowledge the multiple and interlinked global economic structures that the Biennale can only exist within and comply with in order to sustain both national interest and support. The Biennale organisers must carefully balance the competing forces of the art markets, corporate sponsorship and global economies, which can systematically reduce the cultural difference of India’s art production through the homogeneity and standardisation that these market forces eventually bring as they seek greater economic benefits. These are certainly some of the most persuasive situations that the curators must critically resist yet crucially operate within, as Adorno has previously warned acting as a critical consciousness that ‘[t]he entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms’ (1991: 99). Only the distance of time can allow us to consider whether critical knowledge from the growing study of the Biennale could be significant in supporting the future development and manifestation of a more effective biennale for India, reminding those who seek to develop and grow this event as to what the ‘biennale effect’ might effectively constitute. It must be asked if the current preoccupations with this growing format and the growing critique of these global art events have become an unsatisfactory critical burden for every new curator and biennale organiser with the expectations and constant examination of the theorists and critics that these events are so dependent on and who in turn depend on these new opportunities in the cycle and revolving constellation of the art world. With the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, it is clear that while it is aware of this burden of responsibility, the character and identity of the Biennale is being determined by the city of Kochi and the situation of Indian art/artists in relation to specific localities, but also as part of a network of global opportunity, the opportunity of the contemporary Biennale should be to absorb and seek out criticism to make this a part of the productive process of re-imagining to keep the format relevant. Debates will carry on about the prospects for the Biennale, with a continued focus on India’s nascent developments on the global network and the wider critical discussion of global contemporary art and the structures that support and inform it will continue to develop and be informed by the growing critical study of the format. While globalisation for Indian art inevitably means economic pressures from the Western markets, it also brings the benefits of the de-territorialisation of any current centres of global art production, which in turn allow for changing relations 50

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of cultural exchange and value systems of art production from those currently accepted. It has to be accepted though that the Biennale will bring economic benefits for artists who have been selected, their galleries and a global art system hungry for the new and different validated by a biennale and that this ‘[p]roduction of difference, to say it in more general terms, is itself a fundamental activity of capitalism, necessary for its continuous expansion’ (Kwon, 2004: 159). Still, it can be evidenced by concerns raised in debates in the India Art Fair in 2013 that there are still many questions as to how India might critically engage globally with accepted structures of thought when those structures are still dominated by the West. If the field is shifting globally, then there is still much work to do to provide alternative and suitable frameworks, and the discourse to further Indian arts recognises the significance of this issue both economically and intellectually. As the Art Fair puts it: ‘While art practice associated with the global contemporary has become global, the space of art writing is still ruled by western art historians and curators. Art curators, critics and art practitioners are invited to reflect on this paradox of the global contemporary and the status of art theory in writing practice’ (India Art Fair, 2013). Following the critical reception of the first Biennale at the Art Fair in 2013, a precedent had now been set in reclaiming a territory via the Biennale on the international art circuit as well as its reception in India. Building on this success, the second edition in 2014 had to work hard to develop its identity and was refined further through a more controlled exposition. In this case, Indian artist Jitish Kallat developed a curatorial approached based upon synchronically ordered artworks, with the title ‘Whorled Explorations’, which formed part of the continued development of the Biennale concept (see Chapter 6). His approach as curator has been to take in the historic navigation of the globe as part of a mapping exercise connecting time, space and history as a contemporary turn while building upon the original curatorial proposition of a paradigm of historic cosmopolitanism in the city of Muziris, a nod to a pre-globalisation India and a critique of conventional historic thinking of globalisation as a more recent phenomena. With the now dominant form of the contemporary globalised biennale established, there is a greater need to question and not just accept this format to allow for the possibility of a new alternative more suitable for India’s current social and political situation. In the Biennale’s speaker programme, Let’s Talk, Paul Domela (a previous programme director of the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art) spoke at the opening symposium of the first Biennale, ‘Site Imaginaries’, with a particular experience of developing a biennale format responsive to the city where, ‘[i]n Liverpool the strategy is to not exhibit works that have been selected in advance but to invite artists to create in-situ projects in direct response to local problems’ (Vogel, 2010: 64). 51

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It may seem that the future of the Indian Biennale might again lie in the ideas that propelled Nehru’s original radical modernising agenda, not only in order to determine a new critical space – a ‘global contemporary’ – but also to reassert secular and democratic thought through art in India, an idea not lost on Riyas Komu (see Chapter 3). I can also see in Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist writings, in the Critique of Everyday Life (published in the same year of Indian independence in 1947), a call for philosophy into action, where critique of everyday life was not just knowledge of the everyday but the idea that this knowledge was a means to activate a transformation. These ideas chime with the particular sense of the intellectual modernising ideas of India’s postindependence artists and the new-found optimism that came to them with early independence, which might be seen here as an arc that reconnects with the present direction and thinking of the Biennale directors as the Biennale develops its third edition. It is clear that a precedent was created by Komu and Krishnamachari solving a lack of financial infrastructure in the first edition by their use of unconventional spaces to house the art and that key distinctions between space and Kochi as a place that could also be broken down where ‘[a]rtists made intelligent interpretations of the culture, economy and politics of the place: Kochi, Kerala, India’ (Kapur, 2014: 32), thus localising and legitimising the Biennale locally. The distribution of artworks and interventions, inhabiting these quotidian and abandoned spaces around the city, gave a freedom for the artists forcing in many cases a materiality of locality with their artworks far removed from the institutional spaces of art thus allowing for the distancing of art beyond objects of value or the visual rhetoric of rarified cultural commodity. While the Biennale in India offers up more opportunities via a reassertion of art through the relational and related use of spaces across the city, this has also created a unique localised environment to understand art as ‘[t]he space developed by avant-garde artists, by those artists who registered the collapse of the old points of reference, introduced itself into this fabric or tissue as a legitimating ideology, an ideology that justifies and motivates. These artists presented the object within the space of the dominant social practice’ (Lefebvre, 2009: 308–309). The point of art’s abilities to connect and make sense of a place is not lost for some critics on many of the works made in situ at this Biennale. Lefebvre’s important insights on the dialectical rather than oppositional relationship between the increasing abstraction of space and the ‘production’ of particularities of place, local specificity and cultural authenticity – a concern that informs many site-oriented art practices today, which was clearly one of the key ‘effects’ of this Biennale in terms of the dominant situation of the spaces of the art being produced. In seeking to understand India’s need for the Biennale, we can equally consider if there is a need for further global radicalism (one is reminded 52

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of the need of the provocations and radical spirit of May 1968 that challenged the balance of traditional power and of orthodoxies) and that the biennale format can reassert ideas of difference when the forces of globalisation might threaten India and this Biennale might need to work smartly to resist a global tide of cultural homogenisation in the arts. It might be prescient to consider previous ruptures and that ‘The transformation of everyday life into a relational work of art was successful in May 1968’ (Nadal-Melsio, 2008: 174). It is clear that the co-founders want to create reactions to the Biennale and have ambitions beyond replicating other models of biennale structure by harnessing a growing confidence that might also be understood as an ‘effect’ of the radical shift of India as a world economic power. It is clear for India and for the Indian Biennale and other biennales of the global south that they do not need affirmation from the West, which in turn means what is local is no longer in the comparative global paradigm of art. The need to negotiate the local situation can be seen in further national shifts in government, which have occurred since writing my original article in 2012 and which also echo the shifts in the local politics of Kerala, and while a rising tide of religious fundamentalism has driven nationalist extremism in the country, it is the further threat that contemporary art practices might become the victims of the shackles of conservatism that makes the repositioning of the Biennale as a site of resistance that makes the further development of this Biennale so vital in India. It would seem that India’s Biennale could well be the platform to reclaim India’s politically radical vision of social potential, realised postindependence within the transcultural space of the contemporary biennale, where, in, ‘global art there is also no hierarchy of “local” and “global”. The themes are global, the contexts local and the artists transnationals’ (Vogel, 2010: 115). The transnational voice becomes an important symbol of India’s global credentials, which in the service of the nation’s growing global voice might also become an important alternative voice as an antidote to these growing nationalist tendencies. It is clear that the KochiMuziris Biennale is both influenced and formed through the prevailing and very real political conditions of wider India and the locality while also reflecting these conditions, which makes it such a valuable contribution to the global art scene and the attendant multiple discourses. Whether the Biennale in itself can be a wider influential tool waits to be seen but it is clear that the ‘biennale effect’ is strong in this case as is the desire to strengthen the region by also connecting to more global developments in art. I can recognise this spirit of thinking throughout the conversations with Riyas Komu over the last four years in terms of his shared sense of purpose that the thinking around the Biennale is beyond the actual event with the proposition of the Biennale now acting as a catalyst, creating a 53

Figure 1.5 Political flag suspended from car on the freeway out of Kochi. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza.

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wider, deeper and more sustained ‘effect’. This Biennale certainly signals a moment of change for India internationally and with the third edition and a new curator, the respected Indian artist Sudarshan Shetty, actively driving the development of the third edition in 2016, with the promise of an uncompromising approach. This is a crucial moment for the Biennale and its directors in developing the critical journey of this already significant and growing event. Growing international recognition for cofounders Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu can be evidenced in their inclusion in ArtReview’s ‘Power 100’ list for 2015; with Bose noting in the Mumbai Mirror newspaper in October 2015: ‘While this must be only a list, such recognitions internationally make us more responsible and it is an acknowledgement of the Indian “soft power” by the global art scene’. So at this critical juncture the Biennale has created the opportunity for a responsible engagement nationally and for art to engage in this case with a city in the spirit of Lefvebre’s argument for people’s right to the city and of a social politics in India understood through a reclamation of the situation of the everyday. It is also useful to reconsider Rancière’s ideas here about the emancipatory effect that art can have on the spectator, to see whether they could be applied in terms of the active participation of art and the possibility of bringing together communities that this Biennale has potentially offered. The Biennale as an event beyond passive enjoyment that might return India to the world stage not just as an economic superpower but in terms of a meaningful contribution to the global debates, connectivities and understanding envisioned postindependence and that art can be more than the contemporary ‘hypertheater’ it has become – that it can be a creator of a more revolutionary identity in global art world. Does the ‘biennale effect’ mean, as Rancière (2009: 63) would argue, ‘that art has to provide us with more than a spectacle, more than something devoted to the delight of passive spectators, because it has to work for a society where everybody should be active’? The second edition and future editions of this Biennale have helped build a critical trajectory of influence exceeding the initial ambitions, now with both continuity, widespread support and increasing financial stability the Biennale confers an opportunity for wider impacts in the city, the region in India and beyond. It is clear that this Biennale while still embracing the issues of a new socialism through art, beyond mere spectacle, can now be a greater collective force through its sustained effects.

References Adorno, T.W. (1991) ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, in J.M. Bernstein (ed.), The Culture Industry. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 98–106.

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Block, R. (2013) ‘We Hop On, We Hop Off: The Ever-Faster Spinning Carousel of Biennials’, in U.M. Bauer and H. Hanru (eds.), Shifting Gravity: World Biennial Forum No 1. Germany: Hatje Cantz, pp. 104–109. Cameron, S. and Coaffee, J. (2005) ‘Art, Gentrification and Regeneration: From Artist as Pioneer to Public Arts’, European Journal of Housing Policy, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 39–58. Chaudhuri, S. (2010) ‘Modernisms in India’, in B. Peter, A. Gasiorek, D. Longworth, and A. Thacker (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 942–960. Choy, L.W. ([2008] 2011) ‘Biennale Demand’, in M. Chiu and B. Genocchio (eds.), Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 211–222. Dean, C. (2015) ‘The Biennale Effect: Kochi Gets a Creative Kick Notes’. Available Online: http://thespaces.com/2015/04/21/the-biennale-effect-kochi-gets-acreative-kick/ [Accessed 31 January 2016]. Delanty, G. (2011) ‘Conclusion: On the Cultural Significance of Arts Festivals’, in G. Delanty, L. Giorgi, and M. Sassatelli (eds.), Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 190–198. D’Souza, R.E. (2012) ‘Outside Art: Art, Location and Global Tensions’, in R.E. D’Souza, (ed.), Outside India: Dialogues and Documents of Art and Social Change. Delhi: W+K Publishing, pp. 115–157. D’Souza, R.E. (2013) ‘The Indian Biennale Effect: The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012’, Cultural Politics, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 296–312. Gielen, P. (2009) ‘The Biennale: A Post-Institution for Immaterial Labour’, in Jorinde Seijdel (ed.), The Art-Biennial as a Global Phenomenon: Strategies in NeoPolitical Times. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, pp. 9–17. Hal, M.V. (2013) ‘Bringing the Biennial Community Together’, in U.M. Bauer and H. Hanru (eds.), Shifting Gravity: World Biennial Forum No 1. Germany: Hatje Cantz, pp. 14–15. Hoskote, R. (2012a) ‘Kaleidoscopic Propositions: The Evolving Contexts of Contemporary Indian Art’, in G. Christian, S. Høholt, and D.J. Ruggard (eds.), India: Art Now. Germany: Hatje Cantz, pp. 54–62. Hoskote, R. (2012b) ‘The Catalytic Role of the Biennale’, in S. Iqbal (ed). Against All Odds. India: DC Books, pp. 178–185. Hoskote, R. (2012c) ‘The Shapeshifting Trajectory of the Biennale’, Take on Art, Vol. 2, No. 8,, pp. 42–47. Hoskote, R. (2013) ‘Are Biennials Alternative Sites for Experimentation and Resistance?’, in U.M. Bauer and H. Hanru (eds.), Shifting Gravity: World Biennial Forum No 1. Germany: Hatje Cantz, pp. 145–152. India Art Fair (2013) ‘Fifth Edition: Speakers’ Forum’. Available Online: www.indiaartfair.in/downloads/5th_Edition_Speakers_Forum_2013.pdf [Accessed April 2013]. Iqbal, S. (ed.) (2012) Against All Odds. India: DC Books. Kapur, G. (2000) When Was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Kapur, G. (2011) ‘Contemporary Cultural Practice: Some Polemical Categories’, in R. Weiss (ed.), Making Art Global (Part 1): The Third Havana Biennial 1989, London: Afterall Books, pp. 194–203.

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Kapur, G. (2014) ‘Kochi-Muziris Biennale: Sight Imaginaries’, in S. Iqbal (ed.), India’s First Biennale: 12/12/12. India: DC Books, pp. 32–39. Kochi Biennale Foundation (2012) India’s First Biennale: 12/12/12. [Fifty-two-page color-printed guide, made available on the launch date of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale]. Kerala: Kochi Biennale Foundation. Kwon, M. (2004) ‘By Way of a Conclusion: One Place after Another’, in M. Kwon (ed.), One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 156–167. Lee, Y. (2013) ‘The Crisis and Opportunities of Biennials’, in U.M. Bauer and H. Hanru (eds.), Shifting Gravity: World Biennial Forum No 1. Germany: Hatje Cantz, pp. 10–13. Lefebvre, H. (2009) ‘Contradictory Space’, in The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 308–309. Lefebvre, H. (2014 [1947]) ‘Volume 1: Introduction’, in Critique of Everyday Life: The One-Volume Edition, trans. by John Moore. London, New York: Verso. pp. 1–272. Mitter, P. (2001) ‘Art after Independence’, in Indian Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 203–219. Nadal-Melsio, S. (2008) ‘Lessons in Surrealism, Relationality, Event, Encounter’, in K. Goonewardena, S. Kipfer, R. Milgrom, and C. Schmid (eds.), Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, New York: Routledge, pp. 161–175. Øvstebø, S. (2010) ‘Foreword’, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader. Germany: Hatje Cantz, pp. 9–11. Papastergiadis, N. and Martin, M. (2011) ‘Art Biennales and Cities as Platforms for Global Dialogue’, in G. Delanty, L. Giorgi, and M. Sassatelli (eds.), Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 45–62. Rancière, J. (2009) ‘Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community’, in The Emancipated Spectator, trans. by G. Elliot. London: Verso, pp. 51–82. Sheikh, S. (2010) ‘Marks of Distinction, Vectors of Possibility: Questions for the Biennial (2009)’, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader. Germany: Hatje Cantz, pp. 150–163. Smith, T. (2013) ‘Contemporary Art: World Currents in Transition beyond Globalization’, in Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (eds.), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press for ZKM, Karlsruhe, pp. 186–192. Vogel, S. B. (2010) Biennials: Art on a Global Scale. Vienna: Springer. Vogel, S. B. (2013) ‘Bridging the World: The Role of Art Criticism Today’, in Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (eds.), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press for ZKM, Karlsruhe, pp. 255–260.

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2 THE MAKING OF THE INDIAN ARTSCAPE Dhritabrata Bhattacharjya Tato The Kochi-Muziris Biennale is undoubtedly one of the most important visual arts events in South Asia. Biennales are generally characterized as large-scale exhibitions with a defined curatorial process showcasing mostly recent artworks. Additionally, some of the biennales engage in contemporary spatio-economic politics, at times attracting controversies as it was in the case of the biennales of Istanbul 2010 and Sydney 2014, where local and national politics came into conflict with the staging of the artworks. As Geeta Kapur (2012: 160–173) notes in her article ‘Curating across Agnostic Worlds’, in the last two decades, ‘there has been an enormous proliferation of the biennale phenomenon in the south and in the east.’ And the ripples of this phenomenon have reached the shores of the tiny port city of Kochi situated on the west coast of the Indian peninsula. Yet the eventuation of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale might not be as incidental as it seems to be. The social responsiveness of the artist communities does reflect on the broad canvas of the biennale phenomenon in many ways, but the climate that enables such large-scale exhibitions is often left untold. A chronological examination of art and arts discourse in India over the twentieth century may actually reveal that the production of India’s first-ever Biennale goes far beyond mere global artistic vogue and preoccupations. There are a series of factors, not all related to the art world, that seem to have created the premise for such a global event as the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. In her article, ‘The Buddha Goes Global’, the cultural anthropologist Clare Harris writes that ‘Art works may be produced in very specific places but as products in art markets or mechanically reproduced objects, they regularly circulate far beyond their originating context. Once relocated in galleries, homes and museums, these portable things allow viewers to pursue a cognitive exploration of spaces quite distinct from those they routinely inhabit’ (Harris, 2006: 699). Taking her cue from this, Catherine Bublatzky (2013: 305) adopts the term ‘global artscape’ to denote the transnational 58

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network created and leveraged by all stakeholders of the art world but not limited only to the artists, institutions and professionals. The last two decades have witnessed India’s sudden escalation in the global artscape, which played a crucial role in several Indian contemporary art initiatives in domestic and international contexts. Added to which, India’s conscious effort to bank on its ‘soft power’ to attract international attention not only as a mere art destination but also for obvious economic reasons takes the debate to a different context to understand the implicit reasons for the growing presence of India in the global artscape. Interestingly, the global, international and transnational are recurring themes while exploring India’s Biennale story. In the article ‘Artists Can Harness Culture to Revive Historic International Relationships’, published in 2011 by the initiators and artistic directors of the first edition of KochiMuziris Biennale, Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu write: The Indian government is supporting the project with funding to establish its infrastructure, and the Kochi Biennale Foundation has on its board representatives from various government bodies. They know that by hosting this biennale, we will present Kochi as an aspiring global city. International visitors will experience one of the most spectacular and large-scale art events ever to be mounted in India and witness an unprecedented coming together of international and national artists. But at the same time they will be invited to engage with the remarkable backdrop of the region’s landscape, history, politics and culture. We expect the event to attract both short-term and long-term investment – we are currently reaching out to partners and sponsors – and see it as a way to make our mark on the international scene in competition with other cities. More long-term, Kochi and the state of Kerala will be groomed to become a truly international cultural destination. (Krishnamachari and Komu, 2011: 55) After the completion of the second successful edition of the Biennale, this statement holds true in word and spirit. The Biennale attracted an overwhelming response not only from the national and international art community but also from the local population and administration. The scrutiny of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale phenomenon reveals three distinct but overlapping currents that shaped and paved the way for a global event of its stature. The first among these currents arises from India’s macro reality – a conscious effort of the state and non-state actors to repackage its ‘cultural identity’ following the liberalization of the market in the 1990s. Second, a high tide of global incidents and events in all spheres of Indian art, culture 59

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and creativity leads to the rise of its global value. Finally, certain globalization quotients become crucial enablers of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale at a micro level. Nonetheless, it must be added that this particular reading of the advent of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale does not offer an exhaustive image of the contemporary Indian art scene, for its protagonists are also exposed to a whole host of other political, social and cultural climates that define their contemporaneity (see Chapter 1).

Classica indica As an idea, India covers a large platter of cultural products in all domains of art and culture spanning several millennia arising from different geopolitical contexts. Showcasing such diversity at national and international levels has always been difficult, often making it appear inconsistent. However, there are definite linkages between the choice and the spaces for such exposition. By the beginning of the 1920s, the exposition of Indian culture became obvious due to its domestic and geopolitical situations. It was around that time the Greater India Society was formed by leading Calcuttabased intellectuals, philologists and historians who borrowed elements from the French writer Sylvain Levy. The motive of the society was directly linked to Indian nationalism, which sought to re-discover Indian cultural identity through its history. Starting in the 1920s under the leadership of Kalidas Nag – and continuing even after independence – a number of Indian scholars wrote extensively and rapturously about the ancient Hindu cultural expansion into and colonisation of South and Southeast Asia. They called this vast region ‘Greater India’ – a dubious appellation for a region which to a limited degree, but with little permanence, had been influenced by Indian religion, art, architecture, literature and administrative customs. (Keenleyside, 1982: 213–214) The first notable book on Indian art written in English by a South Asian is Ananda Coomaraswamy’s (1965) History of Indian and Indonesian Art, which was originally published in 1927. It may not be wrong to say that this book served as a handbook to introduce Indian art to the ‘West’. What was interesting in the case of the Greater India Society and that of Coomaraswamy was the way they thought of the extent of Indian culture from the River Sindh in the west to Southeast Asia in the east. Later, the direct link between Indian culture and politics became more explicit. Painter Nandalal Bose’s participation in the Indian National Movement, led by Mahatma Gandhi, 60

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was arguably a direct artistic intervention into mainstream politics. As Soumik Nandy Majumdar (2012) notes: ‘For Gandhi, art and Nandalal were synonymous and he was proud and happy to have “discovered” Nandalal as the artist of the Indian National Congress.’ Nandy Majumdar also points out that Gandhi and Nandalal Bose came to know each other only in 1935, when the former sought the latter’s help to install an art and craft exhibition at the Lucknow session of Congress. By 1934, the Indian National Congress started looking at culture as a tool to forge cultural identity of a country that would emerge in 1947. Nonetheless, ‘the first such exhibition to be organized in connection with a convention of the Indian National Congress took place at Indore in 1934. Gandhi recognized the importance of such exhibitions and believed that it should continue at all subsequent Congress sessions. Though Nandalal was initially apprehensive, he took it on his stride and despite severe paucity of funds got Benodebehari Mukherjee, Prabhat Mohan Bandopadhyay, Vinayak Masoji and Asit Kumar Haldar to assist him in this task’ (Nandy Majumdar, 2012). Led by Nandalal Bose, this endeavour depicted a historical panorama of Indian art, which included copies of the Ajanta and Bagh murals, Jain paintings, paintings from Rajput and Mughal Schools and Kalighat Patas. In addition, it also featured the works of Abanindranath and his disciples. To an outside, international audience, India’s image of ‘snake charmers’ was slowly replaced by its classical and ethnic art and performances. It is during this period that some European personalities, such as Alain Danielou, Alice Boner and others, started the first ever organized efforts to showcase India’s cultural offerings. At the behest of Danielou, Compagnie des Danseurs et Musiciens Hindous was created in 1930, which included Uday Shankar and Ravi Shankar who later would become de facto global ambassadors of Indian culture, contributing to its classical image. The Compagnie did its first performance at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees on 3 March 1931, which proved a big success. Thereafter, the performance toured all over Europe and eventually travelled to America between 1931 and 1938. Around the same period Amrita Sher-Gill, who was born and brought up mainly in Europe, exhibited her work ‘Young Girls’ (1932) at the Grand Salon of Paris, which was the first Asian participation and Gold Medal winner at the Grand Salon. The reason behind Indian art and culture being promoted and hosted in different European countries may be examined in the light of competing colonial hegemonies of those countries during the pre–World War II period (which is beyond the purview of this chapter). After World War II, the most significant event might be Satyajit Ray’s film Pather Panchali (1955), which was awarded Best Human Documentary at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956. But what remains true is that until the 1990s India’s cultural ethos abroad had been also strongly associated on 61

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the one hand with spiritual humanists such as Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore and on the other hand with names associated with India’s rich classical art forms. Sher-Gill and Ray might be said to represent a small segment within that cultural atmosphere, which brought forth a different reality of their respective contemporary experience. The new global order was envisioning itself, specifically post–World War II and during the Cold War era, through increased economic activity as a product of nationalist policies and an understanding that a transnational image was important to a country’s people and their destiny realized through these global ambitions. Added to that was the role that mass media would play in manufacturing a world image and identity of a country. Quite rapidly, the vocabulary associated with India’s economic statute changed through the intergovernmental agencies. From a ‘third-world country’ to a ‘developing country’ to an ‘emerging economy’, India had to live up to the expectations of its ‘clients’, and therefore realize itself in an image that would better fit this shift in identity. In the essay ‘The Difficulty of Being a Contemporary Artist in India’, Deepak Ananth (2007: 50) writes: ‘As Western media hype would have us believe, after China, it is India that is now the “next big thing”, the journalistic label that is equivalent of a kind of package deal wherein cultural products of all kinds – ethnic craft, fashion, Bollywood and contemporary art – come as a bonus or added incentive to the litany of plus-points that is making the country so attractive to investors from abroad.’ Both the state and the creative community experienced the phenomenon of change from almost diametrically opposite poles. The state saw the need to refresh its image to lure multinational corporations to invest in India, which could offer in return a large young population (and cheap workforce), both skilled and unskilled to serve them. A series of enhancements came about that illustrate the redefinition of national identity by the state. The Confederation of Engineering Industry was one example, being one of India’s two foremost industry bodies. It was renamed the Confederation of Indian Industry in 1992, just after the Indian government dismantled its major barriers to international trade and made way for direct foreign investment in many business and manufacturing sectors. In 2002, a global publicity campaign on tourism, ‘Incredible India’, was unveiled. Meanwhile Indian artists were exposed to a new set of social, economic and cultural rearrangements. Their works revealed a critique of globalization while making a conscious effort to break away from the shackles of classic Indian cultural and symbolic representations. As a result, the artistic discourse shifted towards an emerging ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ art sector of the market informed by these economic and societal changes. A whole new set of mediums, techniques and philosophies around contemporary art 62

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production would come into use. Before liberalization in 1991, India had only a set of problems that were particularly localized, but in opening up to a world market, a new set of global problems started to slowly penetrate Indian society. Deepak Ananth (2007: 50) admits, for example, that while curating the first comprehensive exhibition of contemporary India art (in Paris, in 2005, that ‘[t]he choice of artists – there were 24 – who had emerged from the 1990s onwards was also an acknowledgement of globalization, for it was precisely in those years that the Indian government decide to “liberalize” its trade policies, jettisoning several decades’ worth of adherence to a protectionist concept of the economy.’

Soft power While realigning its image internationally, the Indian state began to understand the importance of culture. Right from the beginning of this millennium, the government started to address the need of its cultural image more officially. That was the beginning of a move, though not new, which would lead Indian policy makers in shaping culture through the state. Immediately after independence in 1947, the Indian government created institutions such as the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), Lalit Kala Akademi (Academy of Fine Arts) and the National Gallery for Modern Art to help it execute its cultural policy and control its image through these public endeavours. At the turn of the millennium a second wave of institution building was developed by the government. A range of organizations such as the Knowledge Commission, National Translation Mission, National Mission for Manuscripts and the National Centre for Cultural Documentation were created, but without a decisive road map these new organizations would only reinforce a legacy-based approach, before the government would be able to articulate and leverage the potential of these ‘soft power’ structures. India’s journey from cultural diplomacy to soft power became increasingly explicit over a period of a decade, between 2000 and 2010. True to its convention, neither cultural diplomacy nor the concept of soft power replaced each other in India, but rather co-exist. The difference was that Indian law and policy makers started talking about them in public forums. Although the Ministry of External Affairs of India created the Public Diplomacy Division (later merged with the External Publicity Division in 2014), it was Indian writer and politician Shashi Tharoor who would come to articulate the need to pursue soft power. Tharoor spent a considerable number of years at the helm of the United Nations in the capacity of UN undersecretary and is also an Honorary Advisor of the Kochi Biennale Foundation. His article ‘India as a Soft Power’ (Tharoor, 2008) is an important public 63

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statement outlining the need in showcasing a country’s soft power. In direct reference to the work of Joseph Nye, Tharoor argues that ‘[t]he soft power of a country rests primarily on three resources: its culture in places where it is attractive to others; its political value when it lives up to them at home and abroad; its foreign policies when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority’ (2008). In contrast to cultural diplomacy, the notion of soft power goes beyond the concept of so-called apolitical and nonviolent approaches to forge foreign relations. It also seeks to implant a country’s image not only at government-to-government level, but to reach out to a wider population across the globe. Tharoor’s proposition of soft power was quickly taken up within wider discourse. Not long after, ICCR, an autonomous agency under the Ministry of External Affairs, celebrated its 60th anniversary (co-incidentally, Tharoor was the Minister of State of the Ministry of External Affairs from May 2009 till April 2010). At the anniversary celebration the-then president, Dr Karan Singh, a senior member of parliament and the descendant of Kashmir royal family, spelt out the relationship between cultural diplomacy and soft power: Along with classical political diplomacy, which is nation to nation, economic diplomacy which is corporation to corporation, cultural diplomacy places an emphasis on the people to people dimension as a basis for dialogue. As explained by Prof. Joseph Nye, it is a prime example of Soft Power or the ability to persuade through culture, value and ideas as opposed to ‘hard power’ which conquers or coerces through military might. We at ICCR believe in people’s diplomacy, and every step of ours is directed towards enhancing the understanding between India and the nations and peoples of the world. (Singh, 2010) To some extent cultural diplomacy had by then become an old school concept. Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi had strong personal links with France. France’s first minister of culture (or perhaps the first ever minister of culture in the world), André Malraux, recalls in his book Anti-Memoires (1968) that ‘[o]n the occasion of my departure, Nehru came to dine at our embassy. France was about to create a Ministry of Cultural Affairs; he was investigating the creation of a similar institution, and was anxious to know what we had in mind – in particular, how we conceived of the problems subsumed under so vague a word as culture, for they seemed to him very different according to whether he thought of Shakespeare or the Ramayana’ (Malraux, 1970: 288). Hence, the administration of culture for the Government of India can be thought to have had some French influence, which 64

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was indeed very different from what Nye perceived as soft power. In the same lecture at the ICCR’s anniversary, Dr Singh fondly remembered the advent of Festivals of India Abroad, which was started by the government headed by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi: ‘The paramount reason for organizing festivals abroad was our avowed policy and practice of “people’s diplomacy”, action for the people and through the people and their support and understanding through their demonstratively active participation and involvement’ (Singh, 2010). Unlike many European countries where ‘showcasing’ national cultures was related to their cultural and political hegemony, the rhetoric in India while making reference to opportunities for public participation is beset by poor arts education and infrastructure within the country. Nonetheless, in looking outwards, the appropriation of culture was a means to reach out to the world, which the president of ICCR justified as the ‘exotic’ cultural offerings already introduced abroad as a result of India’s colonial legacy. He elaborates that ‘Culture has been used in the broadest sense of the term as a “way of life” which includes history, art, sculpture, dance, music, traditional and contemporary achievements, science and technology, perspectives for future development and aspirations of our nations’ (Singh, 2010). The visibility of India may have previously gained traction on the world map reconfigured in the wake of globalization through its cultural heritage as opposed to what the government agencies were aiming in terms of recognition through emerging contemporary practices. A growing number of invitations to meet with the G-8 countries at the different world forums pushed India to reciprocate and be part of the global social circuit. From a strategy based on various state policies it became a compulsion recognized by Singh, who notes that in recent years, ‘India’s rapid economic growth coupled with our growing presence on the global stage, has refocused the world’s attention on the Indian civilization that has not only survived the trials and tribulations of several millennia, but has now emerged as a selfconfident, mature nation-state, ready to take its rightful place in the comity of nations’ (Singh, 2010). By the ‘comity of nations’, he is referring to the member countries of the G-8. Then he tried to further bring out aspects of popular Indian culture, which Nye called ‘culture in places where it is attractive to others’, making a connection with the classical Indian image with contemporary aspects. A civilization as ancient as India offers a staggering variety of cultural expressions. Several centuries co-exist in India, offering a rare example of great resilience in changing times, emphasizing the traditions which have taken deep roots and which reflect the essence of excellence achieved over the years. The Gods, nature 65

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and art co-exist in a harmonious manner. India’s rich civilizational heritage itself is a major aspect of its Soft Power. (Singh, 2010) Through carefully chosen words, Karan Singh, an erudite, accomplished and senior political figure, begins his speech with ‘cultural diplomacy’ – an old school term that emerges from the European experience – and ends it with ‘soft power’, the more contemporary, American approach to the subject. This underlying, official discourse on culture would go on to be used to identify and support a number of events in order to strengthen the idea of India’s soft power. However, Tharoor broadens the concept of soft power through his reiteration of Joseph Nye, to point out a certain way of looking at culture beyond the official notion of cultural diplomacy that takes in other less-directed forms such as the sphere of entertainment. ‘For India, this means giving attention, encouragement and active support to the aspects and products of Indian society and culture that the world would find attractive not in order directly to persuade others to support India, but rather to enhance our country’s intangible standing in their eyes’ (Tharoor, 2008). Having said that, Tharoor gives a secular, popular way of looking at culture, including in religious settings. He took the example of his visit to Angkor Vat, ‘perhaps the greatest Hindu temple ever built anywhere in the world, including India’. He also informed the reader of the Naga, the Simha and the Garuda protecting the shrine corresponding to today’s navy, army and air force, but ‘[w]hen Indians voted recently in large numbers in the cynical and contrived competition to select the new seven wonders of the modern world, they voted for the Taj Mahal constructed by a Mughal king, not for Angkor Vat, the most magnificent architectural product of their religion’ (Tharoor, 2008: 38–39). The reference to Angkor Vat brings us back to the discourse of Indic civilization that the Greater India Society drew upon almost a century back. Here, it is interesting to note the way soft power can be manufactured to refer to a cultural past, which is ruptured and fragmented. Similarly, we can think of how the inauguration of the Kochi Biennale was in part conceptualized as revivalism, as a space and erstwhile global centre of trade re-imagined through the lost city of Muziris. As a focal point of the Biennale, it refers to a history that falls very much within the same ambitions of soft power. More than an indirect link to the advent of the Biennale and how it can be linked to India’s pursuit of soft power, Tharoor explicitly captures its extent when he says: For millennia, the strength of Indianness has lain in our country’s ability to absorb foreign influences and transform them by 66

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a peculiar Indian alchemy into something that belongs naturally on the soil of India. So when the Indian cricket team triumphs or its tennis players claim Grand Slams, when a Bhangra Beat is infused into a western pop record or an Indian choreographer invents a fusion of Kathak and ballet, when Indian women sweep the Miss World and Miss Universe contests or when Monsoon Wedding wows the critics and Lagaan claims an Oscar nomination, when Indian writers win the Booker or Pulitzer prizes, India’s soft power is enhanced. (Tharoor, 2008: 40) This is a thread that India has actively followed and boasted publicly since 2000. Even if in the contemporary art sector the government fails miserably to make a footprint, the resonance of Tharoor’s statements could be found in some of the government initiatives that would follow. Tharoor, also an avid cricket enthusiast, has a take on soft power extending beyond the established domains of state-recognized validated culture, so he could illustrate different forms of soft power in other related contemporary and popular domains. This point is particularly important because in contemporary India there is a thin, often blurred line between culture and the entertainment industry. His view of soft power is testimony to all that was happening for at least a decade before the Biennale took place. India, decidedly, has aspired to meet the global standards set by the G-8 countries, attracting global capital, which is subject to several non-industry-related factors, eventually contributing to an increased business confidence index. As such, India has come to be understood as a new global entity, as both a connected and open country where investment is safe and secure with the socio-cultural conditions matching that of other G-8 countries. Slowly, this vision of state-sponsored cultural activities would translate into the planning, if not the creating of more Indian cultural centres abroad in the manner of the British Council, Alliance Française or the Goethe-Institut network. The ICCR proposed to open ten new centres in some of the countries that were commercially important to India, which would only be partially successful due to other political competing imperatives in the government. Another significant step that the Indian government took was to support a number of festivals through the Public Diplomacy Division of the Ministry of External Affairs. The first large-scale festival to visibly benefit was Jaipur Literary Festival. This brings forth the second proposition of this article: a high tide of global cultural events on Indian soil, as the precursors to the KochiMuziris Biennale. 67

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Truly international Living up to the promise made by Tharoor and Singh, the ICCR is now engaged in hosting a dozen Indian festivals abroad, including Africa. But what became more successful was the mushrooming of festivals or fairs in different parts of India across all segments of art and culture. These events drew attention from other global counterparts, practitioners and associated professionals. Key events include the Jaipur Literary Festival; the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival; Indian Art Fair (initially named the Indian Art Summit); International Film Festivals of Goa, Trivandrum (renamed as Thiruvananthapuram) and Calcutta (now rechristened as Kolkata); Jodhpur RIFF Festival in addition to the World Book Fair organized by state-run National Book Trust, and the National School of Drama’s annual theatre festival, which managed to have uninterrupted consecutive editions. In any given month India seems to be having festivals in all parts of the country, with efforts like the Attakalari Festival, the Hindu newspaper–sponsored Literary Festival, the Badugduppa Theatre Festival and North-East Jazz Festival, which caters to local artistic aspiration often with a global purview. Some of these festivals have been established for over two decades now, but are under pressure for being genuinely international in scope. This obligation arose from two interrelated concerns: on the one hand, the need to attract sponsorship from multinational corporations or large Indian corporates, which necessitates the need for higher media value, and on the other hand attracting important players from the relevant domains. More importantly, the festival-goers came from a cash-rich internationally travelled segment of Indian society, making them attractive to big business. These festival-goers have become a product of a rapidly changing urban landscape due to India’s accession to a growing global economy, referred to as ‘new urban constructs’ by Anmol Vellani, who managed the India Foundation for the Arts, one of the country’s largest art funds. Shivangi Ambani (2011) points out the reason for the sudden success of the Jaipur Literary Festival and other similar events stems from the ‘new urban constructs’; ‘It is clear that the rapid urbanisation of India has created these conditions in the cities where Indian art festivals have flourished’ (Ambani, 2011: 25). Graham Delvin Associates also lists key behavioural and leisure habits of an urban populace that provide an ideal ground for arts festivals – this includes an increase in disposable incomes, number of options for leisure and sources of information through new communication media, while this same segment of professionals were also simultaneously becoming time poor. In the case of the Kochi Biennale, the flyers for sponsorship of the second edition of the Biennale bore the information of the Biennale’s ‘Total media value ~ INR 90 crore’, along with the number of participating countries.

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KPMG, a notable global knowledge partner published a report on the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which analysed the impact of the Biennale in the scale of economy and employment. Curiously, the KPMG report starts with a quote from Chris Dercon, the former director of Tate Modern, reiterating the importance of international quotient in domestic ventures. Media and international visibility are two recurring components of most of these festivals. On one hand, it brings legitimacy from the artistic community at a global scale; on the other, it helps the organizers to raise funds. This transformation of festivals in the wake of globalization is an area ripe for further study and requires a more detailed study in each of the genres, which is beyond the purview of this present chapter. The easiest example to illustrate this phenomenon is the literary sector. One of the most celebrated moments of contemporary Indian literature was the winning of the Booker Prize by India-based writer Arundhati Roy in 1997 – a period that also marked the beginning of a widespread electronic media boom across India. There were previously various Indian writers with global reputations, such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, but the Booker Prize moment somehow gave a push to Indian authors writing in English. The number of books in English has been increasing ever since. The industry, even if it lags behind in terms of technology and editorial infrastructure, suddenly drew global attention. In an article on the Indian publishing industry, Akshay Pathak (2011), who served as the director of the German Book Office in New Delhi, points out: ‘India has been a guest of honour at the prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair in both 1986 and 2006, the only country to have been accorded that privilege twice.’ One may wonder why an underdeveloped publishing Industry would have such a privilege in an important industry event of the stature of the Frankfurt Book Fair. This would also pave the way to the DSC Jaipur Literary Festival, which remains today the most important of all cultural gatherings in India in terms of its global participation, brand and media value. ‘The Jaipur Literature Festival is the largest literary festival in the Asia Pacific, held annually in the historic city of Jaipur, at the Diggi Palace Hotel as the main venue. The festival directors are prominent writers William Darlymple and Namita Gokhale. Inaugurated in 2006 with just 18 participating writers, the threeday festival now attracts guests like J.M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Pico Iyer and Michael Ondaatje among many others, with free entry to all events’ (Ambani, 2011: 27). The Public Diplomacy Department of the Ministry of External Affairs supported this initiative, which has often been referred to as the world’s most glamorous literary festival. In brief, the growth and high number of international festivals in India has created confidence for festival participants, goers, funders and organizers. In turn, this can be related to the government’s changing outlook 69

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towards supporting culture, which made a huge difference for the inception of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which in its two editions has received some direct support from the Government of Kerala. These macro-conditions helped give rise to the imagination of the Biennale in its present scale. Of course, it should be noted, the account given in this chapter, to understand the longer history and the bigger picture, is not to ignore the fact that, internally, the Indian art scene itself has created ways in which to develop and extend. So, for example, Bose Krishnamachari initiated the curating of exhibitions of fellow contemporary artists much before establishing the Biennale, including with the exhibition AFFAIR: 15 Contemporary Indian Artists, at 1×1 Gallery in Dubai in 2008. As mentioned, India’s participation in the global market in the early 1990s brought forth a subtle but cognizable change in the reception of India’s cultural offerings by both outsiders and insiders. This change is a marker of a rupture in what India had been showcasing to represent its cultural core to the world. Indian visual artists now started to speak and create to the tune of wider global artistic trends. There is a definite change, for example, in the subjects of the art works. It can be observed that ‘Indian artists of the 1990s introduced new material and media into their practice, thereby altering both the prevailing viewership and conventions of display’ (Azhar, 2011: 4). It is a shift that is important to note, not least with respect to the work of the artists who curated the first two editions of the Kochi Biennale, Bose Krishnamachari, Riyas Komu and Jitish Kallat. One of the key strengths of the Biennale has been its support of the Indian art community. The Biennale is now perhaps the only art space in India that is led by artists able to offer creative space without any direct commercial implication, unlike the annual India Art Fair. Like most other biennales, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale offers both a space to the local artists while ‘creating’ space for global artworks. The theme of the second edition, ‘Whorled Exploration’, itself hints at documenting globalization from a ‘South’ perspective. Consequently, the artworks from India (but also from some other countries in the ‘South’) suggest of a new global reality with an uncanny vocabulary of local realities. ‘Many of the works that situate themselves on the local/global axis’, writes Deepak Ananth (2007: 53), ‘merit being seen in the light of this play of difference and relationship. [. . .] Here, a poetics of cultural translation would, at the same time, be a hermeneutics of art.’ He later cites the example of Subodh Gupta’s much-celebrated works of household utensils in gleaming stainless steel, which Ananth included in the contemporary Indian art exhibition in Paris in 2005. According to Ananth, a superficial reading of Gupta’s recourse to those objects is as ‘a ubiquitous feature of middle class households’, which we might take ‘as an Indian version of a post-Pop celebration of commodity fetishism à la 70

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Jeff Koons’. Yet, this ignores, he argues, ‘the specific local connotation of these objects, and their role in a symbolic economy of signs. For, the usevalue of these utensils co-exists with their exchange value, inasmuch as the cups and tumblers and plates are also staple of the bridal dowry in villages’ (Ananth, 2007: 53). This crucial dilemma of interpretation/representation played a positive role in forging a domestic art community that is capable of debating the aesthetics and politics of a Biennale. While a distant factor, the support of a non-resident and international Indian art community had a vigour and intensity that served as a backbone supporting the last two consecutive editions of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The exposure through this event, through the attendant curatorial concerns, prepared the Indian art community to become a host to the global artscape. Meanwhile, the Indian visual art sector has been witnessing several infrastructural and visible enhancements (including, for example, a rise in the number of galleries and a rise in value of artists’ work, leading to many artists receiving ‘star treatment’). Additionally, the size of the art market has grown sharply. Poulsen (2010) points out that ‘most frequently circulated guesstimates of the size of the Indian art market claim a growth from US$ 2 million in 2001 to US$ 400 million before the recession in 2008.’ This huge growth did not happen overnight; it was a result of huge excitement and activities in the visual art world. According to Uzma Azhar Ali: There is now a flourishing art market in India, due to several reasons, like its process of self legitimization, as part of its multinational corporate identity and finally, as a result of its investment interests. In addition, to the middle class, the globalized Indian bourgeoisie and the NRIs (non-resident Indians) have come into the picture and now constitute the largest section (90%) of the International buyers. All these categories of buyers need the national/Indian slogan to shore up their self image, their consumer status and cultural confidence. (Azhar, 2011: 2) In 1982, Geeta Kapur conceived and compiled ‘Contemporary Indian Art’ for the Festival of India with Akbar Padamsee and Richard Bartholomew. But in the three decades since, the dynamics of international visibility have changed, and the Indian art market grew at a rapid rate, and the prominence of India also rose in the global artscape. Initially, one witnessed a oneway traffic of contemporary Indian art going abroad. India gained attention for its economic growth rate, and provoked curiosity among the developed nations, which were struggling with recession. Several shows like Lille 2003, Indian Highway (Serpentine Gallery, 2008/2009) and Paris-Delhi-Bombay 71

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(Centre Pompidou, 2011) would gain huge appreciation from their global counterparts. ‘Over recent years art from the subcontinent has also been pushed into the limelight through inflated auction results, this in turn has primed the developing commercial gallery sector and internationally a strong desire to engage with these emerging artistic regions outside of the global North’ (Singh, 2009). Indian contemporary art was slowly getting a foothold in galleries abroad, with The Empire Strikes Back: India Art Today (Saatchi Gallery, 2010) being a notable example, followed by India: Art Now (ARKEN, 2012). Echoes of this global trend have resonated on the home front as well. Contemporary art suddenly triggered a two-way traffic evident in the findings of ‘Art Market and the Growth of Private Galleries in Delhi’ (2010) by the sociologist Uzma Azhar, which shows a phenomenal rise in private galleries. From less than twenty prior to the 1990s, the number steadily grew over the decade, rising to more than ninety during the 2000s in Delhi alone. Azhar also points out how the international Indian community (i.e. those not resident in India) started to take an active interest in the contemporary Indian art scene, which helped the industry have a more global outlook. ‘The success of the art market can be gauged by the people involved in this sector. As Poulsen observes that the people involved in the present art scenario often have not spent their lives in India. The market has grown to the extent that now it interests foreigners and the NRIs, as is evident with the presence of Peter Nagy (Nature Morte), Bharti Kher, et al. in the Indian art sector’ (Azhar, 2011: 2). Azhar’s detailed research shows how some galleries commenced overseas ventures, with Indian galleries such as Vadhera joining with Grosvenor from London in 2006. These new galleries brought a new high in the Indian art scene; ‘the artists were flown business class to art openings, the galleries and the staff looked good, the catalogues were of a high quality’ (Azhar, 2011). The aspiration of the Indian artscape culminated in the first edition of the Indian Art Summit. This edition was organized in a venue called Pragati Maidan, which usually hosts commodity, defence and industrial fairs (with an exception of state-run book fairs). The evolved avatar of the summit is the Indian Art Fair, which attracted foreign and domestic galleries alike, and in the same spirit, active auction houses dedicated to contemporary Indian art flourished (Christy’s representative office although opened in 1994 had its first auction in 2013; Saffronart started in 2000, and Sotheby’s announced the opening of its Indian office in October 2015). The phenomenal rise of this Indian artscape naturally merged with the global artscape. Catherine Bublatzky writes: An art market system of international galleries, museum shows, and biennials that select ‘star artists’ from all over the world, and 72

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in the past decade particularly from India, fosters not only the positioning of the self and the other in relation to art but also the increased mobility of art as cultural production. In the process of this global mobility and circulation of art creates complex networks and transnational entanglements between the art markets, institutions, curators, artists, experts, and concepts and ideologies that generate and add to an international art world, which Claire Harris defined as a global artscape. (Bublatzky, 2013: 300) The advent, then, of a true Biennale fulfilled the conditions that were particular to visual arts. Today, in addition to art residencies and festivals, the Indian network of galleries often directly created and managed by large Indian corporate conglomerates makes one wonder what would have happened to contemporary Indian art had the country not liberalized its economy in the 1990s. India not only became a prominent spot in the global artscape, but also became literally and metaphorically an extension of it. In this atmosphere of globalization, the last two consecutive editions of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale have actually become ‘a truly international cultural destination’ as the initiators declared in the summer of 2011. The first edition drew eighty-nine artists from twenty-three countries with 382,659 visitors to its fourteen sites and sixty spaces. The scale and level of international participation hint at the extent of globalization quotients that became one of the keys for success of India’s first-ever Biennale. If analysed, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale’s financial support came from both public and private sources. The Biennale engaged with the sponsors and other entities in a very corporate fashion, a word that India learned by breaking the trade barriers. The pattern of sponsors of the Biennale comprised of a number of public entities like the Kerala government, Australia Council and Goethe Institut; international art funding and support; and corporate funding. BMW, which entered Indian business space after economic globalization, has been a long-term financial supporter of the Biennale, alongside a few established Indian conglomerates such as Tata, and other sponsors such as Indigo, Delhi Land & Finance (DLF) and Royal Enfield, which were true products of India’s liberalization. The second edition of the Biennale had three major corporate partners, IAL, BMW and DLF, in addition to the Kerala government and Kerala Tourism. As per the offers made up to December 2014, the Biennale also brought on board corporate social responsibility (CSR) partners such as Deutsche Bank, through their interest in CSR. As defined in the context of India, government regulation of CSR requires MNCs to invest in ‘social’ sectors to even up the great disparity among its population. The participation of 73

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art councils and embassies rose from three to nineteen in the second edition, with nine national and international foundations. Ten art galleries and six corporate houses also extended their support to this unique visual arts initiative. The sponsorship pattern also underlines a changing trend in the Indian visual art sector, which no longer depends only on public money for its survival and celebration. It may not be incorrect to state that the Biennale is the coming of age in the Indian artscape, as the extension of a global artscape.

Art escapes. . . At the time of writing this account, as a reflection on the biennale effect, a new biennale has been proposed on social media by some Indian artists. The Srinagar Biennale is scheduled to launch in January 2017. Srinagar is the capital of conflict-ridden Kashmir, with a climatic temperature slipping below zero during the period of the proposed event. Kashmir also has a high geopolitical temperature all year round. The flood in 2013 damaged the architectural beauty of this city, which was often referred to as a paradise. Being both a paradise and a zone of conflict with regular violent encounters makes it an unusual rendezvous for an art biennale. One of the initiators claimed: ‘Normally, art happens where you can go comfortably. Winter is a difficult time (in Kashmir). Can art also happen when it is difficult, when the geography is not conducive, when the environment is hostile to experimentation?’ It may be true for most of the global events that take place in India. All major Indian global events take place in the cities, like Jaipur, Delhi and Kochi, that have already been hotspots on global tourism maps. These events take place during comfortable climatic conditions. But there are other art initiatives like the Srinagar Biennale or Kolkata International Performance Art Festival (with a fourth edition in 2016), which are trying to situate outside of the conventional formats, ignoring the global artscape formulae. Beyond ideology, history and geography, all art initiatives need other enablers far beyond the control of the artists, be it inheriting a socio-cultural legacy or be it overwhelming extra-artistic conditions. Large exhibitions may draw migratory festivalgoers, they may provoke debates and introspections, but they create a space for unique expression and experience. It holds true in the account given in this chapter, that no cultural space in our times can be truly autonomous yet public, in spite of strong drives for artistic freedom. Art is exposed to the same conditions as its creators, curators and viewers. So why not borrow the word from Hakim Bey (1991: 39), ‘As long as no Stalin breathes down our necks, why not make some art in the service of . . . an insurrection?’ 74

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References Ambani, Shivangi (2011) ‘Making Arts Festivals in India’, in Serving Artists Serves the Public: Programming Art Festivals in Asia and Europe. Singapore: The AsiaEurope Foundation, pp. 24–35. Ananth, Deepak (2007) ‘The Difficulty of Being a Contemporary Artist in India’, Art Press (Paris), Issue 336, Jul–Aug 2007, pp. 49–55. Azhar Ali, Uzma (2011) ‘Art Market and the Growth of Private Galleries in Delhi’. Academia.Edu. Available Online: https://www.academia.edu/3160075/Art_market_ and_the_Growth_of_Private_Galleries_in_Delhi [Accessed 1 December 2015]. Bey, Hakim (1991) T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia. Bublatzky, Catherine (2013) ‘The Display of Indian Contemporary Art’, in Hans Belting, Jacob Birken, Andrea Buddenseig, and Peter Weibel (eds.), Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 298–306. Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish (1965 [1927]) History of Indian and Indonesian Art. New York: Dover Publishing. Harris, Clare (2006) ‘The Buddha Goes Global: Some Thoughts towards a Transnational Art History’, Art History, Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 698–720. Kapur, Geeta (2012) ‘Curating across Agnostic Worlds’, in Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foundation (ed.), Against All Odds. Kochi: DC Books, pp. 160–173. Keenleyside, T.A. (1982) ‘Nationalist Indian Attitudes towards Asia: A Troublesome Legacy for Post-Independence Indian Foreign Policy’, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 55, No. 2, pp. 210–230. Krishnamachari, Bose and Komu, Riyas (2011) ‘Artists Can Harness Culture to Revive Historic International Relationships’, Brunswick Review, Issue 4, Summer, 2011, p. 55. Malraux, André (1970) Anti-Mémoires. New York: Bantam Books. Nandy Majumdar, Soumik (2012) ‘Haripura Posters by Nandalal Bose: The Context and the Content’ Art Etc., July 2012. Available Online: http://www.artnewsnviews. com/view-article.php?article=haripura-posters-by-nandalal-bose-the-contextand-the-content&iid=35&articleid=1056 [Accessed 1 December 2015]. Pathak, Akshay (2011) ‘When Markets Commission’, Himal Magazine, Kathmandu, May 2011. Available Online: http://old.himalmag.com/component/content/ article/4410-when-markets-commission.html [Accessed 1 December 2015]. Poulsen, Nina (2010) ‘Creative Tensions: Contemporary Fine Art in the “New” India’, in Anthony P. D’Costa (ed.), A New India? Critical Reflections in the Long Twentieth Century, Delhi: Anthem Press, pp. 179–194. Singh, Devika (2009) ‘Indian Highway’, Frieze, Issue 121, March 2009. Available Online: http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/indian_highway/ [Accessed 1 December 2015]. Singh, Karan (2010) ‘ICCR President’s Speech to Commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the Founding of ICCR in New Delhi on November 11, 2010’. Transcript Available Online: http://www.docsford.com/document/4661409 [Accessed 29 April 2016]. Tharoor, Shashi (2008) ‘India as a Soft Power’, India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 32–45.

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3 ‘THE BIENNALE WAS NOT THE ISSUE’ An interview with Riyas Komu Riyas Komu, Robert E. D’Souza and Sunil Manghani

We first sat down to speak with Riyas Komu in July 2014, less than six months in the lead-up to the second iteration of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Looking back, we had been rather over-optimistic in what we thought the meeting was going to be about. We had travelled to Kochi with the idea of creating a collateral event with the title of ‘India-Going Places’. Working alongside a Spanish photographer with a burgeoning international career, we had in mind a social art project that would encourage participation through the broader ‘frame’ of the city, rather than at a designated site of art. We pitched the idea of presenting ‘photographic pauses’ within the context of both the Biennale ‘event’ itself and the everyday lives that makeup Kochi’s very distinctive Biennale, with the aim to mediate on its multiple geographies and interrelated situations. Perhaps we had not yet acknowledged enough how the Biennale and the ‘Biennale City’ were indeed a ‘distributed’ phenomenon – that is, that the Biennale cannot be defined simply as a formal set of exhibition sites, but rather as a diverse network of meanings, meeting points and aesthetic exchanges. Securing a meeting with Komu was the last in a chain of fortuitous exchanges held over a period of several days, and was to be the most important meeting given Komu’s role as director of programmes, and in being, no less, the co-founder of the Kochi Biennale Foundation and co-curator of its inaugural event in 2012. The meeting proved to be much more significant than we had envisaged and in ways we had not quite expected. It was mid-morning, and already hot and humid as the sun burnt up the monsoon rains that had fallen during the night. We were ushered into one of the smaller meeting rooms at the Biennale offices. Unlike previous, more open-ended and conversational meetings, in this instance, in the milieu of the Biennale offices we were aware of the 76

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need to get quickly to the point of our visit, with Komu listening intently, if quizzically. The large-format books of our photographer were politely, but cursorily, examined, while our only remaining copy of the journal Cultural Politics (with Robert D’Souza’s (2013) critical essay on the Kochi-Muziris Biennale of 2012), which we had brought along to qualify our engagement with the first Biennale, was quietly taken and placed aside (later to be filed in the archives of the foundation). Having given us plenty of time to speak, the serious, one might even say intense, man who sat before us now leaned forward to speak. Despite our obvious keenness to work together, Riyas Komu was rightly sceptical. He proceeded to give a rigorous account of what the Biennale had been able to achieve under its own aegis and how it had engaged in setting a new agenda (especially in relation to using the Biennale as an opportunity to open up a critical discussion of arts education within India). Perhaps the most important ‘take-home’ of our research trip was a remark he made as we were about to leave the offices. It was a reminder that the people of Kochi are ‘already on to all of this’; that the Biennale is not some crash-landing, but part of a daily negotiation, and one the local community are becoming well versed in and highly literate in their understanding. Of course, the very ‘situatedness’ of the Biennale was precisely what led us to pitch our project as we did, but what lay behind Komu’s words was the sense that things were decidedly already in hand. On leaving the offices that day we spotted a Che Guevara bumper stick on Komu’s Mercedes parked in the grounds. We smiled to each other, silently noting this as Komu’s wry acknowledgement, capturing the paradox of the contemporary condition. In the former and long-time Communist state of Kerala, the fact that one of India’s noted contemporary artists (who grew up in the state, but developed his career as one of a set of feted Bombay painters) was back here in Kochi helping to orchestrate a social endeavour on the scale of a city was inevitably to speak of many layered complexities – political, historical, social and cultural. One of the effects of biennales is the courting of local, national and international relationships. It was abundantly clear that in coming from a research-intensive university in the United Kingdom (now evermore pressured to demonstrate the impact, international reach and worthiness of its research), we were inevitably caught up in this particular effect. An effect that stems not so much from the Biennale itself, but from within and through a global discourse that (arguably as a means to justify itself) seeks out narratives of connectivity, relevance and legitimacies. Of course, we had hardly walked into this situation unaware of our own condition, but for the meeting to have turned so quickly upon this very issue was refreshing. It perfectly demonstrated the global shifts occurring and demonstrated by this Biennale operating not just outside of a metropolitan centre but in a new landscape we genuinely wished to inhabit, and more importantly 77

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can perhaps now only inhabit. Just as there has been heated debate about the ‘worldwide competence of art history as a Western discipline’ (Belting, 2009: 45; cf. Summers, 2003; Onians, 2004; Elkins, 2007; Harris, 2011), there is a much broader debate about global, alternative competencies. To appropriate Nicolas Bourriaud’s (2009) terminology (which, as considered in Chapter 9, he arguably applies too liberally), there has been a shift from postmodernity, which remixed the modern, to altermodernity, which has seemingly opened out the modern as if an exploded diagram. As Marc Augé puts it: ‘The world’s inhabitants have at last become truly contemporaneous, and yet the world’s diversity is recomposed every moment. We must speak therefore of worlds in the plural, understanding that each of them communicates with the others’ (Augé, 1999: 89). A year later, in October 2015, we sat in front of computer screens to Skype one another (being the only means to circumvent our contemporaneously plural schedules and geographies). Despite a distracting echo across the Web, it was an opportunity to reflect back upon a dialogue that properly began to emerge after our initial meeting in the Biennale offices, as well as various conversations at the opening events and lectures of the second Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014 through to 2015. What has seemingly sustained this dialogue is in fact the original gesture – back in the Biennale office during our first meeting – that sought to hold onto the critical essay in Cultural Politics. ‘I think’ Komu remarks, ‘now we have gone back almost . . . politically or socially to the idea of triggering a social interaction that is very active.’ With the Biennale now having gained ‘great acceptance’, he suggests, the time is right to engage in further critical debate and to examine more closely the idea expressed of the Biennale as ‘a catalyst for many things to happen and thoughts to emerge, and people to get a platform’. Creating the Biennale in the first place was of course a complex and arduous undertaking, not least due to political tensions and a very damaging media campaign waged against it. It was somewhat surprising then, when Komu put it to us that ‘the Biennale was not the issue,’ for him, instead, the issue was ‘to emanate, to kind of trigger . . . to ask how do you build an eco-system’. Komu is happy to acknowledge that the received model of biennales has helped – that is, the idea that these events help manifest a credible identity, of varying faces (whether looking to the immediate location or to a wider global context) and of providing a ‘venue’ in/from which to operate. But, more importantly he is keen to put across the significance of the Biennale as a curatorial endeavour and more fundamentally the coming together of art and artists to form a critical mass, to make an impact. Its venue allows for the simultaneous juxtaposition of regional talent (with inputs from reputed international artists), with a keen concern about the history of the site, and what it brings into the present aesthetic and political 78

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discourses. ‘That’s why,’ he explains, ‘I use the word conflict for provoking responses; I mean the Biennale, or its discourses, can produce solutions to many conflicts; in that context I think the next edition is going to be very complex and challenging because it will also have to address and respond to the heightened and prevalent sense of fear and loathing in India.’ He couches these remarks with respect to a discourse emerging against the perceived threat of far right political tendencies and intolerances. ‘The growing intolerance,’ he argues, ‘is not solely directed at religious-secularism anymore but has now become a form of political action in India and is wielded loosely against anyone who is seen as the “other” and is used against freedom of speech, against thinking, against liberal approaches, against writers, against scientists, against artists, against inclusive progress, even against food habits, and is challenging existing ways of life. So I think the Biennale has also grown into a critical space of intellectual and cultural engagement at a crucial time.’ The fact that the project of the Biennale was always rooted in ‘certain notions of co-existence that gel with the multicultural aspects of the region’, Komu suggests, allows art potentially to argue for explorations of radical political ‘solutions’ or understandings that need to be asserted and brought back into a wider discourse.

Against all odds Given the levels of investment and explicit global perspective required of a biennale, combined with the change of ruling coalition that was taking place in Kerala at the time, it is little surprise the inauguration of Kochi Biennale proved controversial. In a reflective publication by the Kochi Biennale Foundation, Against All Odds (2012), the organisers recount the difficulties: Everything was going swimmingly till a vernacular magazine came out with a story saying the Kochi-Muziris Biennale was a smokescreen to pilfer the Rs. 5 crore that the previous government had allotted, and all hell broke loose. [. . .] It was the beginning of what had snowballed into one of the most vicious and negative campaigns in recent history of media in Kerala, throwing a spanner in the work of organizing an event of such magnitude. (Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2012: 34) The foundation faced an inquiry, which, misled by media reports and misinterpretations resulted in the new government withholding financial support a little over a year before the Biennale was due to open. For an event like the Biennale, it was also a learning experience of sorts, of being part of and party 79

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to the vibrant polemical and argumentative tradition in ideas and politics in Kerala. However – against all odds – the curators, Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, persevered to put together a highly successful programme. Both originally from Kerala, and born nearly ten years apart, Krishnamachari and Komu graduated in the 1990s from Mumbai’s oldest and highly regarded art institution, the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art. Founded in March 1857, the school has a complex colonial and postcolonial history. In the last decade or so the institution has been seen as having lost its ‘vital spark’ (Martyris, 2002; Jaisinghani, 2008). However, the early 1990s can be taken as a key moment in the school’s history. Indeed, Krishnamachari and Komu came to prominence as painters, along with others from the same school (notably Sudarshan Shetty and Jitish Kallat), at the very point in time of India’s economic liberalisation. As outlined in Chapter 2, this had a marked impact on the status of contemporary art coming out of India, and of course the status of the artists themselves. Krishnamachari’s work at this time included highly vivid abstract canvases, made up of brushstrokes and daubs of thick, bright hued paints; while Komu was known for powerful portrait paintings. His compositions, tightly cropped, engender a particular gaze, forcing us to look upon its particularly urban Indian subjects. Both Krishnamachari and Komu have been associated with Indian photorealism, ‘a byword for figurative paintings derived from imagery of the mass media, the Internet and technology’ (Jumabhoy, 2009: 29). These themes and modalities somewhat echo the emergence of pop art in Britain and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, with works not only replicating the means of reproducibility but also themselves being about reproducibility and mediation. An engagement with mediation is similarly significant as India entered into a global marketplace in the early 1990s, coming at the time of course of the broader embedding of digital technologies and, most significantly, the emergence of the World Wide Web. However, as much as both are attuned to the new aesthetic-technological context, explicit in the work of both Krishnamachari and Komu is a sense of social consciousness (as well as a deep commitment to improving art education in India). While the enormity of the task in delivering the first Biennale inevitably took them away from their own practices, it was arguably an extension, or even progression of their work. The Biennale is a form of social practice that in many respects makes manifest the critical sense of exchange and equity that many of their individual works can only proposition. As Komu explains in an interview with Arts Illustrated magazine: The energy for the Biennale is very much derived from the history of public action in the state and the strength of political engagement; the political discourses and the social engagement makes 80

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this region much more interesting and has produced a great number of creative minds . . . and this region has a strong history in relation to Indian contemporary art, through several movements. I would say that the journey of the Biennale actually did not start with the inception of the idea. The journey of the Biennale started with the execution of the project because we got people to walk along with us; we got the community to walk along; we got young artists to walk along; and we got senior Indian contemporary artists to walk along with the dream. It is almost like the Biennale has taken a revolutionary step to walk with people and that is the kind of space artists need to change the existing perceptions. (Komu cited in Nair, 2014: 43) While Komu often expresses himself as an ideological thinker, the idea of getting people, organisations and administrators to ‘walk along’ with them, and his suggestion that the Biennale did not start with the inception of the idea but rather with its execution, points to his underlying sense of pragmatism. In the same interview, Komu refers to a seminar he attended in Delhi after the first Biennale, which prompted a troubled thought: Shuddho (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, a media practitioner, filmmaker and writer with the Raqs Media collective), a well-known spokesperson of [the] contemporary art scene in India, made a remark countering the project. He said ‘Kochi can also be poisonous?’ This thought lingered with me. Why did he say that? Is it because of its colonial past? Its politics? Or because of all the influx despite being situated in one space? (Komu cited in Nair, 2014: 51) The fact that Komu thoughtfully takes on this remark is a good example of the reflexivity he hopes will inflect the tenor of the Biennale itself. The remark, Komu tells us, ‘carried dark resonance as it brought to mind another excavation that in fact led to and seeded conflict, that of Ayodhya where they excavated not history but a myth that suited communal interests. It was K.N. Panicker, the historian who invoked us to look at any excavation as an ongoing process, not as something dead and reified and used only to justify mythologies.’ This reading of history is of course relevant in the context of the Muziris Heritage project, which also ‘involves excavation and along with it, its hyphenated relationship with Kochi Biennale. The point is not to glorify the past and reify certain mythologies but to turn it into a site of exploration and learning.’ In response to Shuddho, and in going on to consider how we ‘create fictions’ as a way of handling our circumstances, 81

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Komu draws upon a Malayalam colloquialism: Irunnal ningalkku panikittum, which translates as ‘stillness created by stagnation is poisonous’. Against which he cites: Karangikondeirukkumbol undakunna stillnessaanu sheriyaaya Tawaf, meaning ‘the stillness attained at the centre of the whirl is the real stillness’ (Nair, 2014: 51). The suggestion is of an ethics underlying the Biennale from its very inception, which in turn raises interesting considerations regarding its future undertakings and ethos. ‘The Biennale started in 2012 and maybe with a certain sense of historic responsibility,’ Komu notes as we talk across our Web connection, ‘And within two editions, I have a strong feeling that it’s now entering into a phase of strategic responsibility.’ His remarks sit against his own concern that the ideas raised through the Biennale about coexistence and cosmopolitanism could be taken as sloganeering. Yet, ‘one of the best quotes which we always use’, he tells us, ‘is that this Biennale is not just about art, it is about who we are ourselves.’ Through its artist-led approach the Biennale has of course been a practiceorientated project, but at the same time, Komu notes, ‘we also allowed parallel streams and narratives to grow and especially allowed different discourses to happen parallel to the Biennale itself.’ The second edition, he feels, added further depth, particularly with its History Now seminar programme and importantly the development of the Students Biennale, ‘which brought the whole argument for and of arts education into the limelight’. Again suggestive of a certain pragmatism and conviction about the importance of practice and art production, Komu adds: ‘it’s a perfect time to talk about many things through art.’ Even within the context of our conversation, he refers to our dialogue itself as part of a ‘collective effort . . . to make the Biennale – to make more art, to make more of/by art’. There was always an awareness, he suggests, for the need of a wider academic discourse surrounding the project. Yet, he is ambivalent about the relevance of observations made from a distance. Some of the early critical writings, which stem from a professional curatorial or critical discourse, did not necessarily trigger the kinds of debate that one might have expected. But, in the last five years (and arguably due to the advent of the Biennale itself), these critical voices, ‘instead of standing on islands and making their remarks, have now come together to discuss this project seriously’. Komu is keen to note how a critical discourse has begun to develop based on observations and understanding gained through ‘tasting the salt of Kochi . . . and really being a part of it’. Nonetheless, it is important that the discourse around the Biennale goes beyond merely celebrating its existence. Because of the energy of a small group of people the Biennale has become a part of an ecosystem for galleries, for art lovers, it is an occasion to keep pace with contemporary art practices and genres; for individual artists, it helps their own personal profiles and professional development; for 82

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common people, it is a door to world art; and for politicians, it has become another platform for reaching out. But beyond that, Komu stresses, ‘we really have to build. . . there needs to be a wider participation on deeper issues, because people are ready to come and speak about suffering, rising inequality, art, conflicts, and issues that matter in our worlds. But at the same time we also need to stress the relevance of Biennale in a wider socialcultural and political context.’ And What Komu means by the Biennale is more than art. As he puts it, speaking of the art community in general, ‘they are all happy that it exists, and that’s the only word I can use. It’s easy to quantify the economic benefits of the Biennale. But it has to be much more than just economics and the Biennale’s contribution is not accounted for on a wider socio-cultural aspect. There is no cultural audit, and nobody has actually looked into its effects. And I hope our art critics and art historians take this discourse more openly and positively.’ His remarks of course relate to a wider problem in how cultural contributions are either underrated or alternatively all too crudely audited, legitimated and rationalised in social and economic terms. Yet, Komu is confident that the effects of the Kochi Biennale are being felt. ‘They cannot avoid it,’ he says, ‘because there is great energy coming in; it’s like an acupuncture that is happening in Kochi . . . for, geographically it’s is a peninsular state located almost at the feet. Now they’re feeling it, some vibration is happening.’ And here, Komu is not talking just in terms of art, but in terms of national politics. Kerala is the only state, he suggests, that is resisting what is going on at the national level. Just at the time of speaking, for example, he notes the resistance in Kerala to the beef ban, and its heavy-handed implementation (with restaurants being shut down etc.). The Left retains its presence in Kerala, and in part this is why the Biennale happened in Kochi differently compared to many other places, particularly the more metropolitan elite areas we typically associate with art around the world. Kochi has strength, he notes, because it is a place that was globalised 3,000 years ago. ‘It will not be discussed only through art terms,’ he suggests, instead ‘a reverse discourse might happen’ in that Kerala is acknowledged as one place, which can genuinely host a Biennale politically. The Biennale has to be seen in the context of Kerala’s cosmopolitan history, which stems from strong maritime links with different parts of the world. As Komu points out, ‘Kerala’s connections with the world’s civilisations, religions and commerce may even be older than its links with “India”. As one of our greatest intellectuals Kesari Balakrishna Pillai (who incidentally spent his last days here, in Paravur near Kochi) famously said of Kerala’s cosmopolitan past: “Is Kerala a chapter in Roman history or Rome a chapter in Kerala history?” One should dare to ask such questions in the context of biennale too.’ It is to this long tradition and history of 83

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cosmopolitanism and openness to the world, Komu suggest, through vibrant cultural exchanges and pluralism, and the spirit of internationalism, ‘that a movement like Biennale is connecting to’. It is this idea he feels remains steadfast and to which it is now possible for the Biennale to go back to politically and socially. ‘The idea social action in Kerala is very much active now,’ he argues enthusiastically, ‘it’s really showing that we are not going to give it up. I think it’s also the ideal time to uplift the Biennale, which now has wider acceptance, because it not only introduced global contemporary art but also introduced diverse streams of art for the youth to engage with and innovate.’

People’s biennale Kerala’s political history and ‘social consciousness’ is highly important to the social dimension of the project, and indeed to the prevailing idea of the Kochi Biennale as a ‘people’s biennale’. The former director of Tate Modern, Chris Dercon, uses this phrase explicitly in talking about the project, and marks it out as one of the most interesting newly emerging biennales. ‘The Kochi Biennale’, Dercon argues, ‘is not restricted to the demands of the West that whenever you do a biennale in Africa, in Northern Africa, in the Middle East or in Asia that it has to be about post-colonialism. Kochi Biennale is freeing itself up from all such restraints of other biennales. It’s not about marketing. It’s not about tourism. It is really a people’s biennale’ (Dercon, 2014). He also refers to the Biennale as ‘productionist’ that through its practice-based approach, with artist-curators and many site-specific works being made, it is ‘not only making a difference, it is also showing us the way how to make things differently’. Dercon is one of the art world figures that Komu is quick to praise for having participated in the Biennale from the start, for having ‘tasted the salt of Kochi’. As a political-aesthetic, Komu is deeply committed to the idea of making a difference. In Hattie Bowering’s documentary, Art: Interrupted (2013; see Chapter 5), Komu is seen surrounded by people working at Aspinwall House. Speaking calmly to camera, he says simply ‘Stress is there. Artists are putting pressure.’ There is a double sense to his remark. Artists are putting pressure onto the situation and equally are being put under pressure by the circumstances. In contrast to the typical biennale set-up that offers refined exhibition spaces and technical support, Komu describes the scene at the first Kochi Biennale as a real community, saying ‘it’s almost like an artist camp.’ Reflecting back on the situation Komu reminds us in creating a biennale ‘you’re creating a platform; you’re creating a site. We were bringing artists to work on site. So I’ve always felt that this is a project with artists at work. It’s not only about curating, it’s also about art administration, 84

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it’s about putting together a team that could pull this off. And what was particularly exciting was that everybody was learning at work. People were being introduced to art, art making and its history as they were working and engaging with artists. We didn’t have the luxury of a team that were already inducted to contemporary art. Even we were learning.’ And, of course, alongside the team work that eventually built the Biennale as a platform, it is also the work of the artists themselves – both in terms of their effort, the works produced and in some cases the money that was put in – that allowed the event to come to fruition. It was always the belief, as Komu puts it, ‘that it is the artists that matter more, not the venues; the people, not the construct’. Indeed, Komu is keen to say that the Biennale is not ‘the victim of architecture’; it is not made by the available buildings and exhibition spaces. In being asked at the first edition what would happen if the venues were not made available again the following year, he replied very simply: ‘The Biennale can happen in the rice fields and on top of coconut trees . . . I believe in the power of artists, I believe in the ability of artists to take risks.’ The best art, he suggests, will survive if we take risks, adding that the Biennale itself ‘has now become a kind of synonym for getting artists ready to take risks’. And in this sense, in being asked repeatedly how the Biennale was put together, the only real answers he feels he can give are ‘answers which are dated’. The Biennale gets made again, each time: ‘What happens in every edition of the Biennale is that risk comes back. Every edition of the Biennale is almost a new project. For me it is not a continuation of the previous one, I don’t even think of it like that. We start afresh every time.’ Of course, alongside the commitment of artists to the Biennale, equally committed are the visitors and the community that envelop the whole project. A lot has been spoken about the large number of local people attending the exhibitions. Here the appellation of the ‘people’s biennale’ is one that suggests the local accessibility of high art. But, as Komu points out, it is not something new: ‘if one looks at other such initiatives in the state like the annual International Film Festival of Kerala in Trivandrum, International Theatre Festival in Trichur etc. In each of these, there is a phenomenal and increasing level of local participation. Another instance is the long and rich literary tradition of translations in Malayalam from all major languages in India and abroad. All this indicates Kerala’s hunger for the global contemporary, its incessant yearning to keep pace with international art, literature, film, culture and politics and its active engagement with it in many ways.’ In Art: Interrupted, Krishnamachari describes his experience at the opening of the first Biennale as witnessing for the first time in India so many people queuing up to see an art project. He also remarks about the adoption of the mere word ‘Biennale’: ‘Each and every 85

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auto rickshaw driver in Kochi now knows that there is a word called Biennale. It is there. It is coming. I don’t know whether it is a bomb or whatever it is. But there is something called Biennale that’s happening in this city’ (Krishnamachari cited in Art: Interrupted, 2013). During our visit in July 2014, during the time we first met with Komu at the Biennale Office, we were taken around the city by an astute rickshaw driver who went by the name of ‘Magic Johnson’. With his actual name being Johnson, he gave himself this nickname to play on the name of basketball’s renowned global icon. Yet, it was his local, critical knowledge that really shone through it. He quickly discerned that our interest in the city revolved around the Biennale and so as we travelled around, he offered an insightful running commentary on the sites used and the underlying political interplay that went with it all. Magic Johnson is a testament to the relationship with the local community that Biennale organisers had worked hard to nurture. He had attended events of the first Biennale and was looking forward to its second iteration. For him, the Biennale was without doubt a positive thing particularly for the city (and for Kerala in general). And of course, despite it being off-season, he was making good money as he recounted all of this while ferrying us about. In Against All Odds (2012: 36), the Biennale is described as having a ‘ripple effect’. In fact it is noted that ‘the government of Kerala has already announced building 100 galleries in 100 panchayats (local self-government bodies). There are talks about other biennales in other parts of the country, and there is a zest among young and the communities to welcome and host the biennale.’ However, the notion of the people’s biennale is perhaps a more subtle one, and one that is based more upon tacit knowledge and understanding. The ‘risk factor’ and the support of the government, Komu remarks, are the two things that made the Biennale. And yet, of course, as is welldocumented the financial support of the government fell through at a very late stage. The only project completed in advance of the Biennale was the renovation of Durbar Hall, which in itself was a divisive project, seen by many as having squandered public money. ‘I can say we lost the power to do the Biennale,’ Komu says with a wry chuckle, ‘because the left government vanishes and the UDF (Congress-led coalition government) comes back! They (the detractors) thought they would be able to finish us off.’ Attacking the decision to renovate Durbar Hall, the incumbent government initiated a corruption charge against the Biennale organisers but it did not curtail the project or the directors. ‘What we did on the contrary,’ Komu explains, ‘was, we plunged into it, we gave it everything we had, we sold our properties, we brought in money, from our side and from other sides.’ Gradually artists began to understand the situation, and started pitching in money. Thus, underlying the first Biennale was a personal commitment 86

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among its organisers and the artists. ‘People always say it is the people’s Biennale,’ Komu notes, ‘and people in fact account for only one aspect of it. When they say people’s Biennale, it is because it was seen by a huge number of local people.’ Yet, He wishes to stress the idea of a people’s Biennale for quite a different reason. ‘When the first edition of the Biennale was over, we were in a debt of nearly Rs. 6.5 crores, can you believe it?’ he asks. ‘And the people who we had to pay this money to – the taxi drivers, hoteliers, electricians, plumbers, painters, and people supplied us equipment, projects, fans and even water – waited nearly 12 to 13 months to be paid back. They understood that in their own small way they were also being part of something bigger.’ Komu recounts how an old teacher came up to him during the period in debt and gave him hundred rupees. ‘He knew it won’t do anything but said, “This is in solidarity; this is in protest against the system”; there were instances of artists and art students who worked days and over nights to ensure that things moved along, some artists even raised small amounts of money which helped the daily running of things; there were the volunteers who stood with the Biennale even when nothing seemed right; there were the schoolkids who came back with their parents to show them the Biennale, and then there was the public and the locals shedding their inhibitions and proudly saying “It’s my biennale.” That’s why it’s very much a people’s Biennale.’

Indian Biennale, India’s Biennale There is a way in which the Kochi Biennale is both an Indian Biennale and India’s Biennale. In respect of the former, it has provided an important forum for Indian artists, young and old. Elsewhere, Komu has remarked how the physical nature of the Biennale has been an inspiration. Given that India has generally been short on space for art, at least of art of a certain nature or scale, he has described the Biennale as ‘a higher education about spaces for artists’ (cited in Nair, 2014: 44). Yet, equally, by dint of the fact it is the only biennale in India (at least for now), it has come to be known as India’s Biennale, which is suggestive of something quite different to being simply a showcase for Indian art. We might wonder what is distinctive about a biennale staged in India. Krishnamachari, for example, in Art: Interrupted, remarks that when looking at the international scene of biennales, ‘it’s almost all the time taken care of by expertise’, whereas in India, and perhaps only in India he suggests wryly, it is possible to make a Biennale without expertise!’ However, there is another way of putting this: that Kochi presents and offers a very different form of expertise. Komu reverts back to the local resistance to the Biennale. ‘They thought that it was going to get disrupted,’ he says, ‘they had created a negative campaign 87

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to influence the public and the people in power. There was a concentrated effort to divert any dialogue or discussion about the Kochi Biennale and establish that it was not a cultural project but was a by-product of globalisation and an attempt to “westernise” art in the country. So some of our early efforts was in countering this misguided perception.’ The underlying tension is about the scale of things, and the monetary value of the Biennale. There is a need to position the event at different levels, as international, but not globalist; as well as being of value nationally and locally. ‘We always maintained’, Komu points out, ‘that we were building a project of international repute that will not only be participatory in terms of international artists and art practices but also create a much-needed space for Indian art practices and practitioners.’ In doing so, it was necessary to push forward the idea that the Biennale was not an elitist exercise and that the public was very much involved in its inception and success. That is, exclusive in the most profound sense. ‘We had to tell [people] . . . that “you cannot run the 100 meters in an Olympics just because it’s happening in your city.” We had to educate people on how the Biennale worked and why the role of the curator is important in the selection of the artists.’ This message was only really comprehended after the first edition. To begin with people thought the event was maintained within the limited purview of Kerala. ‘It took one edition for people to understand that it’s not only a national project, but an international project. It’s of great relevance internationally to host a biennale, but,’ Komu suggests, ‘I would say it is still in the growing stage. Even nationally, I would say it is difficult to make people understand; even those who have decision-making powers have not really understood the importance of this project yet.’ On the one hand the Biennale addresses all the key indicators that national/development projects can relate to, such as trade history, destination building, nation branding, economic innovation and investment at the local level (cf. Kant, 2009). On the other, the Biennale also represents a form and platform of resistance. And art defies all the conventional means of auditing and accountancy. It calls for freer mechanisms and fresh tools to comprehend and take forward. Art also creates another kind or set of assets and liabilities that one needs to plan and account for. Although this might suggest a difficult tension, what emerges is the fact that the Biennale is now too much of an asset to be challenged again in the same manner, particularly when looking out from India to the rest of the world. In fact, Komu draws a link between the Biennale as situated within the much talked about Kerala Model of Development and the more recent initiatives of the national government, which through the foreign policy of Narendra Modi (often referred to as the ‘Modi Doctrine’) has particularly focused on raising India’s international profile. Specifically, Komu refers to ‘Project 88

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Mausam’ introduced by the Modi administration, and which is conceived as a rival to the Chinese Maritime Silk Road initiative. Mausam (मौसम) literally means weather or season in many South Asian languages, and is adopted to evoke the crucial significance of the monsoon winds in maritime trade. While still in its infancy, the project – under the aegis of the cultural ministry – is concerned with ancient trade routes and cultural links as a means to reflect on contemporary maritime trade in the Indian Ocean region. Gandhi’s much-cited quotation ‘I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any’ is perhaps partially evoked by the ‘mausam’ project. Yet there is an inversion here, as if for the currents of India to blow away/ through the rest of the world. Komu draws out a nuanced and somewhat counterintuitive reading of the Biennale as a form of ‘soft power’ – but in this case not one that the government necessarily controls, but rather one it must take on board. There is a contradiction that Komu asserts between a prime minister who is proactively promoting international trade and partnerships, with a national government-led campaign to ‘make in India’, yet, all the while, ‘we have all the umpteen regional and local problems, apart from ever so many conflicts and fights even within his own party . . . from outside it looks like he cannot make anything inside there, because they are destroying everything positive.’ It is in this context that the Biennale takes on a new relevance, as a ‘soft power’ for India, because, Komu argues, ‘the Triennial died because of the lack of support and vision, India doesn’t have a pavilion during the Venice Biennale and yet India has a critically, commercially and publicly successful Biennale. They cannot disrupt it politically just because the Biennale creates a platform that explicitly supports struggles for free speech and dissent, and could have participation of artists from countries the government does not have good relations with.’ In this sense, the Biennale, ‘has now become a platform that the Government can no longer ignore because it is the only international cultural project happening in India; and if you disrupt it, India’s standing on the global cultural map will be diminished.’ The Biennale, then, can be understood as a project from below, a cultural project that re-invents and re-asserts the open, liberal and cosmopolitan history of India, which, Komu explains, ‘goes beyond the mere internationalism of projects like “mausam” which is seasoned more towards expansionist ideas rather than fostering global fraternity. It is one thing to imagine oneself as part and parcel of a global imagination and art heritage of humanity as a whole, and something else to project oneself as a “model” above others.’ In an otherwise worrying context in which the national government is removing all funding for cultural activities, and ‘capturing’, as Komu puts, the various cultural institutions (replacing for example with more 89

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politically sympathetic museum and gallery directors, and appointing their own favourites in academic institutions of excellence), the Biennale appears to command a curious position of strength. ‘It is not just about Kerala anymore,’ he says, ‘it is not even about India anymore. Because of the blood-relation (or symbiotic links) Kochi has with the larger world it has become a project of global import and of everybody. So, if you disrupt the autonomy of an artist, it will also disrupt business.’ Underpinning this strength is the fact that the Biennale as an organisation is ‘hugely supported by many cultural organisations from all over the world, because the world is waiting to have that kind of soft power relationship with India and the Biennale has become a platform for that’. Komu’s reading of ‘soft power’ is also of a softly spoken power. It is not about highfalutin rhetoric or making a media splash, but rather ‘when doing serious stuff very systematically, it assumes by itself a power, that’s how art assumes social potency and relevance’. Komu effectively describes the Biennale as a living example of the political aesthetic espoused by likes of the theorist Jacques Rancière. As Komu puts it: ‘we are not devoid of space, we are actually in it, you know, when we use the word politics it means that we are in it, in space and in time. If you talk about economy in art, that means you’re in it in this time. So no politician can escape from a project like this because this project has that kind of relevance.’ Instead he suggests, there should be a means to collaborate, to ‘make a project of this scale as the pride of India, where we bring back or rejuvenate our cultural relationship which we inaugurated maybe 3000 or 4000 years ago. So it’s not just for Kochi, it’s not just for India – I would look at it as a project which has a global reach, resonance and relationship.’

Beyond the Biennale, what is left? For Komu it is very clear, the Biennale provides the means or at least the provocation for re-imagining the Left. But the ‘left’ in two senses: ‘What is left behind, and what is really the Left’. The collapsing spaces of former colonial grounds and warehouses became the venues for the Biennale. They were relics, the leftovers of a worn out history. But they were also simply what had been left, abandoned, set apart. Thus the use of these buildings did not necessarily mean to be haunted by a particular past. If anything, this conjuring up of India’s lost city, Muziris, was a means of re-spiriting these sites; returning the spectre of India’s cosmopolitism. ‘What is left will again be used by us,’ Komu remarks, ‘I always feel that, if it’s not there, something left is there so use that. There is always something left behind, forgotten or shoved aside, for us to use, if only we look for it.’ But at the same time, he notes, ‘what is left has a different meaning because there 90

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are many things that are getting erased, co-opted and captured. National institutions, research centres and universities are being captured by the right-wing. So sometimes what is left is what you have, what is left over, which doesn’t have or is devoid of any kind of focus, but something which has an autonomous power. And in the Indian context, they cannot be left out, maybe we’ll have to fight with what is left with us. As far as Kerala is concerned, it provides you with another meaning to the Left. It’s the radical Left, or it’s the political Left; maybe the last but most resilient of India’s Left tradition. So, here it is also a question or challenge of re-imagining the Left in the new context of art and politics, through new participatory practices and exploring new ethical ecologies.’ When working through a biennale, along with what is left for artists and curators to work with, one critical question is how the biennale format comes to meet the ‘end of times’ period in which we have histories left hanging out/over. And, more practically, we have to ask what is left behind by the Biennale itself. In thinking back to the much-cited Bergen Biennial Conference of 2009, on a panel with the title ‘Did Biennials Change Art?’, Marit Paasche refers to a ‘late style’ of the Biennale as a means to measure against the ‘cage of the contemporary’. Her commentary remarked upon the curatorial work of the panel’s two presenters, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Anri Sala. In particular she refers to a project they managed for the Tirana Biennial in Albania in 2003: Here they took over what originally started out as an ordinary renovation project initiated by the mayor of Tirana, Edi Rama (himself an artist and a close friend of Sala), and transformed it into the famous façade project known as Dammi i colori (Give Me the Colors). Several artists . . . were given the possibility of using the city as a palette, each of them painting one façade. Besides attempting to lift the spirits of Tirana’s inhabitants, Dammi i colori was also motivated by the desire to break free from the event-based mentality that was increasingly haunting the art world at the end of the nineties. Refusing to conceptualize a biennial as an on/off happening, Sala and Obrist wanted it to grow organically. They wanted something to remain in Tirana afterward for the benefit of its citizens, something with a lifespan of decades, not the usual four weeks of an exhibition. Today the façades are still covered in paint in a way that blends art with a modest kind of everyday quality. In this respect, the ‘experiment’ with time as a parameter turned out to be rather successful: time framed the exhibition in a way that pushed the format. (Paasche, 2009: 20) 91

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Despite her positive account, Paasche is in fact critical of the presentation that the curators made at the conference, suggesting they were too celebratory and reluctant to challenge themselves and the concepts they rely upon in positioning their work. In effect, she offered a deconstructionist position, alluding to the fact that a project such as Dammi i colori, while challenging ideas about the contemporary, is nonetheless conditioned by the same problematic. You can keep making such gestures against the flow of the emblem of the contemporary, but arguably it does not change the fundamental conditions of the biennale. ‘It is like injecting Botox into an aging face,’ she remarks strikingly, ‘you manage to keep its deterioration at bay in the beginning but over time it is rendered incapable of expressing anything at all’ (2009: 21). In respect to which, and perhaps echoing Komu’s double play of what is ‘left’, Paasche turns to Edward Said’s (2006: 24) remarks on ‘late style’, which he defines as ‘being in, but oddly apart from, the present’. Said’s notion of ‘late style’ involves a sensitivity towards one’s own death, but one that can equally give rise to a certain freedom and acuity when engaging in the production of new work. Provocatively, Paasche suggests there is already a growing awareness of the ‘death’ of the format – the fact that ‘it has turned into a mere showroom for artists and curators’ (2009: 21). Perhaps, with the Kochi-Muziris Biennale having itself come quite late to the world stage, it has been suitably placed to assume a ‘late style’. It would be fair to say the dramatic foregrounding of relational concerns (the local politics, the educational and community links, the local media, etc.) has forced heightened alertness to its present conditions. As practical suggestions towards ‘lateness’, Paasche makes two specific points: collections and residencies, both of which have pertinence for the Kochi Biennale. The artist-led curatorial approach to Kochi’s Biennale has involved residencies, as well as the highly successful Students Biennale incorporated into the 2014 edition (see Chapter 10). The idea of forming a collection, however, is arguably more challenging given the various structures and resources at stake. Nonetheless, the establishment of a library in Kochi, the ‘Laboratory of Visual Art’ at Pepper House, would seem to go some way to thinking about the Biennale as a form of collection and archive. While arguably a little too celebratory, it is also worth noting Chris Dercon’s positive take on the Kochi Biennale as ‘showing us about the museum of the future’. The museum of the future he posits ‘is not anymore about this vast, huge buildings, enormous buildings that get bigger and bigger. The museum of the future will be more simple, more humble, will be flexible, will be pop-up, will be dealing with the old and the future. And the Kochi Biennale is almost like a blueprint of the museum of tomorrow.’ As much as Komu espouses a somewhat poetic notion of the political imagination, any so-called late style of the Kochi Biennale bears all the 92

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hallmarks of pragmatism, which is again a reminder of the fact that the Biennale goes beyond merely a biennale event itself. ‘We are setting up a digital studio lab,’ he tells us, ‘and we are appointing five people, one is a video director, an editor, a cinematographer, assistant cinematographer, and a technical member of staff.’ Funding for the lab was secured from the Tata Trust, and it was announced with a partnering film festival. The idea is for a free space for pitching ideas, and to help independent film-makers come and make films in Kochi, as well as providing postproduction facilities. ‘I know you are very much aware of Kerala’s tech-history through institutional moves like Technopark,’ he adds, ‘which started in early 1991 and it was one of the biggest movements that actually Kerala led in India.’ An understanding of technology has long been a part of Kerala’s knowledge base, which gave it a secure footing from mid-1990s onwards within India’s economic liberalisation. As Komu notes, ‘Kerala has been a kind of space where it has initiated many such movements even in the area of technology, art and many other things. Take for instance, the library movement that started in the 1940s as a peoples’ movement and literally established thousands of rural libraries all over Kerala, and then the Peoples’ Science Movement or the Total Literacy Movement etc.’ In the case of Technopark, its establishment was followed by that of InfoPark at Kochi. There have been ongoing conversations to develop specific programming with the park. ‘We have planned to set up, or make Kerala a centre for a digital art making,’ he tells us, ‘because Kerala has that resource, and even today I had a Skype call to discuss that. So, that’s why I said, for us the Biennale is not the issue, but rather how to create an eco-system to do things which are needed for Kerala. It is a question of connecting the dots: of potentials, resources and opportunities, of human, social and political capital, of history, dreams and the present. Of course it involves a lot of making and also breaking.’ It is because the Biennale happens, he suggests, that it is possible to start to think about building a cultural hub. To create a digital lab where ‘digital art can be produced even by an American artist here, because Kerala is anyway at the other end of supporting many of their innovations and productions – industrial, technological, aesthetic and economic, in software, hardware and humanware.’ The work Komu has been involved in through the Biennale project has been to counteract the stereotypical view of the state. ‘Most of the people have not understood the cultural depth of Kerala,’ he suggests, ‘during the last 50 years they’ve always seen Kerala in the same way, as a Communist state, and that’s where it all begins and ends. But they have not understood the depth of it and it is slowly getting foregrounded and recalibrated.’ In thinking ahead to the next edition, Komu refers to a number of projects he is already involved in, which are all part of the Biennale offering a platform, sharing social and political goals, and crucially having a presence well 93

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beyond the set period of the Biennale as a curated art event. At the time of speaking, Komu mentions of their involvement with an international digital film festival, which he notes they partnered with ‘because we want to show our solidarity with the spirit of dissent and protest’. He also refers to the first National Art Education Conference,1 which was due to be hosted in Kochi a few weeks on from when we were speaking. With around 300 delegates, this was expected to be a large event to discuss the national survey conducted by the Biennale the year before, in partnership with Foundation for Indian Art Education (see Chapter 10). All these partnerships and activities feed into the preparations for the art event itself. Sudarshan Shetty, the curator for the upcoming 2016 Biennale, is thinking along similar lines, Komu suggests. ‘As you know Sudarshan is a very multi-traditionalist practitioner. So he’s bringing that layer into it, because he’s connecting with diverse practitioners. He is changing the perception, to maybe take it to a different level. Since the last two editions the Biennale has already changed perceptions of art practices, but now it is going to question tradition and its relevance in the contemporary context.’ In speaking with Komu there is the sense of a new confidence and stability in taking things forward. Indeed, he expresses his genuine excitement in looking ahead to the third edition. ‘What Shetty celebrates most of all with the Biennale’, he suggests, ‘is that it’s a people’s Biennale, so he wants to reassert that . . . it’s interesting the way he thinks. . . you know, more than with major artists who are going to come, people are going to be surprised with selections, and the first one who is going to be surprised in the whole context will be none other than the artist him/herself!’ Komu laughs, adding, ‘it means that the art world itself is going to have to change its perception about art making, so, I am very much excited about it.’

Coda Throughout our conversation, Komu never lets up his passion for the Biennale, making it perhaps all too easy to ignore the fact he has his own art practice to contend with. Indeed, it was due in part to his need to travel for a show of his new work in Bangalore that we ended up arranging to speak at a distance. Perhaps it is both because of and despite his international profile that Komu chose to become a curator and director of a huge perennial project. The artist-led approach to the Biennale was a very deliberate decision, and one that has sustained with Jitish Kallat as the curator of the second Biennale (see Chapter 6), and, at the time of writing, with Sudarshan Shetty due to curate the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016. Inevitably such an undertaking must impact on one’s own work (and life). However, when we ask Komu for his personal reflection, he is typically sanguine. ‘What I’ve learned in the last five years’ he suggests ‘is something I have never learned 94

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before. So, as for me, I think I have not lost anything. It has changed me completely as a person. I can speak better . . . I can make my art better. I can read people better. I have understood the art world better.’ He refers metaphorically to the making of an investment. As if everything he had earned since he started his art practice, he put back into the Biennale, to save it, and which now is returned as a form of wisdom. ‘What I’ve learned from this Biennale is about art – art, art world, people, about how all those things work. At the same time what I value the most is the spirit of art. Art has a certain capacity to unite people, to help each other. Artists have a different kind of temperament which in fact acts as a balm and balance in our time . . . and if there was no art the world would be a kind of desolate place to live.’ And it is the trust gained among the artists and what manifests through practice that has allowed the Biennale to survive. ‘Even if you are a curator, or a museum director, or anybody, through your eye, by your own practice, your reading or understanding, you can immediately judge that this person has a certain value, a certain quality, which can be part of the pillar to a structure that you are making.’ This was always Komu’s thinking when selecting artists to join the project. ‘What does this person bring into this effort . . . this discourse . . . this project?’ he would ask. In this sense he does not claim curatorial wisdom. Rather, he regards, ‘it is the artist, the resource of the artist, as an individual standing for different kinds of causes, coming together to try to establish something.’ Working in this way is almost like coordinating a larger team, he suggests. ‘I wouldn’t say it is a curatorial vision or something like that,’ he adds, ‘Already there was an idea and unless that idea is executed it’s just something on paper. And you believe in that idea, because that idea has a history. . . the Kochi Biennale as a project has a history to it, it’s a continuation of a certain history and you’re just trying to retrieve and take it forward.’ This sense of history was something Komu felt could easily be communicated. ‘Everybody understood the power of that certain history, where one has to also contribute to save “our” time, save the contemporary, save the spirit of the time. So everybody’s contribution came, like, brick by brick, layer by layer.’ Overall, Komu’s view of the Biennale, especially the first edition, is of an artists’ collective. It is as if artists are animators and mediators within the process, in a quite different way, considering their role, especially when working on such a large scale. As our Internet connection starts to break up for the last time, Komu parts with a final humbling thought: ‘You always operate with the feeling that you’re nobody, because the art world is much, much, much bigger than what you imagine this Biennale is. . . .you are just a mediator, and you are also an administrator, you’re a facilitator, you know, you’re setting up something, so if you have that kind of open approach . . . then the other person becomes the important person – not you.’ 95

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Note 1 See: http://www.kochimuzirisbiennale.org/state-of-art-schools/

References Art: Interrupted (2013) Directed by Hattie Bowering [Film]. Dubai, UAE: Wild Beast. Belting, Hans (2009) ‘Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate’, in Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 38–73. Bourriaud, Nicholas (ed.) (2009) Altermodern: Tate Triennial. London: Tate Publishing. Dercon, C. (2014) ‘KMB Is a Blueprint for the “Museums of the Future”’ [video interview], Kochi-Muziris Biennale website: http://kochimuzirisbiennale.org/ chris-dercon-kochi-muziris-biennale-is-a-blueprint-for-the-museums-of-thefuture/ [Accessed 10 December 2015]. D’Souza, Robert E. (2013) ‘The Indian Biennale Effect: The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012’, Cultural Politics, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 296–312. Elkins, James (ed.) (2007) Is Art History Global? New York: Routledge. Harris, Jonathan (2011) Globalization and Contemporary Art. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell. Jaisinghani, Belle (2008) ‘After Years, Sir JJ School of Art Begins to Breathe’, The Times of India, 7 November 2008. Available Online: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ mumbai/After-years-Sir-JJ-School-of-Art-begins-to-BREATHE/articleshow/3682953. cms [Accessed 26 January 2016]. Jumabhoy, Z. (2009) ‘Introduction’, in Mark Holborn (ed.), The Empire Strikes Back. London: Saatchi Gallery/Jonathan Cape, pp. 17–78. Kant, Amitabh (2009) Branding India: An Incredible Story. Utter Pradesh: Collins Business/HarperCollins. Kochi Biennale Foundation (2012) Against All Odds. Kottayam: DC Books. Martyris, Nina (2002) ‘JJ School Seeks Help from New Friends’, The Times of India, 6 October 2002. Available Online: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ city/mumbai/JJ-School-seeks-help-from-new-friends/articleshow/24305727.cms [Accessed 26 January 2016]. Nair, M. (2014) ‘Three Is Company’, Arts Illustrated, Dec 2014–Jan 2015, pp. 42–52. Onians, John (ed.) (2004) Atlas of World Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paasche, Marit (2009) ‘The Cage of the Contemporary: On “Late Style” and Biennials’, in Elena Filipovic et al. (eds.), The Biennial Reader: The Bergen Biennial Conference. Bergen, Norway: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 19–22. Said, Edward (2006) On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain. New York: Bloomsbury. Summers, David (2003) Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. London: Phaidon Press.

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4 THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF ‘WHORLED EXPLORATIONS’ Ryan Bishop

One sticks a finger into the ground to smell what country one is in; I stick my finger into the world – it has no smell. Where am I? What does it mean to say: the world? What is the meaning of that word? Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here? Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought from a peddling Shanghaier of human beings? (Kierkegaard, 1983: 200)

‘Whorled Explorations’ was the title given to the second version of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, running from late 2014 to early 2015. If the first iteration was concerned with the local and location, with the Biennale operating in an historical venue previously not on the international art circuit, then the second, curated by artist Jitish Kallat, worked with the historicity of the site within various trajectories of positioning in relation to globalization processes past, present and future (see Chapter 6). If the 2012 Biennale foregrounded the ‘locatedness’ of the Biennale in Kochi, then the 2014 version used its specific location to scale between micro and macro explorations of worlds, how we form them and how they position us in the process. This chapter, therefore, examines the ways in which works at this iteration of the Biennale invite speculation on scales of worlding, the context and genealogy of worlds, and how biennale’s might figure in worlding processes and offer critique of them. All of the pieces Kallat selected for the second Biennale engage the curatorial theme, and it is somewhat churlish to speak of just a few. However, a taste of the event can be found in the reconstruction of Yoko Ono’s instruction work ‘EARTH PIECE: Listen to the sound of the earth turning’, here referencing the 1999 update of her 1963 piece. The conversion of the instruction card into

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postcards importantly invokes the world of postal communications and relays, of linked sites connected by communications systems: a topic that obsessed the information theory saturated era of the 1960s as systems theory reached into increasingly electronic and digital domains that Ono underscores with the near millennial release of her analogue postal system that created worlds of circulation and information for centuries and often did so from a position of power and privilege while articulating that power and privilege through its enunciation. Similarly, Khalil Rabah’s nod to absurdism and photoshop plasticity, with ‘Biproduct’ (2010), finds him ‘greening’ an aircraft carrier to suggest worlds in collision with a potential for collusion: agricultural cultivation of the earth versus military technological domination of it. Shaped like an aerial view of the Gaza Strip, the trawling farm/factory/ military platform vessel similarly suggests the power to move and create worlds through interventionist geopolitical acts while highlighting the restricted lives of those in the Gaza Strip, including the ban on exporting agricultural products from the region. As with Ono’s postcard, Marie Velardi’s ‘Atlas des iles perdues’ (2007) uses various media in peril of extinction, or simply archival obscurity, to engage the literal fluidity of our aquatic planet. Velardi’s bound atlas (bound as all worlds, by definition, must be) provides maps of islands in danger of disappearing due to rising sea levels

Figure 4.1 Khalil Rabah, Biproduct, 2010. Photograph: Dheeraj Thakur. Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation.

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caused by global warming and thus provides a stark reminder that worlds often are (and must be) unbuilt for new ones to be built, just as various media and genres eclipse extant ones, often documenting their disappearance in the earliest inscriptions of the new. The scales of disappearance operative in Velardi’s evocative work – from book to reference work (and the reference section of libraries) to cartographic drawing to the actual geological formations the drawings depict – draw attention to the ineluctable connections between the spaces that worlds occupy and the temporal flows to which those spaces are subject: the slice of thought, representation, knowledge and marks from the Heraclitean flux. Each of these works ‘world,’ and each concerns itself with scales of worlding. If one follows the neatly plotted path through the exhibition as laid out by Kallat – and there are just as many reasons to do so than not – then the first ‘artwork’ one is meant to encounter is the famous short film by Charles and Ray Eames called Powers of Ten (1977). A hybrid instructional, experimental and promotional film made by designers using visual technologies and animation to explore macro- and microcosmic scaling of human perception, prosthetically enhanced, seems an odd initial piece for a Biennale because it is not by artists and not intended as a work of art. Rather it is an instructional and scientific film made under the auspices of IBM in the full flush of technological triumphalism found in the US Cold War linkages of Cold War computing, design and display. Kallat’s telling placement of this well-known work by the Eameses cannily concocts an encounter with several key concepts and concerns of the Biennale, namely the cultural politics of this event, the myriad ways in which humans manufacture worlds (not necessarily discover them), the aesthetics and politics of such constructions or ‘worldings,’ and the ethics of optics. These concepts and concerns lurk metonymically in the Eameses’s non-artwork that gestures beyond its own grand scales to those represented by and through the Biennale. All of these issues also lead to thinking about biennales and their format: how the world of biennales has been constructed and whether or not, given this construction, they are structurally able to perform cultural politics. The question surrounding the cultural political potential for biennales is similar to that posed to popular culture products: can they perform critique of the systems in which they participate and which sustain them? Or do they merely reinscribe the power of that which makes them possible?

Cultural politics, biennales and India: the (w)hole whirled in a night My goal in visiting this biennale was not only to view how an event of this scale might be realized but also to see how India might respond to a globalized biennale format and, more specifically, how

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the transformative effect of a biennale might manifest itself in the city of Kochi, which is outside the recognized centers of Indian contemporary art. (D’Souza, 2013: 298)

The title of D’Souza’s article ‘The Indian Biennale Effect: The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012’ (see also Chapter 1), as well as the venue in which the piece was published initially (the journal Cultural Politics), underscores some of the issues at play in the India Biennale and its cultural politics, as well as an unavoidable ambiguity that occurs when the two titles are combined. The ambiguity concerns the nature of cause and effect: a particularly powerful trope in terms of narrative, especially in the Western intellectual tradition and an important cornerstone of syllogistic and dialectic thought. Its import for the justification of action or not is common sense (and part of what art is meant to do is to undo common sense, and this is part of the realm of cultural politics). Cultural politics, as the term indicates, concerns that which is political in culture as well as that which is cultural in politics. The domain addresses issues of power, representation and value. The combination of the ‘biennale effect’ and ‘cultural politics’ forces us to ask some questions: Are we interested in the Biennale as an effect of larger geopolitical/economic/aesthetic/discursive trajectories, or are we interested in looking at the effects it creates? Is the Biennale an effect or does it create effects? As with all either/or questions, the answer is Yes – either/or explanations being one of the logical fallacies of European study in the Middle Ages of the highly valued field of rhetoric. When we consider this logical fallacy within scenarios of ascribing cause and effect, and hence temporal relations of phenomena, we land squarely in the domain of transitive grammar, in which subjects enact their agency on objects in the world. This is our common sense understanding of subjectivity, not only in the West but in the globalized world of neoliberal economics under which many regimes of power and control currently operate. And to repeat, the cultural political work that art can do is to undermine, dismantle and critique common sense knowledge of the world and how it works or we presume it to work. The cultural politics of art can indeed perform that role, but the devil is in the modal (can) for it hardly ever does. Thus the aims of cultural political inquiry are always of self-reflective critique without any prioritizing of the self. The title of the second biennale, ‘Whorled Explorations,’ contains an allusion (intentional or not) to a line in James Joyce’s 1939 novel Finnegans Wake – one that serves as an excellent synecdoche for the entire novel’s agenda and further for the themes of the second version of the Biennale, indeed articulating concisely its curatorial cultural politics. The line from 100

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Joyce is: ‘Willed without witting, whorled without aimed’ (Joyce, 1991: 272, lines: 4–5). The fun of Finnegans Wake is that each line is infinitely unpackable across a host of languages, allusions and contexts, including the rough diegetic of the novel but mostly well beyond – that is, to the domain of cultural politics. Each line, even individual words – especially those multilingual and poly-allusive portmanteau words – contain multitudes, generative beyond the sum of their parts. To get to just a few points from this line relevant for the event that was the second Biennale, we can understand the general context of the line in relation to Giambattisto Vico’s critique of those parts of the Enlightenment that were perversely recast as a human-centric triumphalist teleology, articulated in the early part of the eighteenth century. Without going into too much detail, Vico posited a cyclical and repetitive model of cultural and civilizational history involving rise, collapse and reemergence. This is not a dialectic, nor is it a linear teleology, nor is it Nietzschean eternal recurrence. It is a structured set of developments of human strength and dissipation in relation to the gods (or God) as well as to other civilizations. Joyce used this structure to write his counter-history of European influence in the world, which he called Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s anxiety, coming as he did from a British colony and writing in the tongue of the imperial master, about global and historical inheritance is aptly summed up in the famous line from his earlier novel Ulysses in which his protagonist states, ‘History is a dream from which I am trying to awaken.’ With Finnegans Wake he ceases that agenda and merely re-dreams history. To so re-dream, he uses Vico’s cycles of human culture (the corso e recorso) to structure the piece. Vico was also interested in what happened to the histories of events as told by those who lost, of those who did not have the authority to write the history books (usually told as a narrative of inevitability leading to the moment of the authors authoring the historical tale). Vico concludes that their interpretation of events resides in devalued linguistic forms: jokes, songs, puns, picaresque narratives without end, and so on. This becomes fodder for Joyce who then takes both Vico’s larger frame of human existence and his analyses of counter-historical narratives, combines them and creates a massive, groaning account of European and colonial histories as told by those vanquished by traditional historical linear teleology. This is the ‘whorled without aimed’ or world without aim/end. It is the world as willed but without true beginning or witting (intention), as cast by Joyce as ‘Willed without witting’. Joyce overturns the teleology of cultures and nations that emerged with and from colonial world views. He provides a venue for artistically crafting devalued discursive forms in order to punch a hole in the whole story of the world to give us the (W)hole Whirled in a Night. Or the term ‘The (W)hole Whirled in a Night’ might 101

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be recast as ‘Whorled Explorations’, in other words: the cultural politics of current and post–World War II artistic exploration. Kallat’s curatorial imprint for the second iteration of the Biennale plays with the very same cultural political agenda, as well as many of the same materials, that Joyce did, showing synchronic and structural links between the interwar period in Europe (when Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake) and the riven set of global regimes operative in the present. Joyce reaches across all of global history to collapse in a dream-like and anachronistic manner the fragments of worlding that get whirled together in non-rational thought, such that all things, languages, images, ideas, jokes and linguistic play are present at the same time. Famously blind, Joyce would have likely relished the cultural politics of this version of the Biennale as a visual supplement to his project, especially as assembled by Kallat, who similarly reaches across spatio-temporal domains to bring a syncretic and synchronic enfolding of moments and means of world-making but through primarily, though by no means limited to, visual culture. Biennales, by their very nature, contain the seeds of cultural politics operating as they do within global flows of markets while simultaneously not necessarily participating in them. As the antithesis of art fairs, they provide the conditions of possibility for art to engage critically within the worlds created by and through artistic production in much the same way as Joyce’s novel exploded the novel genre forever, creating a work that drew attention to its production as a repository of historical vanquishing held up as ‘high art’ by the most famous modernist practitioner in the novel form at the time.

Not so funny ironies: geopolitics and hope (or the lack thereof) Do I love the world so well/that I have to know how it ends? (Auden, 1947: 76) Dazzling promise has always been the underside of the deceptively sober prose of scientific rationality and modern progress within the culture of no culture . . . Disaster feeds radiant hope and bottomless despair, and I, for one, am satiated. We pay dearly for living with the chronotope of ultimate threats and promises. (Haraway, 1997: 41)

An excellent example of this kind of biennale effect, of how the cultural politics of a given moment can reverberate and transform under differing moments of exhibition, can be found in Kader Attia’s paintings entitled Independence Disillusionment (2014). These take the themes evoked by

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Kallat’s mobilization and update of Kerala’s School of Astronomy and Mathematics during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries (according to the Julian calendar). In the great upheaval of mathematical reconfiguring of the world as no-longer-world but globe, the role of cartography, mathematics and astronomy played important roles in the move from science to technology, from merely describing the world to bending it to human will and hubris. As Kallat (2014) states in his curatorial note, in intellectual gestures ripe with promise and malice, the Kerala School offered ‘transformative propositions for understanding our planet and locating human existence within a wider cosmos’ (2014: 14). Such was also the Western colonial trajectory that led Portuguese explorers and traders to Kochi, and Europe to the Americas, Africa and Asia – a cartographic grasp of the planet through geometries of linkage, speculation and exploitation that led us to the escape velocity necessary to leave the earth behind and provide us views of our shared hurtling sphere from outer space. These same astronomical, mathematical and colonizing motifs taken up by many of the artists in the Biennale have an especial cultural political resonance in Attia’s paintings of post–World War II, postcolonial stamps depicting space travel, satellite communications and postplanetary colonization (the earth put through the powers of ten yet again as the Eameses’s IBM promo film proclaimed). The dark irony of the postcolonial moment for independence around the globe was that the old order of post-Westphalian nation-states had met its end, just as it was struggling to be realized by many former colonies. These newly formed nation-states emerged into a new geopolitical order that told them, in essence, that now that they had achieved independence, they could celebrate their freedom by choosing a side in the Cold War. (Many ironies are not at all funny unfortunately.) Some flirted with the Non-Aligned Movement, founded in Belgrade in 1961 by India, Indonesia, Egypt, Ghana and Yugoslavia, but the two global superpowers made sure such a movement could not be tenable. This fact was starkly displayed by the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, which allowed for India’s own satellite programme to begin in earnest a few years later with launches from the Soviet Union. The fate of postcolonial countries was to be a staging ground for the Cold War by proxy, flare-ups of somewhat contained heat, but not the truly hot war that the Cold War attempted to keep at bay with these fledgling countries’ hopes and aspirations for political autonomy returned to ashes. The views depicted in Attia’s paintings are teletechnological ones, postcolonial eyes in the sky and journeys into the space race and the horizon expanded into the cosmos. Satellites embody this vision while the Eameses’s film Powers of Ten performs this vision – both being central to the worlding processes underway in the Cold War. The first stop on Kallat’s curatorial 103

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route, as mentioned, the Eameses’s film explicitly moves up into the atmosphere through visual technologies multiplied by powers of ten, and then takes audiences into the deepest reaches of outer space, before plunging us back to earth and eventually into the nucleus of a carbon atom found in the human body. The macro and the micro, and the astronomical and the nano, that constitute the scopic movements of the film chart a history of Western techno-scientific power as primarily visual. The triumph of the visual in the Western sensorium and its empirical power to overturn received doxa (and thus create a new world in which science had sway) meant that seeing not only equals knowing but also that seeing equals power over the seen, as satellite technology indirectly bespeaks. An immediate and influential precursor of Powers of Ten can be found in an earlier Charles and Ray Eames film called Glimpses of the USA, a multiscreen presentation at the 1959 Moscow Exhibition. As the undesignated designers of the Cold War through their numerous films, exhibitions and multiscreen experimentations, the Eameses helped popularize scientific and technological innovation, consumer culture and the powers of abstraction operative within complex systems. Glimpses of the USA provides their first foray into displaying the optic capacities made by satellites, using the zooming in technique that they display in Powers of Ten – in fact, some of the imagery of visions of earth from space found in Powers of Ten comes from the earlier film shown in Moscow. The film tracks from the teletechnological wonders of a satellite vision of earth down to the mundane start of the day within ‘the average’ US household, zooming rapidly in increments from the space view down to the quotidian making of breakfast. Both films offer the power of micro and macro technological amplification and production of vision with universal computation providing the means to scale rapidly up or down (Colomina, 2012). That the Eameses had an abiding interest in and dialogue with Indian design and crafts people makes them a productive intersection of international and national cross-fertilizations Kallat has constructed. As part of their own specific design interests but also part and parcel of the global worlding wrought by the Cold War propaganda machine powered by the US government, the Eameses worked and exhibited in India for decades, even writing a position paper on the import of design futures for the country. The report funded by the Ford Foundation suggested the establishment of a national design institute, now the National Institute of Design, as a means of modernizing India while learning from and taking advantage of long traditions of design and craft (Kirkham, 1995: 282–284). The Eameses report had been commissioned by Jawaharlal Nehru, who also founded the official Indian space programme in 1962. The Indian Committee for Space Research was ostensibly formed to produce and promote the peaceful use 104

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of space for satellite communications (much as depicted in Attia’s stamps of postcolonial dreams of glory) and thus join the upper tier of ‘advanced’ technological nations then reformulating and framing the globe. Nehru thus looked simultaneously to local and indigenous craft and design while moving the country into the space race. His vision of the country was stereoscopic spatially and temporally: national and global as well as rooted in the past and futural in vision. The world as globe in its modernist technological splendour, evidently, cherry-picked its past to move into the New Frontier. And as all these nations quickly learned, the peaceful use of space and technologies placed there can easily be modified for their initial intended security and military purposes, with the current Indian satellite spine forming an integral part of its defence, surveillance and reconnaissance strategy for itself and its allies. The space created through design and screens that the Eameses displayed in Moscow in 1959 articulated their influence on a Cold War moment that was about tele- and remote control of space in relation to colonial and neocolonial moments, as well as their interest in those nations and traditions taken up by the geopolitical momentum and control of the moment, places the Eameses explicitly within the issues invoked by Attia’s paintings. Attia, as did Joyce, turns to those kinds of sources where the narratives of the vanquished are stored but not archived – in this case in the not-so-humble but by no means high-brow postal stamp. And the images are of technological fantasies and dreams of escape trajectory and velocity, of leaving the planet we have worlded, or whorled, into a global reconfiguration as brutally amazing and horrific as that witnessed during the height of Kerala mathematical influence and European colonization. But the stamps hail from the Congo, the upper Volta, Algeria, Mauritius, Zaire – all pawns in the Cold War chess match, pawns looking for their own escape trajectories and velocities from the new globe to the nth power of ten rendered at that moment (more than half a century ago). And it has only been exacerbated since: the stakes have been intensified in a surenchere of repetition, explosion and implosion – of lines of flight, of lines in the sand and of heads in the sand. Attia’s is but one set of works presented at the 2014 Biennale that shows up the unavoidable paradoxes, dichotomies and successes and failures of attempts to world, whilst showing there is no other way to be or exist but to world, with all of its enfolded contradictory nature, results, effects and unintended consequences. This Biennale itself is just such a construct and could not help but to be anything other than that. The cultural politics of the biennale effect, or biennale effects, or biennale as effect, springs art from the ghetto of ineffective engagement or rarefied reification of materiality – but does so only to land it squarely in geopolitical debates and even complicities at every single level, debates and complicities for which no easy answers exist. 105

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Figure 4.2 Kader Attia, Independence Disillusionment, 2014. Oil on canvas, approx. 15.7 × 11.81 inches (each). [3 of 26 elements from the series]. Photograph by Sangeeth Thali. Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation.

This is how we have been whorled within our ever-whirling world, through it, and vice versa. World without beginning, world without end, ‘Willed without witting, whorled without aimed’ (Joyce, 1991: 272, lines 4–5)

Satellites visions: ‘the world is flat’ He no longer describes the earth as a library globe or a map that has come alive, as a cosmic eye staring into deep space. . . . The war has changed the way he sees the earth. The earth is land and water, the dwelling place of mortal men, in elevated dictionary terms. He doesn’t see it anymore (storm-spiraled, sea-bright, breathing heat and haze and color) as an occasion for picturesque language, for easeful play or speculation. (DeLillo, 2011: 25) What is it – ‘a world picture’? Obviously, a picture of the world. But what is a world? What does ‘picture’ mean here? ‘World’ serves, here, as a name for beings in their entirety. The term is not

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Figure 4.3 Jitish Kallat, ‘The World Is (a) Flat’, from personal notebooks used in preparation for the curation of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2014. Courtesy of Jitish Kallat.

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confined to the cosmos, to nature. History, too, belongs to world. But even nature and history – suffusing and exceeding each other – do not exhaust world. . .Understood in an essential way, ‘world picture’ does not mean ‘picture of the world’ but, rather, the world grasped as picture. (Heidegger, 2002: 67)

The English, and now almost global, word ‘satellite’ has astronomical meanings but its etymology, from the Latin satellit-, relates to an attendant, the member of a bodyguard. Thus the word has long had an episcopal or overseeing function associated with it. The satellit- is simultaneously a protector but one that is under the protected’s own control, not vice versa. Or is it? With issues of agency, especially the control of others human or otherwise, it is useful to bear in mind the complexity of agency, of causes and effects, intended or not. Almost all of our ways of thinking about the technological inventions we have parked in space that we call satellites reside in this etymology. Satellites that we have placed in orbit contend with deep space, but those of us bound to the terrestrial are wise to contend with the deep time of words and concepts that can usefully be mobilized to derail, critique and problematize simplistic presentist thinking and usage. The US President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the emergent military industrial complex when he was leaving office in the midst of the Cold War. Having been the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during World War II and then president, he had some knowledge of the areas about which he sounded warnings. However, many have speculated that military-industrial does not cover the complex fully. James Der Derian argued that it should be the military-industrial-entertainment complex while Rebecca Lowen has suggested the third term should be university. All of them together – military-industrial-entertainment-university complex – makes a more accurate picture of the situation. Regardless, the incorporation of satellite systems into broadcast media and telecomm technologies helped further blur the boundaries between entertainment, industry and military during the massive shift towards globalization during the 1960s and the Cold War. Satellites played an integral role in what is called ‘real-time’ technologies, those modes by which we can watch/hear an occurrence in another part of the world essentially as it happens. This is a common contemporary phenomenon, indeed quotidian, but like everything ready-to-hand it has a long and complex history. And like many technologies at our fingertips, it has a military provenance. Satellites were used to provide surveillance of the entire globe during the Cold War, a role they still 108

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possess but now greatly expanded to include absolute coverage of the earth for military, corporate and NGO surveillance activities. The effect of satellites on media and telecommunications came globally into living rooms around the world on 25 June 1967 with the first ‘live’ global transmission. It was called ‘Our World’ and included such stellar figures in the arts as Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso. Over 10,000 engineers, technicians and performers were involved to realize the broadcast. The satellites beamed the benevolent global programming to a receptive global audience. The UK contribution to the broadcast involved the Beatles singing ‘All You Need Is Love’ to the world. It was an interesting and provocative moment, if one contextualizes it with regard to the primary ‘hot’ war being conducted at the moment under the auspices of the Cold War. It was yet another proxy war staged in a colonial site: the Vietnam War. Singing about love to a world gripped by war and potential nuclear destruction through the appropriation of military technology for civilian means can be seen as a generous, eye-opening political act. But, in retrospect, we need to consider if the broadcast was indeed part of the civic and civilian use. The status of the civic sphere comes into sharp question in the moments of the postTotal War of World War II and Cold War, in which every person born since the summer of 1945 has entered the world – Our World – with a target on his or her head. One can legitimately ask if there is a civic sphere any more. Or do satellites remind us that such formulations are but the wistful tugs of nostalgia? And do we occupy a civic sphere when GPS (satellite-driven of course) positions us for phones and drones? The 1967 ‘Our World’ connects to a 1984 work by Nam June Paik, ‘the first video artist’, and perhaps the first artist to use satellites as a medium for the delivery of art. His New Year’s Day riposte to George Orwell in 1984 was called ‘Good Morning, Mr. Orwell’, in an effort to display the half-full glass of teletechnological innovation. Paik referred to the work as the first satellite international installation. He also called the event a ‘global disco’, blending the gallery scene with the nightclub scene. Broadcast using the satellite ‘Bright Star’ and forming an updated version of Allan Kaprow’s ‘happenings’, the work featured some of the most interesting and innovative artists and performers of the moment, including Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Astor Piazzola, Joseph Beuys, Philip Glass and Alan Ginsburg. The broadcast linked New York City, Paris and San Francisco to celebrate the cultural and liberatory dimensions of electronic telecommunications. In light of their use for the 9/11 attacks and post-9/11 intensive spying on citizens by the NSA as witnessed in the Edward Snowden revelations, Orwell’s vision seems to have gotten the better of Paik’s. 109

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In an unintended gesture to ‘glitch aesthetics’, the broadcast failed at many times to deliver on its technological promises, leaving performers alone or with empty broadcast air, empty like so many promises of technological, political or aesthetic liberations – such as those to which Attia alludes in his paintings of stamps depicting newly liberated colonies launching satellites and other space-based technologies into orbit in techno-utopic futures that never materialized. These stamps that he reproduces gesture to aspirations and desires rarely delivered on: worlds of promise unfulfilled. Satellites metonymically manifest many of the ways that modern technoscientific culture in the post–World War II moment began to ‘world’ and shape the metaphysics of the imaginary in terms of what worlds could and should be. In the first few paragraphs of his essay ‘The Age of the World Picture,’ Heidegger argues that modernity’s essence coalesces around a series of phenomena including science’s most visible manifestation as machine technology, itself using specific forms of mathematics to realize its visibility and power. This situation aligns modern science with modern metaphysics. Further he argues that within the very late modernity of the middle part of the twentieth century, art moves into the world of aesthetics and thus becomes a means for simultaneously creating and articulating human experience. All of this culminates in human action being understood as culture, which then means that culture articulates the highest of human achievement and care, with care being converted into ‘the politics of culture’. Heidegger brings mathematics, science, machine technology, art, aesthetics, culture and metaphysics together in a penetrating view of the legacies of twentieth century trajectories that bespeak the themes of the 2014 Biennale. The cultural politics of Heidegger’s interpretation of modernity’s generated metaphysics can be charted in the capacity for representation to equate with experience and the real, for the map to create the territory and the technological means for cartographic representation to become the tools for human worlding. The satellites depicted in Attia’s paintings are just such machinic technologies, for they chart a trajectory in the world travelled from being construed as flat to orb to globe to flat again. Our capacity to see and render the planet whole has erased the horizon of the world and made it capable of being held in our collective teletechnological grasp. The age of the world picture is evoked in these paintings in the means by which we have enframed, delineated and curtailed potential futures, realized or not. This is the world – the flat world – or flat or room, we have built for ourselves, perhaps unwittingly (‘without witting’) and perhaps without aim (‘whorled without aimed’): a world made, not discovered. 110

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Coda: the optics of ethics and the perspective of perspective [Powers of Ten] popularizes post-Einsteinian thought the way the telescope popularized Copernicus: and the effect is almost as upsetting. The spectator is in a perspectiveless space. (Schrader, 1970: 11)

Schrader’s essay on the Eameses’s film, as the quote above shows, equates their film – or indeed conflates their film – with the telescope. Both instruments – telescope and film – provide a new way to see and concretize ideas, thus reminding us that each new technological mode for visualizing our place in the world actually results in further worlding. The telescope and its complementary device, the microscope, provide a limited continuum within that found in the scales the Eameses’s film explores. The two earlier prosthetic devices marked a moment in a new age of the world picture, that which occurred when colonial forces excavated Kochi out of ancient Muziris and rendered it an important (once again) node in the early modern network of imperial European trade and exploitation. When Schrader equates the Eameses’s film with the telescope, he reaches back a few centuries to Copernican Revolution of the earth’s place in the cosmos and the overturning of longheld doxa. The universe changed, as did the position of humans within it, and the role of science and philosophy to be on par with religion for explaining it. This led, for good and ill to the Age of Discovery, as it was called, which Schrader’s rhetorical move reminds us was actually the Age of Construction. The misstep with such technological developments is in mistaking these visual changes of capacity for progress. We do not necessarily see better; we merely see differently. This is the optics of ethics, if we can only see it as such, and the perspective provided by perspective that the Eameses’s film attempts to evoke, and that Kallat’s worldings in the second Biennale sought to explore. The biennale as an artistic format and platform has long had an interventionist agenda, but generally one contained within the borders of the art world. As a kind of ‘satellite’ event, the Kochi Biennale performs this function but does so as a proper newcomer and outlier in the global art circuit. As such, it turns its telescope both inwardly and outwardly: inwardly by exploring experimental means of staging a dynamic art event when many of the mainstream biennales have become somewhat bland and staid and outwardly by underscoring the worlding contexts in which art is produced and exists. The tropes of satellites and telescopes that have operated in this chapter, therefore, help us understand the cultural political engagement offered by Kallat’s curatorial vision, an engagement not often spied in the biennale sphere. 111

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As with Kallat’s Biennale brief, Attia’s paintings create ‘the world grasped as picture’ in Heidegger’s sense of it by co-opting imagery of the very moment at which Heidegger theorized the technological shifts that caused such a metaphysics to come into play. Attia does so with frames within frames: the frame of a stamp and a painting. His paintings scale that Cold War moment that we still dwell within much as the Eameses’s film does, much as Heidegger’s conflation of a ‘culture of politics’ does, and much as the famous ‘earth rise’ photo from Apollo 8 in 1968 does. The perspective of perspective, though, is rarely understood as perspective, collapsed as it is with hubristic certainty that the world is the world: the one and only world understood by all in the same fashion. Attia and the Eameses – brought together with Ono, Rabah, Velardi and the others in Kallat’s optics of ethics – provide frames for producing worlds within worlds, showing their constructedness, and thus creating conditions for worlding and worlding anew.

References Auden, W.H. (1947) The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Ecology. New York: Random House. Colomina, Beatriz (2001) ‘Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture’, Grey Room, Issue 02, Winter 2001, pp. 16–29. DeLillo, Don (2011) The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. New York: Scribner. D’Souza, Robert E. (2013) ‘The Indian Biennale Effect: The Kochi/Muziris Biennale 2012’, Cultural Politics, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 296–312. Haraway, Donna (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. New York: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin (2002) ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (eds. and trans.), Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 57–72. Joyce, James (1991 [1939]) Finnegans Wake. London: Penguin. Kallat, Jitish (2014) ‘Curatorial Note’, in Kochi Biennale Foundation (ed.), Whorled Explorations [exhibition catalogue]. Kochi: Kochi Biennale Foundation and DC Books, pp. 14–16. Kierkegaard, Soren (1983) Fear and Trembling/Repetition, trans. by Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kirkham, Pat (1995) Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Schrader, Paul (1970) ‘The Poetry of Ideas: The Films of Charles Eames’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 2–19.

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Part II MAKING WORK By drawing lines, arranging words or distributing surfaces, one also designs divisions of communal space. It is the way in which, by assembling words or forms, people define not merely various forms of art, but certain configurations of what can be seen and what can be thought, certain forms of inhabiting the material world. – Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, 2007, p.91 The Kochi-Muziris Biennale has been distinctive for its ‘productionist’ approach – for putting emphasis on making work in situ, and for its artist-led curation. An underlying question in this section of the book is over what it means to make ‘work’ within the context of a biennale that sits within a very specific local, regional and national politics, and broader geopolitics. The ‘artwork’ is generally thought of as a reified object, performance or set of processes. Yet, nonetheless, it requires work to produce it and in turn produces work (both labour and opportunity) through its necessity to be displayed, disseminated and sold. Allowing for the oscillation in the meaning of ‘work’ in ‘artwork’, this section offers four different accounts of both making art and making a biennale. It begins with a visual essay, incorporating film stills from a documentary on the preparations for the inaugural Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012. Both text and image show the many threads of work and artwork, of labour and creativity. Following this is an in-depth interview with artist Jitish Kallat, curator of the second Kochi Biennale, 2014. Here the account of making/curating artwork is a more conceptual one in which we come to understand a complex situating of both ‘site’ and ‘sight’, and the various nuances involved in working with artists and the employment of a curatorial construct that challenges the reception of the artwork. The second edition of the Kochi Biennale is examined further in the next chapter, which focuses on the display of painting and the framing of political gestures. The section concludes with a close-reading of End of Empire, a collateral artwork. Here, a sculpture is the trigger for a social art practice, which involves working with a local craftsman and his associates and friends within the streets of Fort Kochi. This chapter very explicitly draws out an understanding of the labour of art; the labour it takes to make, exhibit, encounter and debate art.

5 MAKING A BIENNALE Art Interrupted Hattie Bowering, Robert E. D’Souza and Sunil Manghani In understanding how the Kochi-Muziris Biennale was ‘made’, we need to consider how, in the background of the actual event, the Biennale team negotiated and managed the development and structuring of its external facing identity. This chapter captures one of the documentary projects the Biennale initiated as part of the wider use of communication and available media platforms to enable the Biennale to reach the diverse audiences that it wanted to engage with. Discussing these issues with Shwetal Patel, who was at the core of the Biennale’s development as one of the founding executive officers and as executive director, reveals a chronology of the Biennale’s rapid development that forms an account of some of the dialogues and decision making that went into making the Biennale a media reality. The rapid formation of a core team to manage the Biennale following the early meetings with the Kerala Ministry of Culture in June 2010 tells a story of the conditions within which the Biennale was formed. In August 2010 there followed the formation of the Kochi Biennale Foundation and the agreement of an executive team in December 2010. In February 2011 the imperative was to launch a Biennale presence with what was then a rudimentary website designed for awareness, and then later to communicate the core mission and objectives that were still then being defined. International communications agency, Brunswick Arts, that specializes in promoting and managing the reputation and interests of arts, cultural and charitable organizations was engaged to advise the Biennale team on approach and strategy at the start, but due to initial financial constraints the Biennale team was unable to continue with this professional input and relied on their own network of ad hoc support. Patel talks of the decision to use ‘compelling’ images the team had taken of the variety of sites and venues they had gained permission to use across the city of Kochi. The aim was to visualize the potential of the Biennale, with the website initially utilized as a holding space and a 115

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tool to establish the project while also promoting the idea of the project to bring stakeholders on board. As part of the wider emerging discussions around a communication strategy of the Biennale, Patel talks of the determination of the Biennale team to embed social media in the website as a more financially viable and more open form of communication compared with using traditional print or email that only reaches a closed group of individuals. In Patel’s recollections there is a sense of an emergent rather than a predetermined media strategy, which sought to create parallel platforms to communicate the Biennale’s developments. This can also be seen through the contingent use of social media and presence on Facebook and Twitter, which became used as a key tool to represent the Biennale’s side of the story during an early period of intense attack from individuals in the Indian art world and the press, as well as a general update and communication of Biennale-related information. The Biennale’s communication channels later develop on from the website, with catalogues, associated books and a more formal advertising campaign under the title of ‘It’s My Biennale’ (see Introduction; also Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2012). Two significant re-mediations of the Biennale are online and on film: Patel notes how the Kochi Biennale was the first event of its kind to collaborate with Google Art Project, enabling online, open-access virtual walk-throughs of the various venues of both editions of the Biennale, while Hattie Bowering’s film Art: Interrupted (2015) provides a candid documentary of the installation of the first Biennale. Between them these create an expanded archive of the Biennale and its wider activities. Patel recounts his first discussions with Bowering in March 2012, which led to the formal invitation to make the documentary. Bowering also loaned equipment, which Patel used contingently to document artists and visitors in Kochi, helping to create more vibrant content for the website. For the more formal documenting of the Biennale, Bowering and a small team of friends arrived into Kochi three weeks before the opening of the inaugural Kochi-Muziris Biennale, in 2012, staying for two months documenting the unfolding development of the event. They set to work to make a film with little time to plan, which became Art: Interrupted. The documentary, which offers an upbeat, ethnographic portrait of the Biennale in its making, went on to be screened at international film festivals and art fairs, as well as broadcast on television. It is an important legacy and document capturing a narrative of the making of the event. As producer and director of the film, Bowering had initially worried they would arrive too late to capture the real story but wanted to document as much

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as possible and to make sense of it in the final edit. Yet, it was immediately obvious there would be plenty to capture as preparations went down to the wire. The event was spread across a string of Kochi’s dilapidated colonial buildings that the Biennale had made so central to its promotion of the event. Upon arrival, the film crew found most of these sites were still in the throes of renovation with the artists and organizers all grappling with the situation – a situation that in turn became a defining image of the Biennale. Several spaces had no power and almost all of the art was yet to be installed. What ensued was an impressive collective effort, which at times led the film crew to feel they were witnessing a strange, complicated performance art piece. The ensuing documentary captured a Biennale that was plagued by problems, not least political and financial, with everyone working around the clock, and with internationally acclaimed artists mucking in alongside local volunteers (Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2012). Bowering captures the regeneration effects of the Biennale in action as freshly scrubbed buildings re-emerged, and with the art beginning to arrive, the expectations and curiosity palpably grow. From the moment the doors opened, visitor numbers were incredible, the film capturing a sense of the buzz on the streets of Kochi. In the first month it was estimated that 125,000 people visited the Biennale, on par with most blockbuster shows in New York or London. Bollywood superstars, nuns, bishops, politicians, school children bunking off class and local rickshaw drivers and their families all went to see the art. One of the rickshaw drivers, Moosa Bava, appears in the film. His local knowledge meant he quickly became a valuable aide for a host of artists, and Moosa himself inculcates a sense of knowledgeable collaboration and engagement with art. ‘I’m helping a lot of artists,’ he explains to camera, ‘Angelica, Ahmed Mater, Amanullah Mojadidi, Hussain, Ariel and Neto. You know, they want something they call me.’ A rendering of Art: Interrupted is provided in this chapter through a set of three parallel texts. Two textual lines appear in columns. One of these (in italics) offers units of description and supplementary commentary, while the other faithfully reproduces snatches of dialogue direct from the film itself. Alongside these two texts run a sequence of film stills. In the manner of the ‘sequence-image’ (Burgin, 2004), what emerges from these fragments and their alternating trajectories are various themes and tensions, such as the local and global, precision and imprecision, differing articulations of ‘work’, artworks and ownership, as well as a viewpoint upon both the production and consumption of the Biennale as event.

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. . .a large wooden fishing boat is Subodh Gupta: . . .can you believe it? I maneuvered through narrow streets in love it; the boat itself is so poetic, no? Fort Kochi. It is late at night. The artist Subodh Gupta is walking in front, keeping out of the way as the labourers negotiate their way carefully through the street. Interviewer: Why are you having to install it in the middle of the night? Subodh Gupta: I have no idea, but according to them, night-time there’s less traffic. And they can easily bring and even stop at the road for half an hour. Subodh Gupta had planned to install ten wooden fishing boats in the event’s main venue at Aspinwall House. But on arrival to Kochi it became clear getting one vessel in place was enough of a challenge. In fact, fearing physical installation would be impossible, he even considered a conceptual boat.

Interviewer: Have you ever installed in a situation like this before? Subodh Gupta: No, no I’m very excited about it. That’s why I love it; I love it, this Kochi Biennale.

Labourers: This is enough right?

Figures 5.1 – 5.51 [above and all subsequent images in the chapter] Film stills from Art: Interrupted. directed by Hattie Bowering, Wild Beast Media FZE, 2015. http://www.wildbeast.tv/art-interrupted/. By Kind permission of H. Bowering/Wild Beast Media FZE.

Atul Dodiya: Whether it’s Gwangju or Moscow or Venice or Sharjah, so many biennales are happening, but here I think it should be different. This will have a certain character; the way India has a character. And that would be the fun of the whole thing. All involved were found working round the clock. Often preparing their own sites, sourcing material and negotiating with local labour.

Kids can be heard chanting ‘Biennale! Biennale!’ A loudhailer blares out in the streets: ‘Arriving in Kochi, India’s first Biennale. Kochi-Muziris Biennale’.

Joseph Semah: Maybe this Biennale will change the attitude of biennales. Because it is in such a different scale, meaning you don’t see here art dealers crossing the streets with dogs and assistants and air condition. No, this is unique.

Joseph Semah: This is the wild; it’s the deconstruction of the biennales. So it already started, maybe here in Kochi.

Younes Bouadi: The site itself is not symmetrical. So whichever way you turn, it’s not fitting in perfectly. So it was quite a job to fit it in perfectly and keeping the measurements set and still making sure that everybody can walk around it. Everything in Kochi was noisy. It was impossible to find a quiet spot on site amidst the constant drilling of renovation work, shipping horns from the river, squawking crows and the constant blare of ‘Bye Bye Baby’ from an installation on a rickshaw by Italian artist Giuseppe Stampone.

Ariel Hassan: We basically have to work here, we have to completely take ourselves out of the comfort zone and just deal with whatever is here and try to deal with whatever accompanies. I guess this is a very healthy way of making art.

And not just noisy, the humidity was unbelievable at times. It felt like some sort of art labour camp. Interviewees would begin talking to camera in freshly washed shirts and end up drenched in sweat. It was hard to know how it would affect continuity in the edit. Anita Dube: . . .people will be climbing these ladders and putting their heads into this other space. I’ve got two distinct spaces. [. . .] It’s a very funny idea . . . seven people’s bodies, just suspended. Because they’re on ladders. But you know if you take away the ladder and you’re imagining it, you just see these bodies suspended you know?

KP Reji: I am here for the last two, three months. [. . .] I am lucky to see how it is changing, this space itself and not just my painting. The building itself. It is renovated and all. A lot of change happened in the space itself. It was a studio, now it is becoming a gallery. The majority of artists were making their work on site and relying on local manpower and expertise. There was a single ladder on site at the largest venue, Aspinwall House, which meant waiting one’s turn.

Bose Krishnamachari: When you look at the international biennales, it’s almost all the time taken care of by expertise. Here it’s almost like the local union people, you know coming and helping, coming and troubling [. . .] It can only happen in India, like this kind of situation. Without expertise, you can do a Biennale. Sheela Gowda: Apparently there were two sides within the same union. One who dealt with building material and the other who was dealing with other objects, I don’t know what exactly. And I think my work kind of was in the border between being building material and being an object of art, literally. They couldn’t decide which group was going to handle it. So then the police were called. And I told the policeman, that it’s not building material. It’s my artwork.

Subodh Gupta: I will bring the drink for you guys in the evening. Evening, when the boat is inside, then party from my side. Yes party here. The boat has to go inside, and that’s the concern. And. . . . they’re happily doing it. It’s not clear whether anyone had actually considered the logistics of getting Gupta’s boat through the door of the venue. It had to be cut in half and stitched back together inside. Gupta hovered about as a team of local boatmen helped out. At times, the whole crew could be found sitting in the half-finished installation, drinking the local rum. Ernesto Neto: I am the one who makes spice sculptures since 15 years. [. . .] I should give that back to the people here. I came here without an idea. [. . .] I couldn’t even . . . think about spice because I was so fascinated to be here. And then I found this shop of sarees. [. . .] I got one piece of fabric. And from this piece of fabric, I begin to design this piece. Ernesto Neto: Best tailors in Cochin. Very well done. Tailor: Everything is alright sir? Ernesto Neto: Looks very great. So I go to hotel, work and in two hours I’m back here okay? Thank you.

Robert Montgomery: I want my work to always look handmade. Just at that point where it doesn’t seem outsourced. So even if it’s something big like this, we make sure that we work on the piece all the way through with our hands and try to just keep connecting with that process. Montgomery’s installation on an exterior wall overlooking the port of Kochi was a single sentence as if a dialect of many languages: The strange new music of the crying songs of the people we left behind Robert Montgomery: I was sanding with a stone feeling very in touch with this really physical, traditional craftsman way of sanding wood. [. . .] Then the local carpenter arrived with the power saws [. . .] They were like ‘What are you doing it with a stone for? Crazy?’ And they hooked up the power saw and just did it in a fifth of the time. Robert Montgomery: The structures that the biennales are in are sometimes decayed colonial structures . . . That has a poignancy I think, physically to me. The piece will go on the top two meters. Between the roof and run the whole length, which is 44 meters from the beginning of this sign to the very end.

Robert Montgomery: I’ve made a completely ridiculous arithmetic mistake. I’m used to working in the metric system and here of course they work in the imperial system of measurement, which I guess comes from the Empire. . . . I made a mistake . . . so we’re short on wood.

mixing as your boat touches stone here

as my new bones touch your bones.

The arrival of the art world’s VIPs felt premature and surreal. Two days before the opening they were teetering over piles of rubble at Aspinwall House in Comme Des Garçons outfits and designer heels. They came to view the last-minute drama. One artist whispered that he felt like an animal in the zoo.

Subodh Gupta: It’s like a workshop biennale. Like look, even I broke that window up there; little bit of roof is gone too, no? There’s nobody telling you off. Okay, break that as long as you’re making you’re work. And where will you get that freedom, tell me. Which biennale will give you that freedom?

One VIP announced he had come to help but looked perplexed when asked if he knew how to wire a plug.

Interviewer: So who’s on the bill?

Local politics had a habit of interfering. The Iranian-born artist Hossein Valamanesh found his work delayed at customs. The light bulbs needed for his installation were listed as ‘globes’ on the paperwork. The local customs officers demanded proof that India’s border with Pakistan had been properly demarcated before releasing them.

Rob Philips: . . .the work hasn’t arrived. It was due in a shipment last night. Because it didn’t get here, we don’t have anything to show for the opening. So we’re closing off the space in order to allow us to work behind here when the work arrives.

Sanjeev Madhav: M.I.A. This is definitely in terms of international stars the biggest star to perform on stage in Cochin. You know we’ve had a lot of other larger acts in Bangalore and Delhi and so on. But no one’s come this far down south before.

Angela Mesiti: We’re working these spaces that are full of history, but at the same time, they’re just shells now. [. . .] I like the fact that there’s a bit of sense of discovery in these buildings. You’re never sure if there’s something down that corridor . . . so you just go and see. I like that viewers will sort of stumble across the works. And it’s not so prescribed.

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Rasha Bhushan: . . .you find some plywood and whatever, and you don’t know whether it’s preparation for the work or the work itself. You don’t know what it is. People are using found objects. It could be an artwork, it could be an installation, and it could be a sitespecific installation. Or it could be an imminent installation. The Biennale is suffused with that. [. . .] we see enough slick finished exhibitions all over the world you know. I like the feeling that I’m going to discover something where I don’t expect to find it.

References Art: Interrupted (2015) Directed by Hattie Bowering [Film]. Dubai, UAE: Wild Beast Media FZE. Burgin, V. (2004) The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion Books. Kochi Biennale Foundation (2012) Against All Odds. Kottayam: DC Books.

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6 CURATION AS DIALOGUE Jitish Kallat in conversation Jitish Kallat, Robert E. D’Souza and Sunil Manghani Jitish Kallat is an internationally recognized contemporary artist, who lives and works in Mumbai, India. As with both Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, who co-founded and curated the first Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kallat studied painting at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Mumbai (graduating in 1996). His works take form in a wide variety of media including painting, sculptural installations, video and photography. Kallat’s visual language is a wide-ranging one, drawing upon numerous sources, which includes various artistic traditions and popular culture, the urban environment, the astronomical chart and the historical document. Kallat has also produced large solo exhibitions in response to museum collections; these include ‘Field Notes (Tomorrow was here yesterday)’ (2011) at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, and ‘Circa’ (2012) at the Ian Potter Museum in Melbourne. In both cases, the exhibitions have been ‘in conversation’ with the museums and their collections, responding to them as both infrastructure and archives of memory, signs and stimulus. In ‘Public Notice 3’, a year-long exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (2010–2011), words spoken on 11th September 1893 at the First World Parliament of Religions were inscribed using LED lights onto the steps of the museum’s Grand Staircase. The installation marked the very location where the words were spoken more than 100 years ago, with the auditorium of the World Parliament having being located in the space where the staircase stands today. The significance of the date of 11 September is of course also highly pertinent, with the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon having taken place on that date 108 years later. In ‘Epilogue’ (2011), Jitish Kallat retraces his father’s life through all the moons seen from the day he was born in 1936 to his death in 1998. Measuring this lifespan with approximately 22,000 moons, each is replaced with a progressively eaten roti, the image of a waxing or waning meal. In recognizing how the historical and the astral frequently recurs in his work, it is possible to see links with how Kallat went on to approach

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the curation of the second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, held in Fort Kochi in 2014. The first Kochi Biennale in 2012 was notable for site-specific works and the artist community that practically put the event together in situ. The second iteration, under the curatorship of Kallat, was more conceptual – and on a large scale. Taking the title of ‘Whorled Explorations’, the Biennale took its point of departure from two chronologically overlapping, though seemingly unrelated histories within Kerala. First Kallat evokes the maritime history of Kochi during the fifteenth century, being the period of the ‘Age of Discovery’; the early beginnings of globalization. This he couples with the history of the Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics that made great advances in trigonometry and calculus during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. These evocations were not imprinted from the start, but arose through Kallat’s engagement with the project and through many dialogues and correspondence with the eventual participating artists. Through an organic and deliberative process, Kallat orchestrated a complex intersection of sites, citations and sightlines, which strikingly he plotted as a chronological pathway through each of the Biennale venues. While all of the artworks were separately numbered through the sequence, the viewing experience was complex and rich. As Kallat describes at the close of his curatorial note: In this synoptic view, much is unsaid and left to be experienced through an unfolding of sensory and conceptual propositions. ‘Whorled Explorations’ plays with the phonetic kinship between world and whorled. Like typographical errors sometimes do, it introduces into the image of the world the motif of the vortex, a pointer to life-forces, a recurrent images in the growth of plants, our thumb-print, the spin in the oceans and galaxies. . . but equally commemorates the scribble as a form of churning and a mark of erasure, the concealment of an error or change of mind, a recurrent gesture in the creative process. (Jitish Kallat, ‘Whorled Explorations’, curatorial note) In July 2015, Robert E. D’Souza and Sunil Manghani went to visit Kallat at his studio in Mumbai. With the Biennale having come to a close several months before, the idea was to reflect upon and talk freely about the process of its curation. What follows is a transcript of what proved to be a lengthy and detailed conversation (and which is supplemented with thought-sketches from Kallat’s notebooks kept during the time developing the Biennale). What is notable in the conversation is that despite the

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event being over, and despite sitting many miles away in Mumbai, the conversation persists in talking of the Biennale as if present – the three interlocutors sharing a re-living of the spaces and connections prompted by the exhibited works.

Figure 6.1 From first page of the first notebook of Jitish Kallat in preparation for the Biennale, dated midnight, 16 October 2013. Courtesy of Jitish Kallat.

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CURATION AS DIALOGUE SUNIL MANGHANI : We could start with some ideas about how you define

curatorial work. . . ROBERT E. D’SOUZA : . . . and about how you have been informed by your

own experience of having been curated; what you have brought from the other side as it were. . . JITISH KALLAT: Just last week I was part of the Experimenter Curators’ Hub in Calcutta. The day before I was to speak I was gathering my thoughts, reflecting back on the way the process began for me. One feeling I have, which is quite central I think to curating, is about harnessing the potential of rearrangement, as a way to get to an insight. How do you move something in the world so that its re-positioning creates new meaning? I was also thinking about how we construct experience. Even if we feel we are experiencing something we know that we are always bound by the perceptual limits of our experience system. We can only see a small portion of our visual field, the rest of it is a relational re-arrangement of fuzzy parameters to make things ‘visible’. Or we pick and choose sounds because we can only grasp so much. So, it got me thinking in that moment if every experience is ‘bespoke’ and rearranged could we then say that we are perennially ‘curating’ our moment-to-moment experience? Here, I am intentionally fuzzing an already mis-appropriated term as in recent years it has been loosely applied to all kinds of processes. At the same time it is also getting more and more clarified through its presence in academia and the discipline of curating is getting more and more defined as an activity and profession. But I am just fuzzing it for my own serpentine contemplation. If every experience is self-curated, then drawing a parallel between the Duchampian notion of ‘every object is a work of art’ or the Beuysian idea of ‘every person is an artist’ can be extended to the idea that everyone is a curator and every experience is a curated one. This helps me bring both the artistic activity and curatorial endeavour under the same canopy of investigation. I felt I had to make a choice at the time of committing to curate the Kochi Biennale. By committing to curate I would in some ways be exiting the space of the studio and swapping the interrogative tools that I work with, that I exist with. And the studio not as a place located in a certain site, but the studio as a state of mind. So you can actually assemble the studio in a garden if you like; you can assemble the studio in an airplane. But it is a state of mind that you can carry so that your perennial interrogations as a human being can converge with the site of the studio as a tool to make

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something. And to me the question mark was to see if I could transition my long-standing interrogations and idiosyncrasies into a domain which is defined as curating and at a personal level still continue with a way of engineering answers and questions as an infinite feedback loop. REDS : One of the difficulties I can see is that you can have this grand plan, this conceptual approach. How do you then deal with the reality of an audience which comes with quite a fixed expectation of art and the reception of art? JK: Unlike many biennales in the world, Kochi has probably the most divergent audience demographic, at least as I can immediately think of. What might appear to be an untutored audience (i.e. not trained in a certain ‘expert’ way, summoning art-history and its associated viewing literacy) is in fact an audience committed to giving time; an audience that has seen very little art, but is extremely adept with other forms of knowledge; an audience that is extremely literate, and have archives of historical information to call upon in the presence of an artwork. And then there is the international art audience . One can’t set out to reach all of the audience types, or any of the audience types for that matter, except maybe retreat into the space from where one can propel the Biennale to self-organize and attain a degree of legibility and purpose for a wide demography. It is easier said than done and I didn’t know if it was going to happen. . . one could only try and create alignments from where meaningful associations could self-emerge. REDS : Can you give us an example of where you think that happened or was successful? What interests me is that some of the things you are talking about are realized in your head, so being of your expectations or what you’d like to try to achieve. And then in reality you’re going to make a separate measure that is more instinctual about how you feel or your observations. We saw you often about the various venues. So, were there any clues to you or things that you noticed that were unexpected in the way people responded or the reception of the work? JK : For me, the first step was really to look at how I might begin at all. How do I commence? The starting point really happened to be something I often like to do anywhere in the world, which is to be outdoor during early hours. Kochi is a great place to do that. In the early hours of the morning one could revisit a moment five hundred years ago. You could sit under a five hundred year old roof in the Church of St Francis, or be on a shoreline that would have had ships arrive and disappear in the same way that they do on these shores today. Or one could smell spices on Mattancherry streets as they have for hundreds of years. My first steps were to cluster this bouquet

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of experiential intuitions and transform what I was thinking into a piece of correspondence. And the piece of correspondence, which is nothing more than an email, was the first carrier of my inaugural intuitions that were written to artist colleagues; shared not in the form of a result-orientated curatorial note, but essentially sharing a cluster of prompts, as a way to hopefully infect an intuition and in turn to be open to be infected by the returning intuitions from colleagues. And so, some of what finally appeared in the curatorial note was already written in the first forty-five days of my taking over when the first fifteen letters went out. So some six weeks into the curatorial process came the two broad co-ordinates. One was the rethinking of the world today by revisiting the embryonic world enshrined in what is often referred to as the Age of Discovery, when someone on one side of the planet begins to navigate the globe to arrive at another point on the planet – a tale of grit, greed and human ingenuity. A collaboration between astronomers, cartographers, cosmographers, mathematicians, seamen and soldiers; a tale of seeking spices and riches that heralded an age of exchange and conquest animating the early processes of globalization. This became one resourceful prompt to hopefully find a cluster of signs. The other thought that went out, without essentially mentioning the Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics in the letters I wrote to artists was to reflect on this present moment while either writing or the reading that email or being seated in the room like we are right now, we know planet earth is hurtling at a hundred thousand kilometers per hour in directions we don’t know where. . . And I wanted to see if these two navigations, one a terrestrial narrative within which history unfolds and our futures unfold (an axis of time), the other a distant galactic glimpse of this present moment (through an axis of space) reflecting on the navigation of our planet itself, could create two very divergent optics through which we can find insight into this present moment, both spatially and temporally. So, I think that became for me a kind of ‘coordinate system’, if I may call it that, through which I started forming the optics. So whether I was meeting an artist colleague in a studio, or I was doing a curatorial talk at the Palais de Tokyo or MOMA, the coordinates for the conversation would remain the same. They served as exacting tools on a map, as lenses to sharpen a vision. SM : There has been a lot said about the Kochi Biennale as being artist-led. On the one hand you described the idea that everything can be art and we are all curators, there’s a kind of neurological sense in which we have to curate something. And yet, there is also the sense here that your instinct to curate the Biennale, which is a big undertaking, is still very much as an artist.

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And the way you are describing this is as an artist with an ability – you are offering those prompts you describe – as a way to make; whereas perhaps a curator would be offering prompts as a way to frame. That might be too binary a way of putting it. JK : I have always shied away from the claim that the artist-led project would be substantially different from a curator-led one. I wasn’t willing to commit to that separation and if you see my interviews, you’ll notice that I’ve always shied away from making that assumption. I mean, I wouldn’t know how else one begins any kind of cerebral or intellectual or artistic process, but to in fact firstly acknowledge that frames are not something that we superimpose like carpentry, like woodwork. Frames are what emerge from the flux of the materials one might be playing with. That we can actually have this assumption, that we have taken our existing knowledge forms to grid the content that emerges, seems like a form of entrapment to me. I’d rather prefer receding and watching the emergent patterns and structures because within and between everything is a pattern waiting to be discerned. Even the most nebulous cloud is a pattern, it has its own frame, an ever-changing and ductile frame. And to watch the cloud is to also observe acknowledging its ‘supple frameness’ rather than sending woodwork to the sky [laughs]. So, I would trust that is what curators would do too. REDS : The Biennale is unusual in the sense that it doesn’t occupy a space in the way most biennales would, which would have a very clear centrifuge in terms of the space. It was really dissipated. Now, for me this is quite an important point about the possibility of the Biennale in terms of curating, because, in a way you are talking about the frame, but this breaks the framing of the Biennale as a kind of affected space. And there is this idea, for me, of heightened navigation, even different people from the city, that they are having to re-look at what they know or are familiar with – again, just by the nature of the Biennale existing, in this space, because it is not really clear what is art necessarily. Did you feel that you were able to use the spaces in this way? JK : I always hoped and waited for as much to self-organize, and to be an alert reader of patterns, rather than a writer of patterns. Of course when I wrote the curatorial note a fortnight before the Biennale opened I was clerically recording the patterns and proposing a pattern of viewing and navigation. One of the things that I was regimented about, in some ways, was from my end to offer, as a preferred rule of the game, a pathway. So the projects were numbered very specifically. In fact there were some strategic walls built to engineer a certain navigation between buildings and between spaces. Most

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people would not have recognized, at some point in Aspinwall House you had to turn around only because a wall is planted and you have to go to the first floor, to keep the sensorial and thematic flow in a certain order. After moving through all the works on the first floor one would descend back to the ground floor on the other side of the wall, to see the next project. REDS: It is interesting, because I think it feels like – or maybe this is an assumption – there is a ‘master plan’, and there is a kind of mathematics to this that harks back to the very first piece of work. JK: There was indeed a subtle mathematics to the navigation across sites so that it might all add up in some way. The very first piece, Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten, was a frontispiece, setting the stage for several interrelated inquiries to unfold. I like the idea of the Biennale taking shape in the form of afterthoughts by the stringing together of potent leitmotifs. Whether it’s the recurrence of a certain activity such as the hoisting of a scaffold that becomes a clock, hoisted in real time in Mark Formanek’s ‘Standard Time’; or another scaffold that takes an hour to hoist, by which time several ships have gone through its Mondrian-like grid – but when a visitor finally gets on top of the scaffold (the piece called ‘Construction Site’ [Mark Wallinger]), they are in exactly the same position that Janine Antoni was, on walking on top of a tightrope in her home in the Bahamas, which is the work that just proceeds the Mark Formanek within the viewing sequence. So, Antoni and Formanek seen in the first venue could morph in memory to reincarnate in the sixth venue with Wallinger’s ‘Construction Site’. Or the experience of seeing a narrative of colonization and decolonization and nations through a postal commemorative stamp in Kader Attia (see Chapter 4), which could reincarnate through another narration of the nation through the figure of Kazi Nuzrul Islam in the work of Naeem Mohaiemen in Durbar Hall. Or the viewing of Julian Charrière’s globes where erasure as a gesture administered on each globe from different points in time across the century begins with the erasure of ten volumes of Indian history through Annie Lai Kuen Wan’s bleached porcelain books; or the way the very next project is the partial erasure of dark and dense narrations in the work of Daniel Boyd. And, Sissel Tolaas’ ballast stones being offloaded by the Dutch East India Company in Kochi, invoking human sweat through a chemical application, is seen alongside Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s narrations of a governor of the Dutch West India Company from Brazil from that same moment in history. So, there were many convergences. I was very pleased that people experienced those relationships despite the sprawling scale of the project across all the venues.

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Figure 6.2 Mark Formaneck, Standard Time (2007). Photograph: Dheeraj Thakur. Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation.

SM : Yes, there was something like 65 new works? When were you able to make

all these connections? The way you describe the prompts and the dialogues, there is all that flux, and as you say the frames emerge from the flux, but these people are in different parts of the world, some pieces are made, not made, partially made. When were you able to really start to make connections? JK: As connections would begin to emerge I would place-hold the projects across the various venues and the places always changed. So, the sites were all pinned up and a simple colour system, using multi-coloured Post-Its would reveal to me the degrees of clarity that would emerge geographically as portions of the plan got clarified. And there was also in my own cell phone a provisional, ever-changing PDF document, which was also shared with the core curatorial team. And I could just go like this [scrolls rapidly down the document on the phone screen with fingers]. And something within me would tell me then if the energy and the flow was right. SM : Like a roulette wheel! JK : Yes. . . and it scrolls very fast on an iPhone [laughs], you can go through half of Aspinwall House, a 6 acre venue in 40 or 30 seconds and it would just say if the Biennale was developing as a bio-field of signs. . .

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Figure 6.3 Janine Antoni, Touch (2002). Photograph: Dheeraj Thakur. Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation.

REDS : In a way it is replicating the sort of contingency you spoke of, you know

these chance connections. . . JK : . . .It was like letting chance settle before one begins to mine it for con-

nections and constellations of convergences [looking at the open PDF on the iPhone]. You would arrive at Marie Velardi’s timeline of this century and beyond (as read from last century and before), after having seen David Horvitz’s sunrise and sunset appearing on both sides of your eye on two iPhones, to see two sides of a timeline; to then off-load that timeline in the charcoal drawings of Aji VN, done with an open imagination. You would read his drawings as either a completely apocalyptic view of a post-human world, or a paradise before our species arrived, each as a complete extended timeline in one dry charcoal work. So, in a way it was about letting one artwork open a gateway to another, from a completely different universe of art-making. SM : It is an incredible endeavour to sustain that thread in any context, but not least in the Kochi Biennale, where you are not even sure if some buildings or rooms are going to be functional or not. . .

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Figure 6.4 Mark Wallinger, Construction Site (2011). Photograph: Dheeraj Thakur. Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation.

REDS : . . .or even whether the people will make the connection. JK : Absolutely. It wasn’t until 4pm on 12/12/14 a few hours after the opening

that we began to get really gratifying feedback. SM : In a way, it didn’t matter to you whether or not people made those con-

nections – they could make their own readings. But it mattered to you as a certain integrity of making? JK : No, I would sound very sage-like if I said that it didn’t matter. It did matter. The Biennale has a civic scale and the potential to subtly infiltrate the discourse within a larger community and for that this legibility of potent provocations were important. Subliminally there was also this desire that the aftereffect of this second edition would stabilize the Biennale and cement its future to an extent. REDS : Can you speak a bit about other ideas such as age, gender etc. that come into play while making choices. JK : I didn’t work too hard on that. Some months into the process Shyam Patel, who was the production manager, who is an engineer by training, created a file that he called ‘artist analytics’. His purpose was to serve the wide mix of people in the team, so they can identify gender, age and nationality of participating artists. This colour coded chart looked suitably balanced

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and one didn’t have to tamper with it much to fit any norm. Speaking of age, K.G. Subramanyan and Akbar Padamsee are almost ninety and Yoko Ono is in her early eighties, while Ho Rui An, Andrew Ananda Voogel and Unnikrishnan, were all recent graduates that year, and coming from different parts of the world. REDS : You’re talking about the artists, which I’d like to go back to, because in a way we haven’t really touched on, or you haven’t talked much about the negotiation of the curatorial process with the artists on site. So, one thing is to have your curatorial vision about their work, another thing is to negotiate with the artists, because they’ve also got their own vision. . . JK : Yes, absolutely. And every gesture was communicated. For instance, Pors and Rao’s work was exhibited in a space that on first inspection was in total disarray. But both Shyam Patel and I strongly felt this space was most suited for their work if we could simply make it navigable. And so, what I did, I shot a video walking through the space with a running commentary on how I envisaged it and sent it to them. As a result, I was thrilled they shared the same view.

Figure 6.5 Sketch from Kallat’s notebook regarding installation of Pors and Rao’s work. Courtesy of Jitish Kallat.

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Figure 6.6 Pors and Rao, Teddy Universe (2009–11). Photograph: Dheeraj Thakur. Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation.

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Figure 6.7 Navin Thomas, Long Live the New Flesh (2014). Photograph: Dheeraj Thakur. Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation. REDS: I kind of like the way you’ve used the immediacy of the technology to

communicate these things, because I think the immediacy is again about this honesty. If someone spends a lot of time constructing an email you feel a bit suspicious, you try to unpick it (‘what are they trying to do here with me?’), but by just talking over things, it’s all there in the tone and what you are doing. You’re not scripting it. . . JK : . . .that’s right. REDS : So, there’s an honesty in that. And I can understand how the response to that might be more compelling. JK : With RAQs for instance: I told Shuddha, Monica and Jeebesh, that they might choose and enlist spaces that seemed appropriate but as a parting thought I said ‘there are these two homes that I have seen. . . I somehow feel that they will work really well – so just think about it.’ I was thrilled that it was exactly what they picked. There was only one case where Navin Thomas, two or three days before the opening, felt that the space for his work could have been doubled. The work is primarily a sound-piece, the sound of an arrow as it is shot across the room, between two targets standing in the space. We had no exact scaled drawings from him. Our team sent a sketch that was okayed by him

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based on the extent of knowledge we had of the work. There was little I could do at that stage as I couldn’t reduce the space around Sarnath Banerjee’s drawings. But I also felt strongly that his space needn’t have been any bigger and if made any bigger the sonic resonance of the sound piece would be lost. But I knew Navin was dissatisfied. . . you know. . . So, I couldn’t say much. I said: ‘to me, it feels like any more space between the targets would cause sound spill and you would lose this sense of assault’. My intention of building a wall in the space was so the door was on the opposite side, so you had to go through the line of the sound. . . REDS : . . .to force the encounter. . . JK : . . .and the next day after some deliberation he hugged me reassuringly and said ‘it works’ [laughs] . . .man of few words! I was relieved too as I wanted every colleague to be satisfied with the manner in which their work was presented but also the manner in which they unfolded within the narrative of the Biennale. REDS : Did you find yourself questioning yourself? Your artistic head questioning the curator self? JK : You know, each colleague had to get his or her best space. And it had to be scaled as far as possible correctly to that work. I was also happy when one could pull and push certain relationships in works, like the absolute expanded scale of the N S Harsha painting contrasted with the diminutive postcard of Yoko Ono. SM : It is interesting about scale, because in the way you are saying about flipping through the PDF and you are able to see the diversity and so forth. How did you manage questions of scale because it really ranges a lot, from the miniscule to the large. How do you make yourself encounter that sense of scale when again you are working at a distance with people? JK : It has to do with the trust and the willingness of artist colleagues to let their works be animated by contrasting juxtapositions. When we were thinking about Tara Kelton’s beautiful work, ‘The Creation of Adam’ (wherein a Nokia phone re-starts again and again), we placed Shyam’s own Nokia phone in the space and let it play to see the sonic effect of the piece on all other works that would share the space. Same can be said about David Horvitz’s work with the iPhones or Biju Jose’s ‘Swistik’ knife placed away in a treasury. SM : You’ve talked about spending a lot of time in Kochi, wandering around the spaces with these potentials in mind. . . JK : Yeah, long hours spent on site, amongst snakes and reptiles [laughter]. . .

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Figure 6.8 Sketch from Kallat’s notebook regarding installation of Yoko Ono’s work.

KALLAT, D’SOUZA AND MANGHANI REDS : And within that, how many of the more collaborative situations did you

have, because obviously there were artists who were there over a period of time so you’ve actually got a chance to have a conversation as the work is being formed. . . JK : There were several. . . such as, Sumakshi Singh, who in fact created her largest illusion work at the Biennale. I always knew that she could hold that large space together, although there were some questions from her if she should use half the space or produce the illusion in the studio and then play the video of the illusion. But it is good to try and see if one can propel an artist colleague to do what can be done with the space. Or there were moments with Sahej Rahal, who is very young and it is possibly his first biennale. He had the biggest and most complex space in the whole Biennale to unload his ideas. There was lots of memorable dialogue with him. REDS : That’s another aspect of the curation: you are also considering the artist in terms of their career or their trajectory. You’re not just making a consideration about the artwork, you’re starting to think about something wider than that. JK : Those were actually afterthoughts I must say. I mean, having reached a moment within the curatorial process, let’s say in July or August, when the ideas and signs that make up the exhibition began to develop an interrelatedness, I began to think of the eco-systematic dimension of how a biennale such as the Kochi Biennale can serve an individual artist or the art-scene. I would not have invited somebody because they were young or old at all. But it was necessary to take a chance and trust one’s instinct while inviting Unnikrishnan who was just out of art school or to offer Sahej one of the central spaces in the exhibition. Unnikrishnan’s work at his graduation exhibition was a hand-painted brick wall built in the middle of the gallery space as if an image-memoir was interwoven with raw masonry. This was placed at the CSI Bungalow, which was one of the venues of the Biennale, where most of the works, works by Bijoy Jain, Mark Wallinger, and Hamra Abbas reflected on the idea of architecture and how it might point to ideas of time, the horizon. Unnikrishnan’s work was well immersed in that space. REDS : One thing that is very particular about India and the Biennale is the amazing amount of politics around everything. Did you feel as a curator you were able to work within that? There is a politics of inclusion, I think. One thing that struck me about the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is that it is not really about Kochi. You’ve kind of got the nation, the weight of the nation

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Figure 6.9 Sketch from Kallat’s notebook regarding installation of Unnikrishnan’s work.

and the expectation in a way; in some ways, because people are considering this externally as an Indian Biennale, so it is representing India. . . JK : One can expand it to say South Asia, but I didn’t want to be distracted by expectations of how the Biennale would be received. All along I felt that it was very important that I communicate my working ideas, the emergent coordinates and themes in real time each time I was invited to talk about the Biennale at institutions around the world; right from my first talk at

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the Asia Art Archive, which was barely 45 days after I donned the role in January 2014, to my two hour-long, closed-door conversations with the C-MAP curatorial group at MOMA sometime in October 2014. Each of these talk were opportunities to self-reflect and share the contours of the project to an audience as an invitation to come see the Biennale. REDS : You are kind of describing that you’ve learnt to be a curator. Is that fair, in some ways? JK : I had to work from a space of commitment to the art ecosystem that I am borne out of. REDS : In a way for me, this chapter is also a chance – and I’m not sure how that manifests for you – for this reflection. Life carries on, so where do you reflect, where are the points of reflection? JK : Through the Biennale, there are so many dialogues, and public gatherings, and each time, one was speaking it was an opportunity to reflect in real time, like we are doing now. While we’re seated together right now it is also really a reflection, or the essay that I’m writing for the review catalogue which is essentially not like a big, heavy essay, it is really a series of notations, going back and forth; passages that don’t necessarily connect; islands without bridges; an archipelago of thoughts [laughter] REDS : There are a lot of constellations and archipelagos. Things that are in a structure, but they are disconnected in some way, but there is an implicit connection between them. . . JK : You know talking of reflections, this came up earlier from one of Sunil’s remarks, about a dimension of politics that is so specific to Kerala and Kochi, where there is this heightened awareness of equity and inequity, that leads to the placard and the banner being the most omnipresent image in the public domain. And so, politics is writ large. . .it is also amplified through messages on moving autorickshaws and ambassador cars. And so to me, it became very important – within ‘Whorled Explorations’ – to shift from the confrontational motif of the placard to a site of self-reflection. Self-reflection is fundamentally a political act as the mess in our daily living is actually politics without reflection. And if I have to think of an agitprop in the Biennale I’d pick Peter Rösel’s work ’458.42 m/s’ (2014). Demonstrating the velocity of earth’s rotation at Kochi, this installation represents optically the speed at which the earth’s surface moves through space as it rotates on its axis, a velocity incomprehensible below our feet. To be confronted by how little we can actually physically perceive is a good way to examine all our belief systems. I wanted to let these ideas infiltrate and in a way ‘up-regulate’ civic discourse.

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CURATION AS DIALOGUE SM : You use the term ‘up-regulate’, can you develop that? JK : Genes were thought of as un-transformable things, but as epigenetics tells

us that we can ‘up-regulate’ our genes through the way we might conduct ourselves and the environments we make, so we might consider ways of subtly attending to societal conflicts that otherwise seem intractable. Within the Biennale I was interested in the idea of subtly seeding transformative inquiries in the public domain rather than hoist placards, so that they don’t confront the problem at the level of the problem; like the much used oxymoron, ‘War on Terror’, which is just terror on terror. A biennale with an audience of half a million people has the potential to seed ideas in civic discourse. But what are the key words, what are the key sensations, afterimages and takeaways that the audience carries back from a project such as this? What do you populate the Biennale with, so that it doesn’t simply mirror what is written on the street-wall, but it casts another dimension of inquiry through the body and through sensations that galvanizes a new vision to read the banner that’s on the street. SM : There is a nice play there on the idea of the ‘body politic’. In fact earlier when we spoke, you brought up a point about atoms, about how we are all engaging in the same set of atoms as we breathe in, and it is a compelling idea that when you go into a space like the Biennale you are sort of accelerating that sense of an ‘aesthetic’. . . JK : This came up when Matt Packer, who runs the space in Londonderry, spoke at the Experimenter Curators’ Hub about Derry being a riot prone area. And while congratulating him about his programme that focuses on ecology as a mode to address a polarized society through a ‘third way’, I remarked that if we can truly internalize the thought that when we take in a litre of air through our breath, which is roughly 10 to the power of 22 atoms, that, purely through the numbers atoms of air around, we would have shared our breaths many times over with a reptile in Africa, the cat in my studio backyard, the terror agent recently executed through capital punishment here in India and president of the United States, because these atoms are the same atoms circling our collective, rotating abode. If we are all temporary residents in each other’s bodies, who are we killing when we kill another? SM : And also, earlier on, that led us to ideas again about the blurring of artist and curator. I said something about how all the artists became like extra eyes and limbs for you, producing work in part because of the dialogue you had. . . and I think you used the phrase of a ‘chorus of artists’ – so there are all these individual artists and then there comes a chorus from that. . .

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KALLAT, D’SOUZA AND MANGHANI JK : [laughs] I would think that I was an extra limb to the artist colleagues I col-

laborated with, in some ways serving on the ground to best actualize their vision in this space. The early days of my curatorial role was the time for me to circulate prompts and intuitions, and to await and to receive back their intuitions as we went along; to carry on the dialogue back-and-forth until these conversations became tangible objects and experiences within the architecture and the spatial grammar of the Biennale site. SM : I wonder if that’s a point at which we can get to the ‘object’. You spoke about frames emerging from the flux. I was quite surprised by a propensity of framing on site. Unlike the first edition, there appeared in your curation of the Biennale a deliberate shift away from a more emergent set of spaces and site-specificity; towards a greater sense of a frame and attention to the object. Perhaps you can add something about the relationship between the first and second editions. The shift seems purposeful, but I don’t know whether it is. . . JK : It is. . . I would not actually propose a very firm pathway, itinerary of viewing if I wasn’t committed to a certain unfolding of meaning and experience. In fact the joke amongst the team was that I was paranoid that people would enter the Biennale the wrong way. It was a serious concern for me that it followed a certain order and the frontispiece was meant to be the frontispiece. There is a re-alignment within one’s body as one reflects on the time and space through the viewing of ‘Powers of Ten’. It was almost an extension to my curatorial note that recurs and resonates throughout the Biennale. For instance when one is at Chen Chieh-jen’s work, where you actually see a bird’s eye view of a leper colony on one wall, on the opposite wall the image is a picture of the Hansen’s disease from under the skin. And so in a work that is a powerful narrative of a displaced neighbourhood, the reconfiguration of space from ‘Powers of Ten’ activates another dimension of reading. These reflections of our terrestrial existence by taking a glimpse back from elsewhere reincarnated at several points during the course of the Biennale. I was happy that many of the projects I wanted to see realized could be actualized. Things could have fallen through, in which case one would have to find other ways to invoke these ideas. I mean you do have citations and textual utterances to compensate for something that is lost in sightline. You have a few curatorial tools at your disposal when you write, or when you conceive the directions of the wall texts. But all along I could see chance playing a parallel role in an interesting way. For instance, I placed Yoko Ono’s postcards asking us to ‘listen to the sound of the earth turning’ in relationship to N S Harsha’s

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Figure 6.10 View of Yoko Ono, EARTH PIECE: Listen to the Sound of the Earth Turning (1963/1999), and NS Harsha, Punarapi Jananam Punarapi Maranam (2013). Photograph: Aby P. Robin. Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation.

panoramic view of the Universe presented as an infinite loop. By then I also knew that hereafter you’ll step into a room where you’ll find the churning ocean of Anish Kapoor’s ‘Descension’. Anish had chosen this room overlooking the horizon. He had plotted the dimensions based on the space and also the four standing pillars that hoisted the room. Anish had beautifully altered the experience. And without essentially measuring up any of that, simply by virtue of chance, in conversation with the rest of the team standing on the site, I remember going around with a stick and saying ‘would this be the right size for the Yoko Ono plinth?’. There were numerous suggestions and we drew a circle. By coincidence Yoko Ono’s plinth and ‘Descension’ ended up being the same dimensions; one calling attention to the earth’s turning another of oceanic churning! I didn’t know how loud Anish’s ‘Descension’ would be, but intuitively I hoped that the thought ‘Listen to the sound of the Earth Turning’ from Yoko Ono’s postcard provocation would be a good thought to carry while entering ‘Descension’. So you can only let your intuitions take you so far and then you wait for an epiphany after the occasion in a way and say ‘Oh, this is how it was meant to be!’ – in a good way!

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KALLAT, D’SOUZA AND MANGHANI REDS : As we’ve mentioned, it felt there was more focus on the artwork,

because, even in a simplistic way, there was more framed artwork. So, there seemed an idea of focusing in, into the artwork, which is a very different experience in some ways to the first edition of the Biennale, where you are in a world maybe, and you weren’t quite sure necessarily where anything finished or started. So it is a very different experience. JK : There was ‘framing’ in the sense of the framed artwork, through drawingbased, artisanal practices at one level. . . REDS : Yes, there’s a lot of drawing actually. . . JK: Drawing, painting, there was that kind of gesture making, where the hand was an active agent in the creation of experience and meaning. But the other framing tool is really the sightline. And the sightline is not something you really see standing in one place, across the room. It is a sightline that is also the line that travels in your brain from what you’ve seen. The afterimage is part of the sightline. For instance David Horvitz’s ‘The Distance of a Day’ where the videos playing on iPhones act as windows to simultaneously sunrise and sunset unfolding in the present at different points on our rotating planet, is seen in conjunction with Marie Velardi’s ‘Future Perfect’, a compelling meditation on time. Then, on past Aji V N’s landscapes from earth’s primordial past or apocalyptic future one sees the appearing and disappearing bubble sculptures of Susanta Mandal, to reach Adrian Paci’s ‘The Column’ where maritime and manufacture time converges. Adjacent to this space, the Aspinwall warehouse had these three tiny rooms that served as thought-stations where one could meditate on the vlogger Michael Stevens’ ‘Vsauce’ videos. examining ideas such as ‘what will we miss?’, seeing beyond our lifetimes, going past thousands and millions of years. Questions such as ‘what if the earth stopped turning?’ are inquiries that set the stage for works such as Christian Waldvogel’s ‘The Earth Turns without Me’ (2010), a playful and thought provoking chronicle of his quest to briefly step away from the planet’s relentless rotation. All of these ideas intertwined in a loop, stacking up overlapping inquiries and provocations. SM : In a way it is incredibly demanding, isn’t it. . . on the viewer? Not least because of the scale, there are so many works. You use the phrase ‘stacking up’. It needs sustained engagement. JK : I was hoping that the audience or colleagues would commit to this pathway because the most playful of works were asking questions that relate to the most severe and serious of works. For instance Adrian Paci’s video ‘The Column’, which is a moving meditation on time, the acceleration of our world,

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of labour etc., finds a doppelganger in Tara Kelton’s ‘Time Travel’, a playful attempt to engage with ideas of time, the dilation and acceleration of time. REDS : It is kind of time-travel, the idea that she can see what is coming up. . . JK : And she says that in the note, which we actually quote in the wall text as a ‘sincere attempt’ at achieving the physically impossible – time travelling while on a train in Bangalore. [laughs] REDS : Actually, that is one important difference between the first and second editions. On going to the first Biennale, for some artists, their names weren’t even up properly and there was very little information. There was no catalogue as such, or anything of where the works were on. So they had to work autonomously, in their own right. They didn’t have the support of any information. And in the second iteration you read, you engaged with the text, and that makes a big difference. . . JK : Yes. To me there had to be convergence, to propagate meaning. In my curatorial note I point to this interplay of site, citations, sightlines. . . SM : Yes, you mention ‘citation’ (as in textual). One thing you are just describing with all these sightlines, the image that comes to mind is Alice in Wonderland, when Alice is changing shape. You are sort of doing that to us through this curation of space and these sightlines. But in order to do that, there is quite an investment in textual works, where we need to ‘dig out’ or read out the meaning of them, as opposed perhaps to more collaborative, participatory artworks. Was that something you felt you were conscious of, or – and in a way I go back to the framing – there were these set pieces, which, set up in the right way, created these sightlines, but they rely on the set pieces rather than a kind of participation in a work. . . JK : Sightlines are not just juxtapositions, they create rich interactions of afterimages. Let’s look at what happens when you last leave a Lindy Lee – dots, complete abstraction (I often think of them as Indra’s net, carrying a spiritual import). Then, going past Michael Najjar’s ‘orbital cascade_57–46’ where every dot signifies a fragment of space junk in earth’s orbit, we arrive at Sunoj’s D’s dots, where every dot signifies a rupee converted from a dirham which in turn is converted from a dollar. The dots (sharing a visual family resemblance by virtue of being a dot) are animated with divergent meaning but each of these works share thematic correspondence with works elsewhere in the Biennale. Not far from here is Michael Steven’s speculation of ‘What Is the Speed of Dark?’, not the speed of light [laughs]. It is essentially Vsauce speculating whether you could reach the speed of light by casting a shadow of your finger by a virtual torch, so that as the shadow moves on the surface of the moon that it’ll be faster than the speed

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of light, but then he says there is no light, there is no dark, but the dark is simply the absence of light, so you cannot prove/disprove the speed of light. It sets the stage for Ryota Kuwakubo’s mythical world of shadows and light, where tiny daily commodities and a small moving light creates an immersive experience that physically places the viewer within the very questions that the vlogger Vsauce was prodding us with. . . REDS: For me, that was a wonderful piece of work because it was monumental in its vision, but so simple in its execution. A wonderful metaphoric piece of work. . . JK : It was a beautiful piece. The best experiences are hard to put into words. Talking of words it had to be a delicate balance between what needed to be said on the wall text and what could be withheld, given the enormous diversity in audience. For instance Navjot Altaf made a new work that developed as a three dimensional model of a recent scientific chart documenting 2000 years of continental temperature change on earth. The work had many dimensions but some of the information in the chart was crucial, yet both of us were averse to the idea of prosaically describing the contents of the chart. Prior to the opening Navjot was working in Kochi with a team of young students and she had to leave Kochi mid-way to attend a seminar at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. As chance would have it in the seminar a fellow speaker was a scientist who had worked extensively on the very chart that formed her piece in Kochi. She returned with a video recording of their conversation, and overnight we edited the video which became part of her multi-media installation. There were pointers to the piece in the wall-text and now the voice of the scientist reminiscing through his extensive research on the subject just added the desired layer of meaning. SM : There is a lot of labour, a lot of hard work going on, yet you tend to brush it aside. . . REDS : You downplay, you often downplay. . . JK : Yes, there was effort but there were beautiful accidents like the one I just mentioned that self-organized the process that one set in motion. And I must confess it was not at all without moments of doubt. We actually got access to CSI Bungalow five days before the opening. The key arrived literally six days before, but we had five days to reset the space. There was one pink room and two green rooms and some other coloured room, with deflated balloons still stuck on the wall perhaps from a long-gone birthday party! One had to simply befriend the uncertainty and layout multiple possibilities. For instance Bastion Bungalow was a site identified a while ago and we had roughly plotted a few key projects there but after many weeks of negotiations it fell through as the necessary permissions couldn’t be

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procured from the Archaeological Survey of India. One was always making parallel plans so that if one fell through we had a plan B [laughs]. SM : It is amazing to work with so much flux and complexity of ideas. I kind of knew that is what you were doing, but to hear you lay this out in detail. . . JK : . . .and for me too, this was an invaluable and memorable experience . . . I had once described it to a journalist as ‘trying to write while the alphabets are shifting’ as if one was trying to arrange a thematic frame-work while other co-ordinates were shifting. As we speak I’m reminded of a remark made last week at the Experimenter Curators’ Hub, where during a Q&A following my talk a member of the audience said that he felt that ‘Whorled Explorations’ was a Marxist biennale. He said he couldn’t put his finger on it but wanted to hear my feedback to this comment. I kind of enjoyed the comment because I must say I wasn’t expecting it. It seemed he had caught a strand from the ‘whorl’, as if one could pick out a single ripple from a whirlpool. While thinking through his remark I started thinking of the many pieces that reflect on the Left movement such as Madhusudhanan’s ‘Logic of Disappearance’, a complex landscape of memory, triggering flashbacks of an era gone by, of Prajakta Potnis’ ‘Kitchen Debate’ named after a heated debate on capitalism and communism between then U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in the middle of a model kitchen built for the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. Placed inside the file room of Aspinwall House was Punaloor Rajan’s black and white photographs chronicling Kerala’s cultural and political landscape from 1956, when the state of Kerala was constituted, to the late 1980s when he withdrew from photography. The invocation of the Left does come up many times. REDS : Do you think that is a bit of cliché to say that as well? JK : It convinced me of my view that the Biennale is indeed formed in the eye of the beholder. We always string and create the meaning based on the point from which we view our world. While this gentlemen viewed it through an ideological narrative there are others who have actually taken in a cosmological contemplative dimension. While retaining the strand that runs from Madhusudhanan to Rajan to Potnis, others may have stitched from ‘Powers of Ten’ to Christian Waldvogel to N S Harsha to Peter Rösel and engaged with the space of the astral. I would remind myself during the months leading up the Biennale that it would be a fallacy for me to assume that ‘Whorled Explorations’ is curated by me. It is finally to be re-curated by each viewer. . . REDS : . . .but also, isn’t it about the prevailing politics of the place and time. You can find yourself in opposition to that without designing yourself to

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be in opposition to that. It’ll be interesting to see at the next iteration of the Biennale where the politics of India is, and where the Biennale sits within that because it is a publicly funded project, or partly funded project. Intrinsically you’re part of a political dilemma. . . JK : Hmm. . . yes. SM : And in a sense all biennales are, in accordance to their own places. But actually, the themes that you were working with, in some way help navigate away from that dilemma, by dealing with ‘the political’ (rather than a politics). . . JK : . . .or I might say navigate towards those dilemmas. The political as a ubiquitous and an all-pervasive aspect of all human, institutional, national interrelations. To articulate a politics one might create a placard, to contemplate the political, one widens the inquiry. Self-reflection is a political act. SM : Perhaps here we should end, but I’ll just ask this last question, in a way to hand it over to the ‘people’. I think earlier today I jotted down – I might be paraphrasing – but you said: ‘what are people going to talk about at the Biennale?’ So, while we have the strong sense of the pathway, your attention to detail, there is also this moment you’re interested in of what people are going to talk about at the Biennale. I wonder, as a final note, are there any threads of what people talked about that you may be picked up on yourself? JK : It is very hard for me to assess. I would often say, from very early on, that I would like the Biennale to produce themes rather than reproduce a preconceived theme. That was my endeavour, to unfold a set of early intuitions that would function as prompts to develop the project and also serve as the coordinates with which one might map the outcome, the exhibition. It was important for me to see the proliferation of ideas reflect off each other, like a complex kaleidoscope. It would be interesting to see how the project will be remembered by people who saw it and the residual resonance that stayed with them, especially the thousands of young children who came. I’d like a young child in Kochi to know that not far from where they reside were a few individuals who, five hundred years ago, were at the very cutting edge of human thought on this planet proposing ideas of where we are located in the wider cosmos and attempt to comprehend notions of infinity. I’d like them to know of the Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics which is hardly known to the general public. But, equally, I’d like the young child to catch the numerous sensory and playful propositions that made up this large exhibition. My hope was to populate the project (and by extension the surrounding civic discourse) with contemplative ideas that an individual can re-purpose to re-think their world.

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Figure 6.11 Sketch from Kallat’s notebook. Courtesy of Jitish Kallat.

7 PAINTERLY EXPLORATIONS AND THE SOCIAL GESTUS OF CONTEMPORARY ART Sunil Manghani

Contemporary art can be defined, as Ranjit Hoskote suggests, ‘by certain global conditions of culture production. . . that is produced within the circulations of the residency system, the travelling exhibition, the research proposal, the museum, and, perhaps most importantly, the biennale’ (2012: 60). The work produced within these conditions tends to be ‘in the form of video, installation, photographic project, performance, and the social project’ (Hoskote, 2012: 60). Notably, painting is not included in Hoskote’s list. One of the difficulties for understanding painting within this context is the medium’s long-term connection with both modernism and the art market. For Hoskote, the latter is certainly the problem in the context of India’s art scene, which has only really emerged (and flourished) following economic liberalization of the late 1990s (Holborn, 2009; D’Souza, 2013): [T]he marketplace of discussion. . . remains conceptually thin at the popular level, dominated by market-obsessed reportage rather than discerning criticism [. . .] Few observers seem to have the time or patience for a more sophisticated analysis of the painting’s potential confrontation with its institutional ethos of reception, or the video’s possible absorption of painterly qualities, both of which features would destabilize any easy assumptions about the ‘modernism’ of one or the contemporaneity of the other. (Hoskote, 2012: 60) Hoskote, however, considers the choice of medium much less of a concern than the ‘sense of conceptual freedom and bracing criticality that global circulation, at its best, can provide’ (2012: 60). With this view in mind, this chapter offers a critical account of the differing ‘painterly 160

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explorations’ found within the second iteration of India’s Kochi-Muziris Biennale (December 2014–March 2015), which, under the curatorship of the internationally regarded Indian artist, Jitish Kallat, took the title of ‘Whorled Explorations’. In all its various guises, painting at the Biennale can be said to have been surprisingly conspicuous, at least if we understand painting in an expanded sense. Following an account of some of these different practices, the chapter draws upon the term ‘social gestus’ (the critical demonstration and curation of gestures) to suggest a reading of global, contemporary art that is concerned with the coordinates and situating of gestures as an entire form, and which is critically revealing of itself. The productionist site of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale provides a fitting example of what social, critical meanings painting can reveal.

Painting’s precedence The co-founders and curators of the first Kochi-Muziris Biennale, artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, both originally from Kerala (but settled in Mumbai), came to prominence as painters. Krishnamachari’s work includes highly vivid abstract canvases, made up of brushstrokes and daubs of thick, bright hued paints, while Komu is most known for powerful portrait paintings. His compositions, always tightly cropped, engender a particular gaze, forcing us to look upon its Indian subjects. Both Krishnamachari and Komu have been associated with Indian photorealism, ‘a byword for figurative paintings derived from imagery of the mass media, the Internet and technology’ (Jumabhoy, 2009: 29). Jitish Kallat, curator of the 2014 edition, is similarly well regarded for his paintings. Resembling Mumbai’s bold billboards, Kallat has produced numerous large-scale figurative paintings, which he describes himself as presenting ‘a vast collision of the thumping, claustrophobic, city street’ (cited in Høholt, 2012: 21). These works can be understood as counter-billboards, depicting ‘the lived life that for many Mumbai inhabitants is characterized by hardship and hard work, serving as testimony behind an outer surface of pop and cartoon aesthetics’ (Høholt, 2012: 21). All of these three artists are explicit in their work about their sense of social consciousness. The weight of delivering the Biennale must inevitably have taken them away from their own practices, it is arguably a natural extension, or even progression of their work. The Biennale is a form of social practice that in many respects makes manifest the critical sense of exchange and equity that many of their individual works only proposition. Kallat’s Eruda (2006) is a pertinent example to cite. The work, a giant fibreglass statue covered in lead, makes a very obvious social-political statement. 161

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The statue is of a child labourer, typical of the underage book vendors who try their luck at traffic lights in Mumbai: Kallat’s lead-skinned boy is made from the softest form of carbon – the artist is keen to point out that ‘diamonds, on the other hand, are the hardest’. By using material that leaves little black traces on the fingertips of those who attempt to touch the statue, Kallat is forcibly reminding bejeweled visitors of galleries of the poverty they thought they left outside the white cube. (Jumabhoy, 2009: 18) Offering a critique of poverty inside the luxury of a gallery setting is a wellworn gesture, and brings with it obvious ethical dilemmas. Jumabhoy makes a somewhat oblique comment on the development of Kallat’s paintings, with their use of florescent hues and cartoon figuration. ‘Despite the dismal subject matter,’ she writes, ‘these colours and smiles don’t make gloomy pictures. No one would blame us for concluding the subject matter is an ironical nod to what is expected of a socially conscious Indian artist’ (Jumabhoy, 2009: 29). The ‘ironical nod’ can go two ways. Cynically, we might consider this the canniness of an artist on the rise, yet equally we can understand it as the obligatory attempt at a critique from ‘within’. Arguably the Biennale in Kochi provides an opportunity beyond the need for irony and double-coding. Of course these same gestures persist, but there is a lived social fabric within which they are staged. And, Eruda need not be written off as an empty political gesture. It is the product of a very particular geopolitical context in which Kallat finds himself. Furthermore, with respects to the focus here on painting, this particular work is a pertinent example of how an artist has come to extend his practice and equally presents us with an idea of painting in an expanded sense – which is to suggest painting be understood an elastic cultural term and still very much as a progressive art practice (Staff, 2013: 49–68). Kallat’s use of carbon, which flakes away when touched, is evocative of painting as an elemental medium. The ability of this work to leave indelible marks of black ‘pigment’ makes a wonderful play of the subject of the ‘painting’. Viewers are caught ‘red-handed’; their fingerprints duly noted. The observer’s desire to reach out and simply take what is seen is now marked and displayed as part of the work itself. Perhaps rather more pointedly than the example given by Joselit (2009), Kallat’s Eruda is a ‘transitive painting’. Instead of reifying something, the work ‘invents forms and structures whose purpose is to demonstrate that once an object enters a network, it can never be fully stilled, but only subject to different material states and speeds of circulation ranging from the geologically slow to the infinitely fast’ (Joselit, 2009: 132). 162

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Figure 7.1 Madiha Sikander, Roses Are Red, gad rung on paper, 7 inches × 4.6 inches × 0.6 inches, 2010. Exhibit from ‘Reading Room’, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Collateral Event, 2014. Photograph: Sunil Manghani.

Krishnamachari, Komu and Kallat (and others of their respective generations) have each branched out into other mediums and installation work. Yet, the trope of having ‘formerly been a painter’ is a common one (a trope by no means confined to the Indian context). In this respect painting in the expanded field can be understood in the structuralist sense. It is less the medium per se that is stake, more how painting as a category operates within a wider discourse; how, for example, it is placed in opposition to terms such as installation and contemporary art (Melville, 2001; Staff, 2013: 49–51). Attending the launch events for the 2014 edition, I met several artists who introduced themselves with variations on the line ‘I began as a painter, but. . .’. Manisha Gera Baswani was one such artist. Still very much a practising painter, based in Dehli, Baswani spoke of painting as an ongoing, patient practice, with a long history in India. She referred, for example, to India’s long, rich tradition of painting rooted in miniaturist art. Baswani’s 163

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take on the Biennale was seemingly one of consigned lament. Painting, she suggested, was not a significant feature of such an event, but then it was never likely to be and that the importance of painting was no less diminished for the fact. Nonetheless, at odds with Baswani’s view, an argument can be made that painting – at least in an expanded sense – had a notable presence across the various sites of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014; testament no doubt to Baswani’s comment upon India’s deeply engrained consciousness of painting and its traditions. Of the ninety-four exhibiting artists (as listed in the published short guide, excluding collateral events, etc.), nearly a quarter can be said to have contributed works pertaining to painting and drawing in one sense or another. Aji V. N., for example, a Kerala-born artist (now working in Rotterdam), exhibited metre-long landscapes in charcoal. Offering panoramic rural vistas, these landscapes, drawn in exquisite detail, appeared to shimmer almost like huge daguerreotypes; turning peaceful scenes into phantasmagoria. Another artist from Kerala, born in 1925 and greatly influential in the region, K. M. Vasudevan Namboodiri, produced a series of new drawings, which are described in the catalogue as to ‘unfold like a mindscape of the city [of Kochi] where the past and present collide’ (Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2014: 109). There were also a number of artists drawing very explicitly upon traditional forms of painting. Lavanya Mani, for example, bases her work in textile painting and printing techniques, while Fiona Hall, known for her concern for the environment, produced works that echoed traditional techniques used by Aboriginal people of Australia and Pacific Islanders. As a quiet aside or outtake, a very delicate and fine miniaturist-style painting resided on a single leaf of a book in one of the Biennale’s collateral events, ‘Reading Room’ (Jain, 2014). Nevertheless, this delicate rendering can by no means to be taken as emblematic. Painting at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014 spanned a wide spectrum, which in most cases had more to do with the aforementioned ‘global conditions of culture production’, so only adding to what we might consider to ‘count as painting’ (Melville, 2001).

Frames within frames To date, the Kochi Biennale has exhibited the majority of works within a set of dilapidated buildings that form the large compound of Aspinwall House in Fort Kochi. The property was originally the site of Aspinwall and Company Ltd., established in 1867 by the English trader John H. Aspinwall. Facing out to the sea, with a collapsed jetty, the venue is highly significant for the Biennale in recalling and ‘situating’ Kochi’s historical and geopolitical context. The works displayed for the inaugural Biennale were in the main interactive with the site itself, producing artworks that 164

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broke free of any literal framing, and equally articulating historical and conceptual frames within frames. While walking around Aspinwall House for the opening in 2014, a surprising feature was the propensity of works to be framed in the literal sense. Of course, it is hard not to consider all artworks to be framed in some fashion. It is largely the ability to place or ‘frame’ something out of time or space that demarcates the ‘work’ of art. As Roland Barthes traces in the opening of his essay ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’ (1982), representation need not be defined by imitation as such, but by geometry. Yet, in the context of contemporary art with its relationship to ideas of fluidity, precariousness and relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002), as alluded to with many of the works of the inaugural Biennale (and not least thinking of the ‘whorled’ aspirations of the Kallat’s curation for the 2014 iteration), it was striking to find quite so many straight lines and the strict use of landscape or portrait formats. Perhaps one of the most striking and controlled uses of frame was Parvathi Nayar’s The Fluidity of Horizons (2014), described as ‘an interconnected suite of drawings and a sound installation that makes references to the history of the Malabar Coast’ (Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2014: 59). The works

Figure 7.2 Parvathi Nayar, panels from The Fluidity of Horizons (2014), an installation of drawings on wooden panels and sound. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist.

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are produced on sets of wooden panels that make up large picture planes. There is a very exacting design to their display, with Nayar spacing uniform panels with strict, narrow gaps. Her imagery can be described in terms of pseudorealism, offering dramatic, non-realistic forms that nonetheless can be received by the viewer as a form of/from reality (a genre popularized in the early 1990s by Indian artist Devajyoti Ray). A massive black pepper corn, for example, appears in the top centre of one triptych. The corn is like a black sun (on a band of pure white) that hovers above a hyperrealist rendering of sea water washing across sand, which appears very precisely across the lower half of the triptych (giving a definite horizon-line, dead-centre across the panels). The root of the term ‘pseudorealism’ is from mathematical theory, which chimes with Nayar’s sense of precision and interest in scientific imagery. Arguably, the very definite lines of Nayar’s installation are punctuated, or given release by sound elements associated with the sea. However, these were very slight and it was hard not to be overwhelmed by the visual coolness of Nayar’s hyperrealism and strict, clean lines in the framing. However, the pervading sense of the framing of works at the Biennale was not solely based on the literal use of frames, lines and standard orientations. Pushpamala N., formerly a sculptor, before turning to photography and video performances, displayed a complex photographic work that was both a disaggregation and fashioning of tableau. The Arrival of Vasco da Gama (after an 1898 painting by Jose Veloso Salgado) (2014) was presented in an L-shaped room. On entering a series of developmental components were on display, which then culminated in a large-format photograph based on a history painting by Jose Veloso Salgado, as described in the title. As the catalogue notes: Pushpamala for the first time plays a male role as the navigator while her artist friends act as supporting cast. Around the photographs, elements of painted sets made for the photo shoot and written texts form an installation like a theatre museum. In her interpretation of the 1898 painting, the artist turns Salgado’s conception on its head; returning what is a work of imagination that has over time gained a degree of historical legitimacy, to the space of fiction and masquerade. (Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2014: 153) The use of tableaux – as spaces of fiction – brings us back to Barthes’s account of the theatre and geometry of representation. The tableau is both fetish and composition, or as Barthes writes, ‘it is composition itself which enables us to shift the fetish-term and to transfer the erotic effect of the projection’ (1982: 91). This sense of transference, or critical requirement 166

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to make such a transfer, might be one way in which we need to understand painting’s condition within the contemporary. Taking his cue from Bertolt Brecht, Barthes argues the tableau ‘has a meaning, not a subject’. Akin to Brechtian distanciation the suggestion is of something more analytical, or critical, than expressive. Laura Lisbon equates ‘meaning’ to ‘discourse’. What is at stake, she argues ‘is how discourse means – [with] the emphasis on composition as a forming of the operational cut that the tableau can be’ (Lisbon, 2013: 80). As with Brechtian theatre, the point is to understand as much how a story is told, than simply what the story tells us – the latter, on its own, arguably only leading to passive spectatorship. As Lisbon explains, the significance of tableau is that it ‘reveals its constructedness on the one hand while denying any simple return to that construction’ (Lisbon, 2013: 84). For Barthes, this critical meaning (or composition) is brought further into relief through what he terms the ‘social gestus’ (or social gest). The term derives directly from Brecht, as a critical concept in theatre to mean the embodiment of attitude, or the revealing of attitude through expression and action. In a short essay, ‘On Gestic Music’, Brecht (1978: 104–106) notes how ‘[n]ot all gests are social gests’, but that they soon become so once imbued with certain meanings. So, for example, Brecht writes how the ‘attitude of chasing away a fly is not yet a social gest, though the attitude of chasing away a dog may be one, for instance if it comes to represent a badly dressed man’s continual battle against watchdogs’ (104). He adds, also, that ‘[o]ne’s efforts to keep one’s balance on a slippery surface results in a social gest as soon as falling down would mean “losing face”; in other words, losing one’s market value’ (104). Importantly, gestus is not simply gesture, but rather its curation or structuring. To take a theatrical example, a saluting soldier marching across the stage is an example of the use of gesture to give form to a character. Yet, if this same character is saluting and marching across a stage of dead bodies, there is a coming together of forms for social comment. The idea, then, is that ‘the social gest is the gest relevant to society, the gest that allows conclusions to be drawn about the social circumstances’ (Brecht, 1978: 105). While the above are simple examples, we can begin to imagine a much more complex set of forms, which in the context of the Kochi Biennale might be understood to relate to a range of local, national and global conditions and patterns. While social gestus refers to the coordinates and situating of gestures as a whole form, it is also crucially about that form being critically revealing of itself. For Barthes, the idea is that we embody meanings through social conditions and the gestures these manifest: [A]ll that matters is the gestus, the critical demonstration of the gesture, the inscription of this gesture, to whatever period it 167

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belongs, within a text whose social machination is visible; the subject adds nothing, takes nothing away. How many films are there today ‘about’ drugs, of which drugs are the ‘subject’? But this is a hollow subject; without social gestus, drugs are insignificant, or rather their significance is that of a vague, empty, eternal nature [. . .] The subject is a false projection. . . The work begins only with the tableau, when the meaning is put into the gesture and into the coordination of gestures. (1982: 95–96) Understood as the ‘critical demonstration’ and ‘inscription’ of the gesture, rather than simply the gestures in themselves, the notion of a social gestus provides a lens through which we might reconsider both the production and reception of contemporary art. It is not about the labouring of subject matter and/or the need for specific representation, but rather the specifics of the coordinates and coordination of contemporary meanings. It is worth noting, at the time of writing, in the early part of the twentieth century, Brecht was critical of the avant-garde and of the reification of the artist. He suggests the ‘common tendency’ of art at this time is ‘to remove the social element in any gest. The artist is not happy till he achieves the “look of a hunted animal”’ (1978: 104). In his well-known essay ‘The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre’ (1978: 33–42), Brecht is highly critical of the cultural elite who espouse a form of radical art, yet pay too little attention to the apparatus through which they must work, and effectively maintain. This leads, he argues, ‘to a general habit of judging works of art by their suitability for the apparatus without ever judging the apparatus by its suitability for the work. People say, this or that is good work; and they mean (but do not say) good for the apparatus’ (Brecht, 1978: 34). In thinking about these concerns regarding contemporary art there are clearly ways in which a social dimension has become more significant and foregrounded. However, equally, the ‘apparatus’ of the art world has only expanded and in many ways become ever more ‘efficient’. The biennale format, as a means of presenting art on a global scale, has certainly proved effective in promoting cultures, cities and regions, and impacted on economic conditions. Indeed, as Vogel’s (2010) overview suggests, the history of the biennale format is both a history of art and politics. Nonetheless, what Vogel refers to as the ‘second phase’ of biennales (that sprung up through the 1990s, right across the world), including a number of events in Africa, the Middle East and East Asia, has revealed the potential for biennales to be contested spaces. ‘Whereas the invention of the biennial was influenced by the formation of nation states’, she argues, ‘the second phase is marked to a growing extent by a massive criticism of nations and the very concept of nationality. In 168

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the first phase of the history of biennials the artists were regarded as representatives, like athletes. . . [. . .] In the second phase, however, this status has come under attack’ (Vogel, 2010: 67). However, while artists and artworks around the world might be judged to be more deliberately critical and engaging towards their contemporary condition (to make ‘good work’), there is still an argument to suggest such judgements get made with respect to the apparatus not against it, the biennale format itself becoming a condition in which to work and be measured. The artist-led approach to the Kochi Biennale is perhaps significant in this respect. Not only is there the making (and the display) of artworks, but there is also the making of the Biennale itself. Perhaps, then, we might consider here a coming together of both artwork and apparatus – and it is the manner in which these come together that can articulate a form of a social gestus, or to draw together (or draw out) considerations of the social circumstances in which its own making unfolds.

Painting’s expanse Parvathi Nayar’s ‘installation’ of drawings and sound and Pushpamala N.’s transformation of a history painting through photography and performance are obvious examples of what we might mean by painting in an expanded sense, and we can begin to consider differing structures of meaning or their social gestus. Numerous other examples from the Biennale can be cited. However, two very striking contributions, both of quite different painterly dimensions, were the works of Nikhil Chopra and Francesco Clemente. Chopra, along with artists Atul Dodiya, Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher and Pushpamala N., can be placed within a group of key contemporary Indian artists that been has referred to as ‘Generation i’. Jumabhoy explains: [t]he difference between this current crop and their predecessors. . . is the way they deal with identity. ‘Generation i’ uses the selfportrait merely to adopt a theatrical position – which shouldn’t be confused with autobiography. So, the ‘i’ of ‘Generation i’ does not reference an authentic self, because in this art what constitutes identity is invariably up for debate. Consequently, ‘Generation i’ frees the self-portrait from having to plumb the depths of an artist’s soul and puts it to other uses. (Jumabhoy, 2009: 55) Jumabhoy goes on to note, for example, how Pushpamala N. is often referred to as India’s answer to Cindy Sherman, which immediately brings to mind deconstructed notions of identity. However, in comparison to 169

Figure 7.3a and 7.3b Nikhil Chopra, La Perle Noire II: Aspinwall House (2014), 50-hour-long performance. Photographs: Manghani/D’Souza (taken during opening hour of the performance).

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Sherman, Chopra’s work is described by Jumabhoy as ‘more intriguingly oblique’ and confrontational. Chopra is a performance artist. He draws on the history of his family who were landowners in Kashmir. One of his most ambitious works, Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing II (2007), was a 72-hour performance in a warehouse in Mumbai where he appeared as his paternal grandfather among other personas. For the Kochi Biennale, Chopra staged a 50-hour performance, again appearing in various guises. The performance, La Perle Noire II: Aspinwall House (2014), involved ‘living’ in a room at Aspinwall House, like an inhabitant in a cell. A thin, narrow mattress lay in the room, along with two buckets of paint – one black, one white. The performance consisted of painting the walls white, then repainting black, over and over again. As I entered into this space at the opening of the Biennale, visitors surrounded Chopra taking photographs, along with many others peering through the windows of the room. The press were there too and indeed it was Chopra’s work that made it into the initial news reports in the regional press. Dressed only in undergarments, with black paint smeared over his arms and face, Chopra moved about the cell in erratic ways, accentuating aspects of his body by stretching at times, or standing still. It was unnerving to be standing in the room with him, his hair rather wild, eyes bulging and a large paintbrush dripping in his hand. Like a Calibanesque figure, you wondered what he might do next. As the performance ‘progressed’, so did Chopra’s identity. He later appeared (though to less audience) as a European explorer, complete with a shirt and wire-frame glasses. We can begin to see Chopra’s performance as not just a set of gestures (and characters), but the coming together of a social gestus and a series of living tableaux. For all the spectacle and effect of Chopra’s performance, there is clearly an intellectual project at stake: a critique of the colonial past. And while Pushpamala, for example, creates mock-ups of scenes as a means to critique ‘being Indian’, Chopra’s approach is more troubled, since he brings the past into conflict with the present. For Memory Drawing II (2007), he produced a massive charcoal drawing on the four walls of the room. ‘As the inky-black mural spread’, Jumabhoy explains, ‘past and present, private and public were eerily merged. Chopra’s avatars and their audience seemed imprisoned by the architectural disjunctures’ (2009: 78). Similarly, for La Perle Noire II, there is a ‘drawing’ together of narratives and subject positions, which is both ritualistic and yet equally set at a distance (as with the tableau) from the visitor in the space. The social gestus here might be said to align with that of the art historian or literary critic; it is a form of postcolonialism. One of the dilemmas of this work is whether we think of it as only looking backwards, albeit critically. There is now more sense of a postcritical discourse that acknowledges key debates, histories and problematics, yet equally looks 171

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to more productive, or affirmative critical forms. The curator Nicolas Bourriaud (2009), for example, makes reference to the ‘blindspot of postcolonial theory’ (34), suggesting it to be a victim of its own success, whereby the ‘postcolonial’ ends up prefiguring debates and everyday inscriptions of culture. By contrast, Bourriaud’s (2009) term ‘altermodernity’ becomes a descriptor of a new space, or multiple spaces. He is keen not so much to question origins (as in postcolonialism) but to examine and suppose destinations (in his case through contemporary art practices and curation). Chopra’s externalization of an internal, historical ‘terrain’ does not readily make for a destination. You can witness his work, but not necessarily enter it. Francesco Clemente offered a different proposition, one perhaps more in keeping with destination than origination. While briefly associated with the neo-expressionism of the 1980s, his work is rather more ‘nomadic’, though he remains very much a painter. He divides his time between New York and Varanasi, India, and inspired by Indian and Tibetan tantra traditions, his work from the 1990s onwards has increasingly taken on erotic imagery to explore questions of identity, sexuality and self. His connection to India is also through a Chennai-based Theosophical Society, which drew him to Indian mystical thinking, and a long-standing set of collaborations with artists in the region, from miniaturists to billboard painters. For the Kochi Biennale, Clemente exhibited Pepper Tent (2014), a full-size nomadic tent

Figure 7.4 Francesco Clemente, Pepper Tent (2014). Photo: Dheeraj Thakur. Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation.

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Figure 7.5 Francesco Clemente, Pepper Tent (2014) [Detail]. Photograph: Swanoop John/Dheeraj Thakur. Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation.

Figure 7.6 Francesco Clemente, Pepper Tent (2014) [Detail]. Photograph: Swanoop John/Dheeraj Thakur. Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation.

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covered in his paintings, and erected with tethering ropes within one of the top-floor rooms at Aspinwall House. The paintings include repeated reference to black pepper corns, which is the spice most associated with Kochi, along with Clemente’s signature imagery made up of human forms, motifs from nature and warm, vibrant colours. Like many contemporary consumer products, the tent was ‘designed’ in America (at Clemente’s Brooklyn studio) and ‘assembled’ in India, in Rajasthan by Indian tent-makers. If it was not for Clemente’s long-term association with India, this might seem highly problematic. However, the work itself allays such fears. Standing as a soft, fabric structure within the bricked structure of the warehouse-like room, the tent immediately evokes a social gestus that is inherently social. The tent is an invitation to take up a space within the larger scheme of things. It is a place to dwell, albeit temporally. As the catalogue notes: ‘In creating an artwork that can envelope the viewer, at once offering shelter and refuge, the artist makes plain what connects art to life’ (Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2014: 141). Observing in the room, I watched numerous people file through the structure, chatting with their friends, smiling at the imagery and generally exhibiting a moment of pause or relaxation. Again, both these works are examples of painting in an expanded sense. One is a performance of painting, and the other a structure, or place. Both are about process, though made manifest in very different ways. Between Chopra and Clemente, respectively, one is attuned to an art history as performance/critique on the one hand, and on the other, a lived form of visual culture, or a living in the visual. And while we might argue Chopra presents an anti-colonial, anti-modern critique, which is merely confrontational, we must equally be measured about the effects of Pepper Tent. On the face of it, the tent would seem to fit with the pervading view of ‘dialogue’ and ‘exchange’ associated with global, contemporary art. As is discussed at greater length in Chapter 9, Bourriaud’s account of contemporary art holds to a weak notion of ‘translation’ (suggesting ‘we are entering the era of universal subtitling’ (2009: 44)). Bourriaud’s reference to altermodernity, which is pitched as a move on from the postmodern, is arguably more sympathetic to Jürgen Habermas’s (1985) reference to the ‘incomplete project’ of modernity – the idea that, despite its failings, there was a universal cause and engagement with enlightenment principles that remain worth upholding. What both Bourriaud and Habermas appear to converge upon is an unproblematized notion of free speech (Bourriaud refers to ‘universal subtitles’, and Habermas the fundamental norms of rational speech). The intention, of course, is to underpin deliberative democracy, yet this reveals a privileging of verbal reasoning over other forms of reasoning and deliberation, including notably the visual, which otherwise we might consider as a vast domain of signification beyond the word (Simons, 2000; Manghani, 175

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2008; Manghani, 2013). If, however, we are to uphold the broader political significance of the visual – as a means of deliberation in itself – then the question that remains, as we stand enveloped by Clemente’s tent, is whether or not the tent itself, and its painterly imagery, is something we deliberate with or simply within (the latter suggesting the tent functions purely decoratively, rather than politically and/or philosophically).

Ebb and flow Understood within the context of contemporary art, an expanded notion of painting presents no real difficulty. Indeed, the diversity of works on display at the Kochi Biennale perhaps alerts us to the underlying fact that, as with the postmodern condition, anything seemingly goes. As Bourriaud remarks: ‘In these early years of the twenty-first century, it is clear that the oppositions are less marked. All forms coexist peacefully’ (2009: 82). Unlike the art of the 1990s, which arguably exalted the precarious over the solid, Bourriaud argues precariousness today is of our general condition, rather than a specific aesthetic. As such, precariousness is neither good nor bad, but essentially the circumstance to which all art must respond. Nonetheless, despite the apparent ‘peaceful’ coexistence of forms, painting all too conveniently seems still to fall out of the contemporary. Bourriaud evokes the emergence of modern painting as an analogy for the (alter)modern moment we are supposedly experiencing now: A modern moment took place at the end of the nineteenth century: the brushstroke became visible, expressing the painting’s autonomy and magnifying the human hand in reaction to the industrialization of images and objects. It may be that, in these early years of the twenty-first century, our own modernity is developing on the basis of this collapse of the long-term, at the very heart of the consumerist whirlwind and cultural precariousness, countering the weakening of the human territories under the impact of the globalized economic machine. (2009: 85–86) The ease with which painting is summoned here as a ‘modern force’ at the end of the nineteenth century would seem to consign the brushstroke to the past. Within the specific political context of India, Jumabhoy notes how many painters ‘switched to installation art in protest against fundamentalism’ (2012: 72). Echoing Bourriaud’s account, the argument made is that the making of mixed media and installation works (whereby ‘forms coexist peacefully’) has come to represent a political, secular act itself. Yet there 176

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is still surely something ‘elemental’ about painting that remains evocative today, and which continues to have a presence within the ‘cultural precariousness’ on display at global art events. Split identities aside, Chopra’s Sisyphean task of painting black over white and then black over white again, and the sheer muscularity of it all, is precisely an act of remarking a human territory and social gestus. On returning to the site of Chopra’s work, long after he had finished the 50-hour performance, there was a sense of calm about the room. His bed still lay on the floor, and between black vertical lines painted on white walls, Chopra had concluded his work by making delicate observational drawings from across the port area as seen through the windows of the room. During the Biennale’s opening BMWsponsored ‘Art Talk’ panellist Gulammohammad Sheikh eloquently evoked a line from Gandhi: ‘I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.’ Clemente’s Pepper Tent makes for an obvious vivid, lyrical rendering of such a remark. The ease with which one can wander through his painted structure is balanced by the security of the ropes that tie the tent to the floor. Yet, equally, what Chopra left behind from his performance can be read as an eloquent balance, all held together through the labours of paint.

Figure 7.7 Nikhil Chopra, La Perle Noire II: Aspinwall House (2014). Photograph: Manghani (taken a month after the 50-hour-long performance).

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The time it takes to paint (in whatever fashion) and to situate ourselves to what has been painted can arguably still establish our critical distance ‘at the very heart of the consumerist whirlwind’ to which Bourriaud refers. Of course, in surveying the works on display at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014, we might find a number of the works, at least on first viewing, do not necessarily warrant such a statement. The argument made here however is that, taken together, having walked to and from the various works, there is felt an undoubted effect – of a painterly exploration – that is in step with (and helps further remark upon) the explicit worldly gestus of the KochiMuziris Biennale.

References Barthes, R. (1982) ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 89–97. Bourriaud, N. (2002) Relational Aesthetics, trans. by S. Pleasance and F. Woods. Dijon: Les Presses du reel. Bourriaud, N. (2009) The Radicant. New York: Lukas and Sternberg. Brecht, Bertolt (1978) Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. by John Willett. London: Methuen. D’Souza, R.E. (2013) ‘The Indian Biennale Effect: The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012’, Cultural Politics, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 296–312. Habermas, J. (1985) ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project’, in H. Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press, pp. 3–15. Høholt, S. (2012) ‘Reverse Cannibalism: Introduction to India: Art Now’, in Christian Gether, Stine Høholt, Camilla Jalving, and Camma Juel Jepsen (eds.), India: Art Now. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz/ARKEN, pp. 13–34. Holborn, M. (ed.) (2009) The Empire Strikes Back. London: Saatchi Gallery/Jonathan Cape. Hoskote, R. (2012) ‘Kaleidoscopic Propositions: The Evolving Contexts of Contemporary Indian Art’, in Christian Gether, Stine Høholt, Camilla Jalving, and Camma Juel Jepsen (eds.), India: Art Now. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz/ARKEN, pp. 54–62. Jain, A.K. (2014) Reading Room: An Exhibition Featuring Artists’ Books and Altered Book Art [exhibition catalogue]. Tarq, Colombo Art Biennale, Spenta Multimedia. Joselit, D. (2009) ‘Painting Beside Itself’, October, Issue 130, Fall, pp. 125–134. Jumabhoy, Z. (2009) ‘Introduction’, in Mark Holborn (ed.), The Empire Strikes Back. London: Saatchi Gallery/Jonathan Cape, pp. 17–78. Jumabhoy, Z. (2012) ‘Me, Myself, and You’, in Christian Gether, Stine Høholt, Camilla Jalving, and Camma Juel Jepsen (eds.), India: Art Now. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz/ARKEN, pp. 64–81. Kochi Biennale Foundation (2014) Whorled Explorations [exhibition catalogue]. Kochi: Kochi Biennale Foundation and DC Books.

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Lisbon, L. (2013) ‘Notes on the Tableau’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 77–86. Manghani, Sunil (2008) Image Critique and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Bristol: Intellect. Manghani, Sunil (2013) Image Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Melville, S. (2001) ‘Counting as Painting’, in P. Armstrong, L. Lisbon, and S. Melville (eds.), As Painting: Division and Displacement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–26. Simons, J. (2000) ‘Ideology, Imagology, and Critical Thought: The Impoverishment of Politics’, Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 81–103. Staff, C. (2013) After Modernist Painting: A History of a Contemporary Practice. London: I.B. Tauris. Vogel, Sabine B. (2010) Biennials–Art on a Global Scale. Wein: Springer-Verlag.

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8 END OF EMPIRE Robert E. D’Souza

Having been invited by the Kochi-Muziris Biennale to take part as an artist producing one of the collateral projects for the second edition of the Biennale in 2014, I put forward the proposition to install a sculptural installation originally made for a previous exhibition site in India in 2012. I chose, then, to re-make this site-specific sculpture, End of Empire, which on the surface was a to-scale cloth sculpture of a crashed Hindustan Ambassador car that I had previously photographed on the streets of Delhi. This was not a case of recycling or re-presenting an existing piece of work, but to utilise this particular artwork in response to temporal, historical and spatial conditions of the city of Kochi and through its Biennale. The aim was to re-situate the work in a public space within the city of Kochi that might work with the temporal nature of the event, while considering the object as a potential critical site for dialogues by placing in a public arena during a prolonged period during the event. I considered this an artwork that might take on issues of locality and the separation between public and private space, while it might also give me an opportunity to test the participatory and transactional nature of producing and installing the artwork in Kochi within a public space. This was an issue that I had previously touched on in my writings on the Biennale at its launch in 2012, commenting on the ‘emancipatory effect that art can have on the spectator, to see whether they could be applied in terms of the active participation of art and the possibility of bringing together communities that this biennale has potentially offered’ (D’Souza, 2013: 312). I saw the collateral project as a clear opportunity to engage in the very critique I had made and the possibility of art that I had previously alluded to at the Biennale’s first launch (see Chapter 1). The very nature of collateral events and projects sitting outside of the official venues and that engaged with the wider geography and locations of the city become another manifestation of the wider workings of the biennale format beyond the curated works in the more formal exhibition sites. My project became one of twenty-two collateral projects commissioned for 180

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the second Biennale, and I noted that over a quarter were site-specific, community-facing/collaborative or temporal works that were being made in response to the city and location of the Biennale. While collateral events are often the home of artists using the opportunity and their practice to make work that might be more directly relevant and impactful to the locality, it is often these fringe projects that might connect or shape the social and cultural world around them beyond the sometimes passive spectatorship of the main exhibitions. Other collateral projects that clearly aimed to have a local effect beyond the second Biennale included artist Nandakumar P.K., who worked with friends and locals to rehabilitate the Pazhannur Bhagavati temple in the centre courtyard of Kochi’s Dutch palace. This space had served as a key establishment for social interactions for five centuries where free meals were served daily for the needy. The ruins of the temple structures that were once used as a dining hall and a pond that was used for cleaning were still in existence and the artist initiated a month-long cleaning of the site and an exhibition for the Biennale. The efforts in partly restoring the land became an inspiring event for many of the local public with many then volunteering in different ways. This project aimed to highlight the value of art in bringing a community together and initiating a move to address the issue of preserving culturally and environmentally fragile areas including the water bodies around the temple. This first exhibition/project was called ‘The Land Re-formed’. The momentum from local public support in reclaiming this land opened new possibilities to the artist, and the project developed further to renovate the structures and rebuild the pond that was originally used to clean the vessels used in the dining hall. Projects like this generated by the Biennale also become small aspects of the wider regeneration of the city via art practices that have a longer and sustainable future beyond the Biennale and ultimately impact on a positive local reception of the Biennale. ‘Critical Juncture’, another collateral project curated by Dr Neelima Jeychandran and Magda Fabianczyk, brought together twelve artists from Poland and Kochi to providecollection of artistic responses to contemporary political and social issues in the state of Kerala, India and Poland. Here the project’s aim was to bring two remote territories that have both been influenced by different notions and practices of communism, while investigating socio-political changes that have been happening in Poland and India. By exploring, among others, issues of in/visibility, the importance of utopian thinking, and forms of social self-organisation and mechanisms of exclusion, the project hoped to explore similar socio-political issues. Along with creating a space for critical thinking and exchange, ‘Critical Juncture’ was another collateral project envisaged to engage directly with the local community, where artists would work with residents and support 181

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Figure 8.1 Robert E. D’Souza, End of Empire, 2015. Collateral project installation, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Fort Kochi. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza.

local workers and workers’ unions to create work for exhibition. The project was partly artist-led, which set a base for a collaborative approach while trying to provide an alternative to the established hierarchies of the art world. An integral part of the project was the residency for the invited artists, creating an immersive environment to engage with the local community and to produce new work or conduct in-depth research for future projects. The programme of the residency, from common accommodation and meals to research trips and university-hosted seminars and workshops, enabled both informal and structured interaction between the artists from the two countries, setting up the possibility of future collaborations. ‘Worlds’ was a collateral project initiated by American conceptual artist Donald Fels who often works with the intersection of commodities and culture, here working with long-time collaborator and former local hoarding painter Surya Noufal who had been working in this trade since the age of 15. This local hoarding painting trade has disappeared as this commercial practice has more recently become outsourced to digital methods of production. The loss of economy for these trained artisans becomes an effect of cultural and economic change and functions that effect people and subsequently their visual culture. Fels and Noufal worked together on a conceptual performance on the floor of an empty factory open for the 182

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public to watch Noufal paint ‘Worlds’. Each piece produced as a triptych, while each work consisting of three panels would depict a separate world of its own, which at once connected visually but not in terms of linearity or a narrative story. Fels operated by collecting the residue of digitally produced and designed movie posters fly-posted around the city and generally seen as a visual pollution. By pulling remains of posters from the walls and making collages with this found material, Fels and Noufal completed a circuit of production and consumption that once made Surya Noufal redundant, but here provided him with a new situation to develop his work. On multiple levels this project communicates the rehabilitative nature of this intervention, which at the same time acts as a reminder of the value of local skills and knowledge and the need to preserve the economic viability by reimagining the application of skills. While this collateral project deals with the local socio-economic impacts of change, it has also developed a colloquial visual language within the artwork, making the works speak visually again to the locality as another form of visual dialogical communication. These various examples of collateral projects demonstrate the scope of the Biennale organiser’s selection in developing more experimental, temporal and socially engaged projects, which in turn enable the Biennale to root itself more firmly in the locality and with the local community. The following account of my own contribution to the Biennale’s collateral programme offers a close-reading of the making of an artwork as a means of further elucidating the complexities and nuances in play, as part of the making of a biennale that is cognizant of its locality and history.

End of empire The sculptural artwork, End of Empire, is the photographic recording of a crashed Ambassador car found in Delhi in 2012 that is literally ‘returned’ by recreating it as an artwork. This crashed car symbolised an object and project of previous function and purpose of a particular Indian history, and now of decline, returned back into an object with purpose as a public sculpture. I noted on finding the original car in Delhi that, ‘[t]he wrecked Ambassador car became a totemic object and illustration of a form of decline. The graffiti and degradation increased between each of my visits as the car deteriorated, its original graffiti over-pasted with fliers for loans, giving it an ignoble ending’ (D’Souza, 2012: 150). This resurrection is achieved by rendering my original photographs taken over a period of six months in the car’s decline, wrapping these together into a three-dimensional photographic shroud of the deceased vehicle. This shroud becomes the literal skin and surface of the object rendered through time whilst also capturing the multiple shifting external viewpoints and frozen moments framed through the windows onto the multiple views of the surrounding views of the streets of Delhi where it 183

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Figure 8.2 Robert E. D’Souza, End of Empire, 2015. Detail, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Fort Kochi. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza

had crashed. The car acts as a lens capturing a rupture in the world, with its cubist appearance also recognising the multiple viewpoints where ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ vie together to make sense of each other and where each vantage point struggles to inhabit a space of the original object. The abstraction from the original object not only becomes a meditation on the complexity of change and identity in contemporary urban India, but also through the title becomes a clear reminder of a historic and colonial past rendered impotent through recent historic change. The sculpture is a form of the documentary photography of the original object and its surrounding situation but also absorbs parallel issues of the boundaries and thus politics of public space in India having been first abandoned on the streets. The political and social complexity of territory I describe in the city can also be evidenced through the graffiti tags applied to the car that act to make claims on this abandoned object while rehabilitating it into a creative statement of local interest. As I’ve suggested elsewhere: Graffiti on the Ambassador and around the neighbourhood of the DDA Shopping Complex becomes interesting when you consider that there is little in the way of street art tradition in Delhi. Such activity is evidence of the beginning of non-corporatised ‘public 184

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art’, which is still a subversion in the immediate visual culture and only occurs in a zone of the city where deregulation may be ignored. (D’Souza, 2012: 151) I later found out that these tags were by the renowned Delhi-based street artist Daku (whose pseudonym is a Hindi expression for ‘bandit’) and whose artworks are designed to make poignant observations on socio-political issues of urban life using the immediacy of the public context of the streets and public walls of India. In part, the choice of the Ambassador car for this collateral project was directed by the fact I had learned its production might be ended in 2014 due to falling sales. This situation would immediately heighten the purpose of the artwork being displayed in this moment of time and the allusions to the title would be increasingly significant. It was also clear to me that while I had seen a decline in the Ambassador more recently in my visits to India, Kochi was a city where the car was still in wider use and very visible, which made the proposition of my rendition in relation to the real object fitting. The iconic nature of the image of the car in India has become a visual cliché of India in the West; and is something I have written about previously, with reference to the photography of Raghubir Singh, who suggests the rotting Ambassador claims another iconic history: [T]his metal monument slowly slides into history. It is now a part of India’s long journey . . . It is the good and bad of India. It is a solid part of that India that moves on, even as it falls apart, or lags behind. In its imperfection, it is truly an Indian automobile. (Singh, 2002: 4–5) In echo to Singh’s remark, I noted how ‘I can’t help but consider this crushed remnant of the Empire ironic at a moment in time when the Tata group in India has bought out the iconic brands of Jaguar and Land Rover, successfully reinvigorating these brands’ (D’Souza, 2012: 151). It was also clear to me that the idea of the car in India had rapidly changed from a proletarian ‘people’s car’ to something appealing to a new demographic wanting a modern take and identity – a shift we might associate with Adorno’s notion of the ‘culture industry’, whereby there is a disregard for saleable objects in favour of ‘interests objectified’ as ideologies. I would also argue that the object itself even when devoid of saleable value as a crashed Ambassador can be associated with Adorno’s account. As he put it the ‘product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement’ (Adorno, 1991: 100), and even if it is for a nostalgia for something already passed. The production of this sculpture made from the ephemeral site of the car crash becomes 185

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photographs printed onto fabric and literally hand stitched back to create a new form, mimicking the original car but without its former substance. Here it acts as a strategic reversal of the process of domination through the gesture of imperial authority and British manufacturing power that originally gave India this discontinued British car model. The discontinued Morris Oxford might be considered within the growth of globalised human movements as the British migrant who has re-imagined and renamed itself as the Hindustan Ambassador, a rhetorical symbol of progressive India postindependence only to be later stereotyped as classic Indian, only to now become symbolic of the demise of a certain economic history of India pre-globalisation. The Ambassador car already had a particular narrative from the late 1940s when it became a symbol of India’s independence from a British colonial past; a legacy of a Nehruvian modernising agenda and a closed economy, only to become a victim of recent economic reforms rendering it suddenly into a curio of this recent past. Another contingent moment for me came when it was announced in the run-up to the second edition of the Biennale in December 2014 that, in May that year, the maker of India’s Ambassador would officially suspend production, citing problems of debt and lack of consumer demand. Potentially, then, this would render my original sculpture into a new memorial of the dismantling of a mythical India, realised as the sculpture presented at the Kochi at the Biennale. Paradoxically the sculpture deals with a time span of change in India, on one hand the optimism of economic development and at the same time economic and political uncertainty. The remnants of this particular car records its crash, recording a rupture in its narrative history from an object of manufacture, worth and use, once owned as a possession and investment, only now rendered as abandoned object apparently not worth rehabilitating or preserving. Originally by titling the sculpture End of Empire I wanted to draw upon many allusions I could attribute to my attraction to this wrecked car in the first instance, both personal and emotional as a nostalgic emblem of a past India but also historic in terms of a recent colonial and imperial relationship between India and the United Kingdom. This relic of British manufacturing having already become reborn as an Indian icon only now here displayed as a dying symbol of Indian independence embodied by this crashed Hindustan Ambassador car. While the assumption that this sculptural interpretation and titling might allude to a continuation of a postcolonial discourse, it is also more importantly about the possibility of art to be critical in both reception and production when considered in the temporal and political landscape of public space afforded this sculpture at the Biennale. It seemed fitting that as a collateral project in the KochiMuziris Biennale that the geographic location of Fort Kochi, where the Ambassador as a car is still quite prevalent and in use, might be a suitable 186

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situation to use the sculptural form to amplify and act as a tool to reconsider this familiar vehicle of the local streets and to use the opportunity of this Biennale to connect back to the everyday and thus the local people through the familiarity of the Ambassador. Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism is a fitting reference point to this particular project and particularly the title of the chapter ‘Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories’ (1993: 1–72), which I find to be an apt description when constructing the conceptual conceit of this sculpture. The original car has a history of production that becomes a significant narrative for me between India and the United Kingdom that takes in the complexities and overlaps of contemporaneity understood within a critical understanding of a recent set of colonial and imperial histories. Said’s discussion of interpretations of history illustrated through his quote of T.S. Eliot about writers needing to have ‘[t]his historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together. . . No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone’; and Said’s imperialism comes as a result of political, ideological, economic, and social practices, ‘“structures of feeling” that support, elaborate, and consolidate the practice of empire’ (Said, 1993: 19). This might be noted as a description of pride in this new Indian car when the original Ambassador first became prevalent in India. The conditions of the wrecked Ambassador rupture any historic memory of the arrival of this shining symbol of progression now instead dislocated from the new and consolidated into a past. This situation makes sense of the titling of the sculpture, describing its historiography contained within this symbolic wreck. The crashed and graffitied car could also be a symbol of the consequences of the politics of space and place imagined as an anarchic gesture or a timely reminder of the temporal nature of things. It becomes a point that Bhabha calls, ‘hybrid sites of cultural negotiation’ (1994: 255), where the critical understanding of this car can be imagined through terms of the postcolonial as a historiography that challenges us to consider hybrid locations and the hybridity of locations. It is here that I find cultural value through this wrecked Ambassador, embedded with the trappings of both historic traditions, of cultural contingency and the textual indeterminacy of its local graffiti; that in this specific outdated car can transform our understanding of a narrative of urban progress and modernity when realised as an artwork.

Participations In bringing the ‘car’ to Kochi, I searched for someone to fill the cloth sculpture and by chance I came across a furniture shop selling mattress stuffing. While trying to negotiate a bulk-buy of foam to fill the car I was told that 187

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Figure 8.3 David Jose outside Casinovas Bar assembling End of Empire, Fort Kochi, 2015. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza

someone who owned a furniture upholstery shop across the street might be able to help me. The owner, David Jose, was a local Keralite who was immediately interested in trying to understand the project and the object. He immediately got to work challenging ideas I had about stuffing the whole object with foam, lamenting the cost and volume needed for the scale of form and pointing out the need for more structural supporting elements. Immediately when David started to speak of the challenge in making this artwork and his interest in having this as a new project that might show off his skills, I knew that I had my first participant and collaborator to work with. The idea of collaborating with ‘non-artists’ is important to me as a way of naturalising the process of making the artwork, while throwing into question the authorship of a work that Grant Kester (2013b) writes of as a key ‘communication’ approach. Expanding the thinking and approaches to critically applying these dialogical artistic practices and approaches allows for what would normally be a more conventional relationship between art and a social world, and between artist and viewer to shift, while allowing the experience of reception to extend over time. Developing a dialogical practice is key in my approach in the opportunity afforded by the Biennale in Kochi, by constructing this approach into the conceptual conceit of the collateral project that allows for a potentially wider social exchange. 188

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This approach allows for the very responses of the collaborators and those participating to have the ability to influence the final results and the ‘transformations’ in the development of the form of the work. As Kester argues: We require new models of reception capable of addressing the actual, rather than the hypothetical, experience of participants in a given project, with a particular awareness of the parameters of agency and affect. . . This would also necessitate an analysis of the gathering together and disaggregation of bodies within a given project, and the ways in which these varying proximities inflect the meaning of the work and the consciousness of the participants. And this requires, in turn, new research methodologies. . . a fieldbased approach, in which the critic inhabits the site of practice for an extended period of time, paying special attention to the discursive, haptic, and social conditions of space, and the temporal rhythms of the processes that unfold there. (Kester, 2013b) Kester goes on to look at the communication element of participatory practices as ‘dialogical practices’, which can unfold over differing lengths of time as their ‘spatial contours’ or geographic boundaries fluctuate over time. Kester sees the critical response as questioning ‘[W]hen does the work begin and when does it end? What are the boundaries of the field within which it operates, and how were they determined? . . . The unfinalizable quality of dialogical production requires us to understand the bounded-ness of the field of practice, and how these boundaries have been produced, modified, and challenged’ (Kester, 2013b). Kester’s account foregrounds the need for the artist to be aware of both the entry into and departure from the ‘field’ that defines the situation and personal history as a social context as a field of practice. I would describe my own awareness in terms of my own relationship to the historiographical situation of the Ambassador being one of the factors that I have co-opted the particular car as an artwork and expression of my own related concerns. Finding David, as a skilled and willing local craftsman, became part of the process of surrendering the decision making and production of the art as coproducers if not collaborators as such. Making work outside of the traditional studio space in public spaces also becomes part of the strategy of working against the prevailing assumptions and the fetishisation of the valued object of the art and of ownership, and removes some of the formal barriers for viewing or producing the works. While working with David the premise of the transaction was not so much about remuneration but of an opportunity for him to push his production skills in the aim of later getting some certification 189

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and letter of recommendation from me. He showed me an example of a certificate from the American army for a work he had done for them and that he would need a certificate as part of the exchange with which to use to apply for work abroad. In particular he told me of a friend who was working in the Hollywood film industry where he thought David’s skills might be utilised making props and was encouraging him to try and get a visa to come over. Further conversation opened around David’s previous experience in the Middle East working for the American army where he produced custom-built boxes to transport machine guns. The idea of the trading of these skills should be recorded and encompassed as part of the artwork, and this labour revealed a history of skills and global economics and production that reflected the very nature of the original historiography of the Ambassador. The everyday also becomes a part of the process of production where a dialogue with the locality through David’s collaboration and networks of local help, information and knowledge occurs as part of a practice. It is possible to engage locally, bringing new relationships and understanding of the Biennale and art production into local narratives and exchange even if this is difficult to define in terms of levels of awareness of the contributors. This is notable as an approach where multiple levels of activities and participations need to be managed as a durational project. Working in this way as an external visitor also brings together these different economies linked with the international movements that come with the international aspect of the Biennale programme, bringing international artists and their production needs of art into the local economy in a more direct way. With artists including myself working in situ, social boundaries are crossed, which for me becomes a socio-political gesture of my practice and recognition of the locality. Using the opportunity of art to bring me closer to a home audience by establishing conversations and meeting people is an important part of the process. Learning about people, the local culture, issues and concerns on a personal and universal level and their response to my work makes the art more accessible through a process, while it was clear to see how the situation had a certain currency for David. His friends joined in and came to view the art, and the story of David working on an international art project even made the local Malayalam paper. All of this became part of the participatory nature of working and of shared concerns that grounding the project in terms of inclusivity and locality. It could be seen here as a kind of action research challenging the hegemony of art through this social inclusion. As many of the works I have produced over the years connect with the global economic condition including economic migration and its attendant issues and problems, then it was even more important to me that the objects of the artwork did not become the very commodities that they seek to question or the situation of economic need. 190

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The cheapest and most practical approach to dealing with building the shape of the car was to use empty boxes to stuff the car and to fill out the large volume of its internal space. The collection of these boxes necessitated a search for what was locally a commodity, and deferring to David as guide and his rickshaw-driving friend, we went on a search around Kochi to multiple small businesses operating in the city which might sell or give us boxes. While traversing his network of fellow small businessmen, David used the opportunity to show off images on our travels on his mobile while describing proudly that he was now working with the Biennale. Everyone we approached were welcoming and happy to help; while many professed to know little about the Biennale, many questions were asked about what we were doing, especially of David’s involvement. In general he responded by saying he was working with me, not for me, which for me was an important recognition of the ownership and shared values that he was attributing to his contribution, and which I welcomed. As the production of the sculpture was finishing I was told by the Biennale organisers that I would have to pay a large fee to the unions if I moved the sculpture across Kochi as this would require a small truck, a quirk of the local labour laws. On the day of moving the sculpture David assured me that I should not pay these charges and he had organised a solution that turned out to be an elderly local gentlemen who worked as a transporter using a two-wheeler trolley, who moved goods by hands. This situation became another relational moment in local narrative and history of hegemonies of labour as played out in the city, with each party its own defined role in the wider scheme of working and economic relations. I was extremely reluctant to this solution, faced with an elderly man and with the physical effort I knew that would be required. However, David asserted that the man needed the work and wanted this job while technically the unions could not stop us if we delivered the sculpture in this manner; since we were not using a motorised vehicle, we were not infringing the rules of motorised delivery. With me working collaboratively with locals we would not be bothered by the unions who were focused on the financial opportunities afforded by the extra work to be gained through the Biennale from foreign visitors in the main. The paradox – and surrealism – of the problem and that we might circumnavigate this situation carrying a full-sized replica of a vehicle was not lost on me. With some of David’s friends-come-volunteers we traversed the narrow streets to deliver the sculpture to the site. This act of movement became in itself a temporal performance of the street, with a passing audience curious to know what was occurring much to the delight of those helping move the sculpture. Only on arrival at the designated site for the sculpture did I realise I did not have the documented permission when David asked me for this, only verbal permissions from the Biennale to park 191

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the sculpture in the forecourt of the Revenue Divisional Office (RDO). Here I was stopped by an RDO worker and refused entry without said documents. Our inability to successfully negotiate the permissions needed to install the car in its allotted space inside the grounds of the RDO office in Kochi was itself a manifestation of the very politics of space and place that the initial sculpture represented and alluded to. The contingent response to this moment of initial failure encapsulated the very issues of the institution of art that I had tried to avoid. The political situation of space was occurring in this moment of bureaucracy but also simultaneously gave a temporal solution that spoke of the situation. At this point I asked if the public car parking space outside the RDO office was available for us to use to place or ‘park’ the sculpture of the car, which was accepted as a legitimate use of the space. This became an opportunity to reconfigure the sculpture back to its origination as a car re-legitimised outside of being an art installation. The sculpture was suddenly here realised through the Biennale by simply positioning it in a parking bay on a busy street, thus returning it as an object into what on first appearances would be its natural home. The contingent realisation was that here the car’s reading as a sculpture could become more ambiguous and challenging in the sphere of this ‘public space’. At this point other local friends of David arrived on motorbike to see the sculpture. It was clear that they felt no reservations in engaging directly in the situation as they openly commented and discussed what should be done with the sculpture to best show it off, and as we tried to move it into place, suggestions abounded as to where it should be placed for greatest effect. I was happy to relinquish and let these decisions belong to this group, satisfied to see them critically engaged, taking ownership and realising a dialogical and local exchange that I might never have realised had the project worked within a more controlled encounter via the Biennale.

A politics of place These unique set of conditions and situation of the associated politics of Kerala and Kochi, understood through the various hangovers of previous Communist politics and strong labour laws and heavy unionisation, is a historic legacy that controls the movement of art into the sites of the Biennale, and offered me the opportunity to incorporate it into the critical dimension of space prescribed within my work. The Biennale’s opening up of sites within the city that were otherwise redundant or without interest, has given a new public appreciation to the power and use of art especially when artworks connect to or reference elements of the locality that ground them in the city. This rethinking of public space through the Biennale by occupying the indeterminate sites of the public domain was 192

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an important gesture of the Biennale to the city and its inhabitants that also hoped to draw new visitors to the Biennale deeper into the everyday of the city. Within these movements of people and art, this global turn of international art allowed for my artwork a critical return and rehabilitation of the Ambassador, in this situation becoming an object of value again and of interest both to visitors familiar with this icon and to those locally who had helped construct and install the car in Kochi. Working in this situation offers an opportunity to rethink the problematic of dominant relationships and also that of the artist in an imperialistic role by creating situations that might take away the power relations while opening up to the potential for others to stake their claim in the collaboration. It was clear to me that the extended group had become, through my collaboration with David, an extension of the project and also became protagonists in the wider critique of an engaged community. This engagement might seem tenuous and accidental in some parts but there was clear understanding through our discussions and the curiosity aroused that this group were being treated with respect and with interest. It was clear that David above all felt more than just a participant in my art project when he asked me when we would make some new art together and that he felt truly empowered through the relationship not just in our interest in his skills but his ability to negotiate the practical and political situation of the locality for us. Placing the car outside of the negotiated and permissioned public spaces brings another critical mode of reception to the artwork while acknowledging the very local issues at play. Maybe the final allusion of the failed placing of the sculpture in an authorised space for art gave back some of its initial visual power by returning it to a symbolic home, allowing for it to become finally understood as a Derridean deconstruction; an anonymity from art that only the streets could allow. Like Baudelaire’s claim for the ‘heroism of modern life’, the sculpture situated in one of the many streets and public car parking spaces returned the object to the everyday situation if several times removed. The indifference of the streets becomes a situation that heightens the presence of the sculpture and situating the sculpture on the streets keeps the energised situation of the local context that first drew me to documenting the crashed car in the first place. This soft cloth sculpture, filled with sponge and cardboard boxes on the streets would become hostage to the situation of time and place, of nature and people that foregoing of the protected space of the Biennale did not afford it. Within the interventions of daily life and of time through the bird droppings, water stains, the dirt of the street became part of the very fabric of the sculpture with none of the controls or preservation of the art object in place rendering the sculpture a new nomadic document of place. 193

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Figure 8.4 Rameez, Biennale volunteer outside Casinovas Bar assembling End of Empire, Fort Kochi, 2015. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza

By removing this work of the values of the cultural production of art, the ownership of the situation of art, the ideas of the artists, the de-commodification of the artwork liberates the work from the framework of the institution of art that even the Biennale format cannot eschew while socialising it. Doherty (2015) gives a view to further approaches to socially engaged art citing art historian Miwon Kwon from her essay ‘The Wrong Place’ (2000), setting her concerns within a context of more recent debates around the social turn in contemporary art. As Kwon argues ‘the avant-garde struggle has in in part been a kind of spatial politics, to pressure the definition and legitimation of art by locating it elsewhere, in places other than where it “belongs”’ (2000: 42–43). I might consider through the contingent moment of locating the Ambassador sculpture in the car parking space, that this act heightened the situation of the everyday through a process of refamiliarisation through the unfamiliar object of art as a similar strategy of spatial politics where the work is situated in the ‘wrong place’. Doherty (2015) and Kwon’s (2000) accounts are pertinent when considering the abstraction of the car through its ‘accidental’ return as an artwork which in the context of the street starts to become familiar again especially in relation to the crashed cars that lie just metres away outside the local police station. The double take that occurs with the sculpture and the realisation this affects becomes an 194

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interesting phenomenon where the art heightens the reality around it, and when inevitably passers-by take photos on their camera phones, the image at scale returns the object back into a closer representation of its former self. I would claim I was disrupting the narrative structure of the gallery or museum by locating the sculpture in public space within a situation demonstrating this is not a valuable art object or being valued. The viewer here is no longer a passive viewer but must take on a more active critical role because the relation between the work and the street deprives the relationship between viewer and object of a more passive hegemonic relationship found between that of an artwork and the visitor to the gallery. What is contested here is what Rancière calls the ‘regimes of the arts’, which again locates critical ideas on art against its historical and temporal relativity to the prevailing hierarchies of a society. The democracy of art here is also an ‘end of empire’ with revised narratives of modernism understood as the recalibration of centres of cultural production and globalisation understood through the conceptual conceit of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale that has worked hard to question the modes of privilege accorded to the reception of contemporary art by literally using the city as an open gallery. For me as the artist, the critical possibility of liberating myself from the object of art and ownership by constructing the work using local skills and labour, through a democratic welcoming of ideas and views in the production and by not preserving the object, allows for the performative and relational meaning of the work to take precedence. By acknowledging the strategy to connect the work locally and to give it new meanings and relational values in this approach of site-orientated practices is the realisation that this can only function through the multiple agreements and collaborative efforts that both allow the localisation of the art and also connect the work in unimagined ways to local issues and discourses that cannot be formally controlled. All over the world art has developed its own imperialist regime described within the institutional form of the national museums and galleries, cultural and performance spaces that draw from the middle and upper middle classes symbolic of a cultural economy and entrepreneurial capital. As an artist I was very aware that even in the more seemingly liberating environs of the Biennale I had the contingent opportunity to work against this prevailing trend or need for assurance of the formal arts space for recognition for my sculpture and by embracing the local politics of space and labour the work has manifested itself through the emerging critiques through making this work public on the streets of Kochi. It might be seen as an issue of cultural homogenisation that occurs while extending an original history of the buildings into new exclusive spaces for the affluent and globalised traveller to enjoy a seemingly authentic experience of a local history. This re-enacting 195

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of history becomes a historical turn that will again exclude many of the local population and bring wider infrastructural issues to the city. While the Biennale has offered a vision and gone some way to pragmatically demonstrate its ‘effect’ on the city, it also leaves a legacy of complex problems associated within the global ‘ethnoscape’ that the contemporary globalised Biennale operates within, that is, a shifting world of globalised workers moving on to the next location to conduct their business. It would seem an opportunity for the Biennale to address through artistic and critical intervention a dialogue and dissemination of ideas, free of any political conformism, to actively address how these large-scale city-centred initiatives might develop sustainable agendas for creatively dealing with regeneration by conceptualising the problems being faced. There are examples of the strategic use of a biennale practice, such as in Liverpool where ‘the strategy is to not exhibit works that have been selected in advance but to invite artists to create in-situ projects in direct response to local problems’ (Vogel, 2010: 64).

Making works The Ambassador might be considered a historic object and reference of the capitalisation of art as it reflects an ‘industrial mass-culture’. It signifies both a beginning and an end for this vehicle as it straddles the divide of time and place through its shift in place of manufacture and in its identity from the Morris Oxford produced in the United Kingdom through to the Hindustan Ambassador produced in India. The title of the artwork not only references this colonial historic relationship but also the significance of the shifts in global production of this vehicle as it passes between nations becoming symbolic of the changing situations and fortunes of an industrialising India but also a shift that recognises the availability of a mass labour that India might provide as an industrial nation to power the Nehruvian modernising agenda. India’s leap forward in a shift towards industrialisation also came in terms of self-determination postindependence with modernism being here expressed as capitalist production in the Ambassador. Stackemeier references the need and purpose of labour within the narrative of ‘art as capital, as service, and as industry’ (2014: 16). I also recognise the historic imperative of this artwork and the implicit need to have to rebuild End of Empire each time it is shown so as to be symptomatic of the engagement with the idea of labour, of production and of locality embedded into the very nature of this artwork. End of Empire as an artwork revives the crashed car by its need for rebuilding each time it is shown as the repetitive act of reconstruction that is redolent of repetition and pattern of mass production in industry but rather than anonymise it in the way the production line might in a factory this artwork instead localises production and humanises it. This humanisation is part of the constant 196

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need of the artwork and artistic approach to seek out local expertise and work with others in the realisation of the artwork. This approach brings into question the status, ownership and authorship of the artwork, as with each rendering the artwork becomes different dependent on who constructs it, where and how. These same ideas of authorship might be considered in terms of contemporary art production with the artist as the developer of concepts and ideas rather than the maker or producer of the artwork. In this sense, End of Empire has been designed to celebrate the collaborative moment, the contingency. And intended it is an echo with my earlier account of the first edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale as a ‘work in progress’: The construction, let alone the launching, of exhibitions across citywide sites, was visibly challenging. The effect of this was not wholly detrimental to the event, lending a grassroots feel in the communal problem solving, which I could see still being played out well after the launch. It seemed apt in this deeply socialist state to see the visibility of the labor needed in the ‘production’ of art, which, in other circumstances, might have been a less effective avant-garde gesture or performance but here seemed both honest and a welcome antidote to the self conscious performance of reality. (D’Souza, 2013: 308) The capital value of the car, not just in terms of materials but of individual labour, creates a narrative of inequality between the maker and producer, the product and buyer. The sculpture became a mere device of transaction, allowing for a more developed exchange where accident and contingency could be accommodated as a working practice that might in turn localise the work rather than enforce any specific format. In the context of Kochi, through dialogical exchange, we were all granted the possibility to bring new ideas and approaches to bear. As a result, the finished car bore little resemblance to the one produced in Delhi in 2012. Working in a public domain also facilitated the dialogues that resulted in differing approaches to production that in turn reflect practices necessary to produce through the most economical means possible. This has occurred throughout the existence of the sculpture when production has resulted in the need for sharing resources, ideas, labour, space, tools and knowledge from a community action mobilised through art. The car becomes a porous membrane to the socio-political situation that is realised within. Working in this manner can provide a medium for shaping a deeper social connection between place and artistic endeavour, which in turn involves the local community not just as audience but as active participants, shaping dialogues between art and life and life as art. By taking into account the temporal nature of 197

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Figure 8.5 David Jose, outside Casinovas Bar assembling End of Empire, Fort Kochi, 2015. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza

the situation of art and working outside of the strictures of institutionalised space and materials of value, one might close the increasing divide between art event and local publics. The work can be understood as a participatory artwork, with an audience participating with the artwork by situating it in the everyday situation of life as another object of the street. I would also refer to the participation of all those local people as the ‘socialisation’ of the work with those who have, in some cases unwittingly, become collaborators/cooperators in the production, realisation and installation of the work. The dialogical nature of these exchanges of art as a form of ‘social cooperation’ is reflected in the term used by Tom Finkelpearl in his writings on participatory art. Finkelpearl (2013: 6) elaborates stating: ‘collaboration is simply too far-reaching a claim to make; not all of the participants are equally authors of these projects, especially in the initiation and conceptualization. Cooperation on the other hand, simply implies that people have worked together on a project.’ As with much participatory or public artworks, the political and social components are writ large. The local problematics in the act of installing the Ambassador sculpture in Kochi reflect the local situation and historical perspective of labour laws and power of local unions, as part of a legacy of a previous Communist local government and politicised culture that focused on protecting the rights of workers from exploitation. The art object here can be seen as a conduit for understanding a particular cultural and social situation while the local 198

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conditions that have shaped its situation as an artwork forcing it to occupy its space in the public realm describe the polarising situation of art and the politics of space that transcends public and private life in India. Here this can be recognised by the inevitable situation of the artwork stranded in a public parking space outside of the legitimate destination. The seeming failure of the artist and the artwork in not achieving its installation site in its given space becomes a reminder of art’s ability to reflect and critically engage with its social realm and surroundings. The situation raises compelling questions for the Biennale in respect to its actual abilities to be a site to question formal structures and controls. It is important to understand the complexity of the situation of a Biennale (or similar public facing event) which wants to participate in the fabric of the everyday lives of the local community, to garner their support, their interest and curiosity to enrich their lives or understanding of life through culture and history and respect for location. The symbolic gesture of the failure of the installation of the work becomes the art’s ability to take this situation and make this a function of the art working outside the safety of the gallery, designated art space, institution or studio. Dorothea von Hantelmann discusses this in terms of art’s relevance to society, its political relevance and its potential impact understood through a recent history of the avant-garde breaking with the structures of conventional reception of art through the gallery and museum. To do this Hantelmann observes that art structures need to exist and art cannot completely remove itself from these conventions and that, ‘The museum in particular was seen as the embodiment of art’s exclusion from social life’ (2010: 12). Like my own project, some of the collateral events at the Biennale can exist as separate entities outside of the format and to some degree this can only occur by existing within a wider ecology and understanding of being simultaneously outside while part of the Biennale at the same time. Hantelmann’s understanding that ‘the artwork does not gain a societal impact by rupturing these conventions: it is via these conventions that there already is a societal impact’ (2010: 14) gains credence when considering how the End of Empire operates within the context of collateral projects. Here unpredictability means a more thoughtful consideration of the place and space for art, its social understanding and reception and the freedom for a public to respond or not to the artwork. For me the artwork became immaterial; more than that it became a relational and socialising tool bringing me closer to the city and the local community, many of whom while curious of the Biennale were clearly not able to connect with it but wanted to. Yet, through David we had a conduit for the artwork and the extended meaning and ‘effect’ of the Biennale to create dialogues and discussion beyond the artwork. By making the sculpture public and entrusting it to the elements and to the streets liberated it from issues of value while making its status 199

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closer to the public. The car became a great facilitator for discussion as a timely reminder of a collective historical moment understood through the social life of the car and what it represented as an object of living nostalgia, raising the question as to why an artist might choose this seemingly redundant object to make art from and what purpose this held. The capacity for the object to hold and store the many ideas, histories and associations made it an interesting symbolic choice especially when placed in the public space of the street. Here through the situation of the Biennale a reversal can occur, returning the object (Ambassador) back to its subject (the recent history of the manufacture and labour of this postindependence symbol of Indian modernity). While the production of the surface artwork is an inevitable translation of the original object that reinterprets its familiarity, it retains its fundamental recognition as the former Ambassador, which is important when positioned on the streets of Kochi as part of the Biennale. The nature of the artwork of End of Empire relies on the fact that it must be realised each time it is shown by filling and constructing the form/body in situ; each time the artwork is shown it is being localised through a circuit of rehabilitation and the artist having to work collectively with a variety of locals to achieve this. This approach allows for a dialogical relationship through the shared discussions in the sourcing of local materials, skills, space to produce the artwork; the transportation and negotiations around this also become part of the shared narratives between artist and a local public. This situation becomes an important part of the collective artistic gesture through the very labour needed to make the artwork transpire while illustrating the ability for art to be, if not wholly collaborative, collectively engaging on many levels. This in some ways takes it back to the labour of production a narrative of the original Ambassador and its life cycle and meaning beyond being mass-produced object. A part of the conceit of the work was to build an artwork that was not designed to last, thus removing issues of the material and economic emphasis on the production and ownership of this as an art object or as a form of material wealth in the circuit of art economy. I have increasingly looked to make more critically reflexive and intangible works where the object has limited value beyond the project and its temporal and dialogical existence is more paramount. Working against this situation is not only a reflexive action but also part of the conceptual framing of the works allowing for engagement into a critique of the ownership and economic value over cultural value of the artwork. Housing the sculpture on the streets was a recognition of the need for the artwork to have a relationship rooted in the fabric of the city where its meaning might be understood through location and as part of its original identity as an object found on the streets and one that in its original form before its demise on the road. In this particular situation, the artwork must 200

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work in its own context and should not be separated from this. Kwon writing extensively on site-specific art considers that: Often we are comforted by the thought that a place is ours, that we belong to it, even come from it, and therefore are tied to it in some fundamental way. Such places (‘right’ places?) are thought to reaffirm our sense of self, reflecting back to us an unthreatening picture of a grounded identity. This kind of continuous relationship between a place and a person is what many critics declare to be lost, and needed, in contemporary society. In contrast, the ‘wrong’ place is generally thought of as a place where one feels one does not belong – unfamiliar, disorienting, destabilising, even threatening. This kind of stressful relationship to a place is, in turn, thought to be detrimental to a subject’s capacity to constitute a coherent sense of self and the world. (Kwon, 2004: 159) By working with David and his colleagues, and by placing the car in the street where they were able to comfortably take ownership and share in the experience of belonging to the artwork in their public space, the work of art became liberated away from the strictures of the Biennale, which in turn are determined by the state in giving the permission for its initial site of display at the RDO office. The artwork becomes rendered through the limitations of the situation and our limitations in navigating or moving the object through the city without attracting the attention of the unions. Producing the car in situ in Fort Kochi was also to be schooled in the opinions and exchanges between multiple local entities, whether it was the owner of the house and David’s landlord whose front yard we were co-opting for the assembly of the car or his friends. Interestingly for me were the co-workers in the restaurant who were also working as unpaid helpers at the Biennale who were eager to help David and myself in the production of the car, enamoured by the idea they might have involvement with an actual artist and art project in the Biennale who as a side line took foreign tourists on tours of the city on their motorbikes. All of these individuals became participants, contributors and collaborators, unwittingly taking a role in the life and narrative of the sculpture, thus embedding the project into the locality while engaging with the international platform of the Biennale. My strategies as the artist became dependent on the knowledge and support of the locals and their extended network whether in circumventing the local labour laws to move goods around the city or through the transfer of knowledge that went in both directions as problems were solved with approach, materials and transport of the finished object. 201

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Figure 8.6 Moving the sculpture End of Empire on the streets of Kochi, Fort Kochi, 2015. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza

The social relationships formed in this initial product of economic exchange has lasted to this day with David still keeping in touch checking on the development of my writing on the Biennale, texting me clippings of a photo of himself in the local paper with the sculpture and asking about his inclusion in this chapter on ‘our’ project, always enquiring as to my return to Kochi and further projects with him for the Biennale. It is this sustained dialogical practices that become an important factor in this project beyond the actual event of the Biennale. Kester offers alternative and more nuanced approaches to considering participatory art that engages with the open-ended possibility, not in the artwork itself but through the process of communication that the artwork initiates. Kester also offers a warning to the artists engaged in this approach. Community art tradition, for its part, was able engage discrete viewers and participants in their daily lives, breaking down to some extent the conventional hierarchy between artist and viewer. However, it was often less successful in developing a substantive critique of the ways in which the quotidian experience was informed by broader systems of political and economic domination or in acknowledging its own complicity in perpetuating these systems. (Kester, 2013a: 17) 202

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These elements of social narratives are a wider critical interpretation of a social life understood in the shifts and reveal in the combination of time and space in the city through the Biennale and can be understood in Soja’s examination of ‘postmodern geographies’, which plays a part in the conceptual conceit of the Biennale: ‘[p]rojected into this larger landscape is a dynamic and contradiction filled dialectic of space and time, played out at many different scales from the routinised practices of everyday life to the more distant geopolitical shuffling’s of a global spatial division of labour’ (Soja, 1989: 157). The prevailing situation and personal history of David serve to remind of a particular situation of production that becomes part of a wider narrative for so many Keralites before him, who have moved to the Middle East as economic migrants attracted by higher paid work and lower taxes. In David’s case, he ended up working for the American army using his furniture-making skills in constructing custom-made boxes for transporting guns and armaments for soldiers posted there. The shifting economic realities of India’s recent history can be seen as it made its way towards independence from colonialism, then to a protectionist national economy and finally to a globally liberalised free economic power. This might be thought through the lens of Kerala’s local historical, economic and political contexts, which have made it both difficult and potentially an important addition to the state when the economics of globalism makes its local economy now more reliant on the global workforce and the remittances of Keralites working in the oil-rich Gulf States while suffering from high unemployment rates due to a heavily politicised workforce.

Art as life The Biennale has described itself as a ‘people’s biennale’ using the city as an expanded field for art as a way of bringing it closer to the lives of Kochi’s residents, while at the same time becoming a proposition as an international destination not only of art but also of culture experienced through this expanded field. As an invited artist I was very aware, even in the more seemingly liberating environs of the Biennale, that I had the opportunity to work at its edges where art was meeting and could possibly become life on the streets. By eschewing a need for assurance of the formal arts space and its attendant recognition for my sculpture I might embrace the local issues of politics, of space and labour in the city. That End of Empire might manifest itself through the multiple critiques and modalities by way of making this work public on the streets of Kochi I might support the project of the Biennale in meeting these goals. By co-opting elements and commodities of the everyday alludes to the social reality of life, which has underpinned the production of End of Empire, 203

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Figure 8.7 Onlookers outside RDO Office discussing End of Empire, Fort Kochi, 2015. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza

and ‘the ‘quotidian’ aspects of the everyday and the common elements of this that can seem to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time and suggests that artists might be drawn to the everyday because ‘the everyday is both authentic and democratic; it is the place where ordinary people creatively use and transform the world they encounter from one day to another’ (Johnstone, 2008: 13). ‘Numerous genres have been deeply intertwined in participation, sociality, conversation, and “the civic”’ (Thompson, 2004: 19), so telling a story of the growing social imbalances in the urban situation that artists are increasingly seeking to address and one that I believe the Biennale in Kochi can address. This can be seen while situating this sculpture as part of a Biennale that has also engaged a younger generation of graffiti and street artists to make public works on the walls of the city in what is a relatively new art form in India, mainly located within the urban settings of cities like Mumbai and Delhi. This again creates another dialogical moment for my sculpture. The street art echoes a form of very Indian protest from the daubing of the public walls in India with political slogans and party logos to become part of the everyday patina and palimpsest of everyday visual life on the streets. Of course, the co-opting of illegal graffiti and street art as a more sociably acceptable form in some ways works 204

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to neuter and commodify the activity, bringing it from the periphery to the centre. It could be realised that under the auspices of the Biennale that there is much thinking still to be done so that this gesture that is so public does not become tokenistic and where it can be seen as part of the challenging nature of the Biennale. By accepting these terms, it could be argued that the Biennale falls into the operation of the machinery of the ‘culture industry’ and its consumptive powers. End of Empire sits among these commissioned street works as a reminder of the connection between the everyday and both reflective ambitions of art to life and a nod to the origination of the graffiti form developed from the everyday and the contingent response of a public in their lives. It is poignant for me that I noted multiple graffiti artworks by Daku in this second edition of the Biennale across the city. On public walls are enacted Daku’s circular narrative of a career, that joins his original practice as a Delhi graffiti artist through to artist via his interventions on the walls of Kochi during the Biennale. His work during the Biennale period is well timed and by accident also extends my sculpture containing an image of his graffiti into a museology of Daku, especially in respect to his new growing fame nationally where he is now known as the Banksy of India and whose guerilla artworks at the Biennale act as a rupture to those legitimised works commissioned by the Biennale. This follows ideas put forward by Rugg (2010), who writes on contingent spaces in relation to site-specific artworks talks of appropriating ‘dialectical sites’ to contest the spatial hierarchies of the ordered city, an approach I would claim when I use the parking space on a street in Kochi, which in turn becomes a ‘provisional site’ for art. It is not only that this site is public but also in terms of its activity and the meaning of this where the constant rhythm of the city is enacted by pedestrians walking, cyclists and vehicles traversing the road alluding to the narrative of the previous social life in India of the former Ambassador realised here as this sculpture. As this art object imitates life on the street I am able to observe passers who while realising and registering that something is amiss with this object are able to acknowledge it in this site, while others clearly have a double take and try and make sense of this seemingly familiar object. As part of the normalisation of the art object this is, as Rugg (2010: 38) says, ‘[a] potential space for encounter in which materials, smells, sounds and the weather all play intensely sensual parts’. A point not lost on me in allowing this fabric-shelled car to be left unprotected to the elements and whose surface begins over the weeks to reflect an ageing and weathering as a surface register revealing the cars surface to manifestly absorb and reflect its situation and location as a temporal object. Using the Biennale as a vehicle to sidestep the hierarchies of the institution of art one still has to be wary of the institution of the Biennale. The failure 205

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Figure 8.8 Crashed Hindustan Ambassador car outside the DDA Shopping Complex, Sheikh-Sarai, New Delhi, 2011. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza.

to realise the planned location of the sculpture had allowed the installation of End of Empire to be freed in some respects of these burdens through its ambiguous position on the streets of Kochi. It is at once a physical and a visual sign of this once commodity and legacy of empire subverted not as an object of domination of power of economy and production or of engineering and manufacturing but as a subverted image, as an ‘end of empire’ and what Rancière (2009: 18) speaks of as ‘art’s efforts to free itself of imagery. . . a form of mourning for a certain programme: the programme of a certain end of images’. As the Biennale establishes itself, it too has to free itself from the expectations of art, allowing for more radical and significant departures and for failure, but most of all to connect deeply with the locality and the histories and narratives of labour present in the city to form new narratives through the critical meeting of art and life and its relevance to society.

References Adorno, T.W. (1991) ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, in J.M. Bernstein (ed.), The Culture Industry. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 98–106. Bhabha, H. (1994) ‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency’, in The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, pp. 245–282.

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Doherty, C. (2015) ‘Disorientation’, in C. Doherty (ed.), Out of Time Out of Place: Public Art (Now). London: Thames & Hudson, pp. 124–153. D’Souza, R.E. (2012) ‘Outside Art: Art, Location and Global Tensions’, in Jorinde Seijdel (ed.), Outside India: Dialogues and Documents of Art and Social Change. Delhi: W+K Publishing, pp. 115–157. D’Souza, R.E. (2013) ‘The Indian Biennale Effect: The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012’, Cultural Politics, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 296–312. Finkelpearl, T. (2013) ‘Introduction’, in What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–50. Hantelmann, Dorothea Von (2010) ‘The Societal Efficacy of Art’, in How to Do Things with Art: What Performativity Means in Art. Zurich: JRP Ringier, pp. 8–21. Johnstone, S. (2008) ‘Introduction/Recent Art and the Everyday’, in S. Johnstone (ed.), The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, pp. 12–23. Kester, G. ([2004] 2013a) ‘Preface’, in Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, pp. 15–20. Kester, G. (2013b) ‘The Device Laid Bare: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism’. Available Online: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-device-laidbare-on-some-limitations-in-current-art-criticism/ [Accessed 17 April 2016]. Kwon, M. (2000) ‘The Wrong Place’, Art Journal, Vol. 59, No. 1, pp. 33–43. Kwon, M. (2004) ‘By Way of a Conclusion: One Place after Another’, in One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 156–167. Rancière, J. (2009 [2003]) ‘The Future of the Image’, in The Future of the Image, trans. by Gregory Elliot. London: Verso, pp. 1–31. Rugg, J. (2010) ‘Contingent Spaces’, in Exploring Site-Specific Art: Issues of Space and Internationalism. I.B. Taurus, pp. 33–52. Said, E.W. (1993) ‘Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories’, in Culture & Imperialism. London: Vintage, pp. 1–72. Singh, R. (2002) A Way into India. London: Phaidon. Soja, E.W. (1989) ‘The Historical Geography of Urban and Regional Restructuring’, in Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London and New York: Verso, pp. 157–189. Stackemeier, K. (2014) ‘Art as Capital–Art as Service–Art as Industry: Timing Art in Capitalism’, in B.V. Bismarck, R. Frank, B. Meyer-Krahmer, J. Schafaff, and T. Weski (eds.), Timing: On the Temporal Dimension of Exhibiting. Berlin: Sterberg Press, pp. 15–38. Thompson, N. (2004) ‘Living as Form’, in Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011. New York: Creative Time Books, pp. 16–33. Vogel, S.B. (2010) Biennials: Art on a Global Scale. Vienna: Springer.

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Part III BEYOND THE EVENT As the city and the biennale are reconfigured as platforms from which viewers can ‘launch themselves’, we can see how the traditional function of the curator – providing an interpretation and classification of the global trajectories of contemporary art – has been complemented by the task of inviting artists and collectives who activate a critical interface between local citizens and global processes or . . . who use the biennale as a ‘space of encounter’. – Nikos Papastergiadia and Meredith Martin, ‘Art biennales and cities as platforms for global dialogue’, 2011, p.47 In keeping with the premise of this book to critically examine not just a biennale, but its effects, it is important to look outwards from the event of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, to consider how it extends into other domains and poses questions for the future. In short, it is necessary to look beyond the event. Riyas Komu raises this point vividly in Chapter 3, but in the final three chapters of this book, which make up this section, the opportunity is taken to examine some specific debates emanating outwards as an effect of the Biennale. The section opens with a consideration of the rhetoric of a ‘people’s biennale’, a phrase associated with the Biennale since its inception. The chapter, however, frames this notion in terms of the shifting discourse from art history to visual culture, with the latter arguably opening up possibilities for new visual ‘literacies’ that the Biennale is potentially in a position to harness and proliferate. This chapter is followed by an account of the Kochi Student Biennale, which provides a consideration of the current state of Indian art education, and which similarly is at a critical juncture in terms of both its political-economy and the burgeoning of a broader, more inclusive visual culture. Finally, this section closes with a chapter on ‘regional effects’, focusing on various models of large-scale art events that exist in South Asia. The account raises important but difficult questions about the future and sustainability of such large-scale events – but with the Kochi-Muziris Biennale offering a credible and contemporary new model.

9 ‘A PEOPLE’S BIENNALE’ A democracy of visual culture? Sunil Manghani During my visit to the opening of the second Kochi-Muziris Biennale, in December 2014, I was drawn to several conversations about the status of the event as an Indian Biennale. In short, I noted an oscillation in how the identity of the Biennale is portrayed: a tendency for it to be considered both India’s Biennale (as in hosting an international event) and an Indian Biennale (as a means of national representation). At stake are differing articulations of local, national, regional, and global identity. Arguably the differing faces of the Biennale simply reveal a pragmatism, a knowingness of what it is to instate an administration of art within a particular context (see Chapter 3). I was made aware, for example, of concerns as to how the new national government might alter the dynamics in which the Kochi Biennale Foundation had been founded. Crucially, there is a consideration for a biennale, as a local, national and international event, both to represent the area in which it is held and to be a site for many others to arrive to. There is also a prevailing rhetoric of a ‘people’s biennale’ that surrounds the Kochi Biennale, and which forms the main focus or pivot for this chapter. One way of understanding the above tensions of the Biennale is to situate it vis-à-vis the somewhat difficult relationship between art history and visual culture, which is arguably an ‘encounter’ still to take hold in the educational and scholarly contexts of India (Dave-Mukherji, 2014). As ‘disciplinary’ approaches, these two strands of enquiry attest to differing hierarchies of knowledge, with visual culture often concerned with more horizontal and contemporary forms of social engagement. Of course, from the outset, it must be stressed there is no simple ‘either/or’ relationship between ‘national’ or ‘visual’ culture (nor art history and visual culture). Indeed, both work hand in hand. However, it is fair to say ‘visual culture’ has been strongly associated with global (capitalist) culture – being seen as both critical and complicit in equal measure. The underlying conceit of this chapter is that the debates and indeed phenomena of visual culture allude to some kind of transcultural sign; some of which is mirrored 211

Figure 9.1 Mural painting under way on the walls of the Kochi Biennale Foundation offices in lead-up to the launch of the second Kochi-Muziris Biennale, December 2014. Photograph: Sunil Manghani.

Figure 9.2 Venue prepared for the BMW-sponsored Art Talk, as part of the launch of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, December 2014. Photograph: Robert E. D’Souza.

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in discussions around global and contemporary art, but that visual culture is equally attuned to the everyday, which cuts across mediums and pertains to a wider enquiry into not just the political, but the grounds of the political. In this sense, visual culture is more a deconstructive tactic than a system of representations, such as we find (albeit contested) with a national culture.

A people’s biennale At the Biennale’s opening BMW-sponsored Art Talk in December 2014, panellist Gulammohammad Sheikh (a renowned Indian artist, with works included in the second iteration of the Biennale) eloquently paraphrased a line from Gandhi: ‘I want the winds of the world to pass through my house, but I don’t want my house to be blown away.’ Gandhi’s actual line is: ‘I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any’ (quote from Young India, from early 1920s). Gulam Sheikh’s evocation of Gandhi would seem to encapsulate the tensions and possibilities that we might suggest of visual culture, within which we sense we are being ‘blown about’ ever more viscerally by our global condition. Of course, Gandhi’s line expresses a universal idea. We want to be open, but we do not want to lose out. We want to feel stimulated in/by the world (presumably by the unknown), but equally we want to feel secure in that same world. The perennial question is just how we achieve such a state. As Geeta Kapur (2000) reminds us, in her essay ‘Detours from the Contemporary’, one strategy has been tradition: What we in India today call tradition was put in the fray by nineteenth-century nationalism. Since this version of tradition emerges in the decolonizing process as an oppositional category it has the power of resistance, as we know very well from Gandhi. It has the power to transform routinely transmitted materials from the past into volatile forms that merit the claim of contemporary, even radical, affect. (Kapur, 2000: 267–268) By the 1970s, debates around the ‘modern’ (against strategic traditionalism) were coming into their own in the Indian art scene. In the opening lines of her 1978 book Contemporary Indian Artists, Geeta Kapur stands up against the perceived scepticism of ‘modern art’ in India, a scepticism she attacks as being ‘no better than an embarrassed self-derision typically 213

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post-colonial in mentality’ (1978: ix). Yet, she also presents something of a lament: Actual communities, alas, are dying away, and what is left is being devoured by a notion of internationalism based on technology and commerce. But, not yet wholly beguiled by such monolithic misconstructions of the notion of internationalism, the Indian artist hopefully realizes that internationalism is true, possible and desirable if the actual communities comprising the world are not wiped out but nurtured to survive at both the cultural and the political level. (Kapur, 1978: xi) By the time Geeta Kapur came to speak at the inaugural Kochi Biennale in 2012, and acting as curator of the main discussion forum, she is a great deal more sanguine about the international prospects and validity of the biennale format. It is apparent that over a relatively short period of time, over a few decades, India as a site of contemporary art practice and critique is able to position itself with ever greater confidence (see Chapter 1 and 2). What was evident from the opening Art Talk in December 2014 was a clear ‘stepping out’ from the past restrictions, imposed by the West, by history, by place and by economics. In being asked by the chair whether India is doing enough for Indian contemporary art, the Biennale’s curator, Jitish Kallat, suggested we might respond from a ‘space of lament’, yet he was quick to privilege a new sense of ingenuity. Also present, the then director of Tate Modern, Chris Dercon, remarked: ‘Postcolonialism, yes but. . . It is there, but it is more, it is about contemporary art in the contemporary world.’ And the artist, Parvathi Nayar, whose work was included in the Biennale at Aspinwall House (see Chapter 7), suggested: ‘The Kochi Biennale is different. My own work is about that (but not about Indianness) it is about “come here, but look out.” It is about what arrives on these shores, but is complex in exchange.’ An underlying consideration relates to the status of art within a broader phenomenon of visual culture – or rather, how an understanding of art through the lens of visual culture is just as important, not least for the longevity of the biennale format. Considerations of ‘global’ and ‘contemporary’ art have come to the fore more recently. It is by no means that these terms, along with ‘visual culture’, are mutually exclusive, but a critical import of visual culture is that it not just about art and the art world. In fact scholars of visual culture posit ‘there is no such thing as a visual medium because all media are necessarily mixed. That is why the field is properly called visual culture, not visual media studies or visual studies’ (Mirzoeff, 2009: 1; 214

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see also: Elkins et al., 2015). Taking Nicholas Mirzoeff’s line of argument, visual culture is taken to be concerned with the ‘division of the sensible’ (Jacques Rancière, 2004a: 225; 2004b), with fundamental questions as to who even has the right to look. The phrase and concept of the ‘division of the sensible’ is drawn from the writings of Jacques Rancière (2004a: 225), and adopted centrally by Mirzoeff in thinking through the complexities of visual culture. Rancière (2004b) offers a way of thinking about politics as itself a form of aesthetic – and here meaning not the aestheticization of politics, but more fundamentally that politics is aesthetic and the aesthetic is political. In brief, this leads to Mirzoeff’s interest in biopower, a concept drawn from the work of Michel Foucault, who refers to practices of regulation over people, whereby ‘an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques [achieves] the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations’ (Foucault, 1976: 140). In short, basic biological features become the site of political strategy, or quite literally ‘People Power’. More optimistically, Chris Dercon (2014), in a short video interview for the Kochi Biennale, refers to the event as a ‘people’s biennale’. It has learnt from the failures of other biennales, he suggests. It is not about city marketing, nor is it about the art market. The Biennale, he argues, is about its local, regional and global situation. During the Art Talk he remarked that art is ‘never ready’ (or at least when it is it is up for sale). Art’s untimeliness is its true resource: ‘And this is what the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is about. It is productionist.’ He echoes this point in the video interview when he remarks: ‘the Kochi Biennale is not only making a difference, it is also showing us the way how to make things differently.’ The idea of making a difference is a common refrain (to cite Gandhi again: ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’). However, it is necessary to probe a little further to genuinely understand what a ‘people’s biennale’ is and how it can be said to make a difference. It is not necessarily convincing, for example, that art – however untimely – is the sole means to understanding or responding to the ‘divisions of the sensible’. We need to take a wider view of what and where art is in relation to those who encounter it (and those who do not). Typically we might think about how different visitors, with differing experiences and expectations of art, come to a venue such as biennale. Yet, equally, as Riyas Komu points out (in Chapter 3), in the case of the Kochi Biennale we ought to remind ourselves that here the rhetoric of a ‘people’s biennale’ refers as much to the many small traders and members of the local community who effectively bankrolled elements of the Biennale (often waiving or waiting patiently on remittance over many months). While easily forgotten perhaps, these are as much the ‘people’ who have a stake in the ‘division of the sensible’, of what can be seen and shared. Thus, in hearing the phrase ‘people’s biennale’, we need to 215

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keep in mind a diversity of people: to include traders, gallery audiences, and also artists as individuals (as people, not star attractions, since many artists played a very hands-on role in making the Biennale). Of course, it is worth pointing out contemporary artists themselves are highly attuned to notions of visual culture. In fact, we might argue that art practice has much more to say about visual culture than art history. Atul Dodyia’s shutter paintings are a good example. Metal shutters are ubiquitous within the Indian urban landscape. Taking these as his ‘canvas’, Dodiya produced a series of vibrant paintings of collaged figurative elements. The shutters can be rolled up and down, making the paintings dynamic of the everyday, bringing the urban outside into the space of the exhibition venue. In this case, of course, we could argue the ‘regime’ of the gallery brings a formality that is at odds with the visual play that the artist has ably located from an everyday experience. Turning to the Kochi Biennale of 2014, under the curatorship of Jitish Kallat, there are three works worth noting. As an artist, Kallat is himself a good example of a practitioner immersed in a visual language of the everyday and its fluid complexities. As a curator the same sensibility for an expanded reading of visual culture comes through.

Figure 9.3 Installation photograph of Ho Rui An, Sun, Sweat, Solar Queens: An Expedition (2014). Photograph: Sangeeth Thali. Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation.

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The 2014 Biennale opened with the Charles and Ray Eames piece Powers of Ten (1977). It is a work of design, it uses the medium of film, and it is narrated by a physicist. It is also a film widely available on the Internet. Yet, it was also installed at the Biennale as a ‘work of art’. Another example is Michael Stevens’s Vsauce – whose ‘irritating’ set of punctuations, derived from his work on YouTube, appeared in the Biennale almost as transliterations of hypertext, as if, while visiting the venue, we have tapped keywords in a perverse search engine. Also exhibited was Ho Rui An’s Sun, Sweat, Solar Queens: An Expedition (2014), a performative lecture that presents a ‘fantasy’ film lecture, in which film clips seamlessly interweave with the speaker to provide a complex intertextual account of colonialism, as played out through a series of visual motifs and histories. It is common for art curators and critics to be somewhat euphoric about biennales and the prospects and significance of contemporary art more generally. On one level they are invested in such progress. At root is a widespread belief in some form of ‘transculture’. Chris Dercon (2014), for example, refers to a new self-confidence: ‘You know that you do not have to speak of your own community. Artists are becoming aware that they can speak for other communities as well; without it becoming then a kind of international language’ (Dercon, 2014; cf. Geeta Kapur on ‘internationalism’). Dercon goes on to say: I wish for the Kochi Biennale, that it would be a new form of working on an international cooperation, to partnership with other biennales; other biennales which speak in different ways about the region. I think the Kochi Biennale is perfect because it is completely in a subconscious way saying what happens if we speak from within and from the outside. (Dercon, 2014) The curator, Nicholas Bourriaud, similarly speaks in terms of a new ‘global culture’. To quote from The Radicant (2009), he writes: ‘The more that contemporary art integrates heterogeneous artistic vocabularies deriving from multiple non-Western visual traditions the more clearly there emerge the distinctive characteristics of a single global culture’ (2009: 13). Bourriaud usefully critiques the critiques (he is very critical, for example, of what he calls the ‘blindspot of postcolonial theory’ (34)), and his concept of ‘altermodernity’ is a form of looking forward; it is a ‘construction of a space of negotiation going beyond postmodern multiculturalism’ (40). It is not about origins, but about destinations. The problem, however, is that at the root of his argument is a somewhat simplistic notion of ‘translation’ – he 217

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suggests rather simplistically: ‘we are entering the era of universal subtitling’ (44). Bourriaud’s account of altermodernity is reminiscent of Jürgen Habermas’s (1985) riposte to postmodernism, arguing instead for modernity as an ‘incomplete project’. Habermas’s general appeal to the fundamental norms of rational speech (supposedly underpinning deliberative democracy) has led to criticisms for overemphasizing the difference between verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning, as we might find with visual and narrative representations (Simons, 2000; Deluca and Peeples, 2002; Warner, 2002). In this way, as Simons (2000) argues, deliberation is all too simply considered an antidote to art and visual culture; or to put it another way, visual phenomena are not taken to actually play a part in the act of deliberating itself, but instead are something over which we deliberate. Ultimately, the view of the ‘public’, or the ‘people’ as Chris Dercon evokes, is not really delineated, nor arguably is there enough of a sense of a visually contested field. One argument from a visual culture perspective is that all looking is in fact a form of labour (Beller, 2006; Mirzoeff, 2009). As Mirzoeff explains it: Advertising, television, film and the other visualized media that comprise everyday life in today’s commodity culture demand your looking to generate value for someone else. [. . .] That value may be monetized when you pay to get into a cinema; or generate advertising revenue by clicking on a web ad; or it may be the value that a successful art gallery show creates by raising the status of the artist. (Mirzoeff, 2009: 8–9) This rather puts a different spin on a ‘people’s biennale’ and inevitably leads us to need to consider a fuller account of what is meant by the ‘visual culture’ within which people reside (and have a ‘right’ to look).

Visual culture The phrase ‘visual culture’ appears sporadically in literature of the twentieth century (Elkins et al., 2015), generally referring to cultures of practice and consumption associated with a range of visual artefacts and experiences. And there is a tendency to shift between a field of activity (of culture) and a site of its examination (a disciplinary, or rather interdisciplinary consideration). It is not until the 1990s that visual culture becomes a defined subject and area of study (and within the Anglo-American context becomes a keyword used by publishers). Nicholas Mirzoeff’s An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999; 2009) and edited volume The Visual Culture Reader (2002) were pivotal in establishing visual culture as a properly interdisciplinary field. Like cultural studies, which ‘sought to understand the ways in which people 218

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create meaning from the consumption of mass culture’, visual culture can be said to ‘prioritize the everyday experience of the visual from the snapshot to the VCR and even the blockbuster art exhibition’ (Mirzoeff, 1998: 7). In one of the key introductions to The Visual Culture Reader, Irit Rogoff characterizes the emergent field of visual culture as opening up ‘an entire world of intertextuality in which images, sounds and spatial delineations are read on to and through one another, lending ever-accruing layers of meanings and of subjective responses to each encounter we might have with film, TV, advertising, art works, buildings or urban environments’ (Rogoff, 2002: 24). It might be argued that new art history had already sought to attend to such matters. Yet the anatgonisms have been all too plain. Art history is to visual culture, what anthropology is to cultural studies (cf. Nugent and Shore, 1997). This was made clear in 1996 when the October journal published its ‘visual culture questionnaire’. The editors solicited responses from a range of notable scholars from art history and media and cultural studies to four polemic statements. In summary: the first of these suggested visual culture is an interdisciplinary project that is ‘no longer organized on the model of history’ and is even ‘an eccentric (even, at times, antagonistic) position with regard to the ‘new art history’ with its social-historical and semiotic imperatives and models of ‘context’ and ‘text’. The second statement suggests that visual culture can be thought to have returned to a breadth of interests that equate with an early generation of art historians (including for example Alois Riegl and Aby Warburg). The third statement looks somewhat the other way, to suggest visual culture pertains to a new interdisciplinary ‘object’ to consider a ‘disembodied image, re-created in the virtual spaces of sign-exchange and phantasmatic projection’. As a corollary to this, a highly critical remark is that visual studies might be thought to be ‘helping, in its own modest, academic way, to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital’ (i.e. to help enter the ‘labours’ of visual culture). Finally, the fourth statement refers to a shift in academia ‘toward the interdisciplinarity of visual culture, especially in its anthropological dimension’ (‘Visual Culture Questionnaire’, October , 1996, No. 77, p.25). Reflecting back on the October ‘Questionnaire’, the art historian Keith Moxey suggests it represents a particular moment in which two positions on the Left come into conflict: One position comes out of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the Enlightenment, and their critique of popular culture in relation to fascism; the other comes out of the Birmingham school of postwar Britain, with people like Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, and others who were also inspired by Marxist thought, but were interested in the visual life, the visual culture of ordinary working-class 219

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people. [. . .] So you have an argument between two wings of leftist politics: one has no use for the entertainment industry, and the other thinks popular culture is where it’s at. (Moxey cited in Elkins et al., 2015: 52) Arguably, the same tensions on the Left can be considered in respect of the contemporary situation of a biennale, whereby the sense of its ‘event’ or ‘spectacle’ gives rise to strong critique (being seen as part of the culture industry). Yet, equally, particularly with respect to the Kochi Biennale, arguments are made for it as a more democratic form and forum for contemporary art – in effect allowing contemporary art to take up a more visible role as a place to site/sight a political critique. The suggestion that visual culture was ‘in an eccentric (even, at times, antagonistic) position with regard to the ‘new art history’ with its socialhistorical and semiotic imperatives and models of ‘context’ and ‘text’ was of course deliberately provocative. New art history as it grew out of the 1970s, marked with particular publications in the 1980s, was arguably the moment art history met poststructuralism (without having passed through structuralism at all). It was the moment art history turned to critical theory and became critically aware of its own field (see Elkins et al., 2015: 43–55). Yet, as recent as 2012, at the ‘After the New Art History’ conference in Birmingham, reflections upon the field were not very positive. In her review of the conference, Kristina Jõekalda (2013) makes note of Griselda Pollock’s keynote address: ‘She argued that in spite of everything, art history is still centered around (white) men, still chronological, colonised, hierarchical, still largely oriented at classifying and labelling.’ Whitney Davis was similarly critical of new art history, arguing that the focus typically remains on the objects of art than ways of looking and seeing. Notably, as Jõekalda remarks, ‘it seems that most art historians, including Pollock, do not find visual studies to be an answer to the problems evident within the field of art history.’ In line with Adorno’s enlightenment critique, Pollock gave a rather pessimistic account of contemporary culture itself, arguing ‘as a whole [it] has lost its enlightening mission in society, dealing, instead, with entertainment, commercial attractiveness and seduction in a supermarket of a vast variety of cultural goods’ (Jõekalda, 2013). Such a lament plays directly to the other key criticism of the October Questionnaire, ‘that visual studies is helping . . . to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital’. In his ‘skeptical introduction’ to visual studies, Elkins (2003: 66–71) develops this argument with what he calls the ‘case of the Calvin Klein suit’, in which he refers to a classroom exercise of an semiotic critique of a fashion advertisement. His argument is that visual analysis adopts an implicit Marxist critique of the phantasmagoria of consumerism, yet only 220

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really provides a partial and individualistic approach. It critiques a Calvin Klein advertisement, for example, in isolation to a wider politics. There is no appeal to a broader understanding and rationale for what a critique is for. As Elkins (2003: 67) explains, ‘[a] Marxist critique can make sense only if it is directed . . . at class consciousness rather than individual consciousness [. . .] Marxist analyses risk becoming incoherent when they take the large-scale terms that drive the Marxist project (class, labor, value) and apply them to the small-scales that visual culture prefers (a particular advertisement, a snapshot, a magazine).’ However, rather than consider visual studies to be somehow inherently lacking in response to consumerist society, his point is really that we seek to make visual studies more difficult, more radical. It is its implementation, not its condition that to date has left visual culture studies exposed. It can be suggested the critical concerns of the October questionnaire (published in 1996) were overshadowed somewhat by the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s in Seattle and elsewhere. The news pictures of the windows of the multinational-owned stores (such as Starbucks, Nike Town, McDonalds) shattered during the 1999 World Trade Organization protests have been likened to a ‘dialectical image’ – in the Benjaminian sense – with the ‘familiar made strange’. It was the serial smashing of these windows that was taken to be significant, as a response to the serial repetition of logos and brands in everyday life, and one that would itself play out on the ‘public screen’ (Deluca and Peeples, 2002). What is notable, however, is a newspaper article by Naomi Klein (2001) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Having been an important voice within the antiglobalization moment, Klein made a case against the spectacle of terror (as we might expect). Yet, this is a moment when visual culture comes into this own – the notion of a contested space of visual culture is undeniable – yet equally it becomes a political dead end (it loses its nerve for fear of siding with visual terror). As such, we fold back into debates about the power and tyranny of the image. At the same time, a ‘global turn’ becomes evident within art history. As Aruna D’Souza (2014) points out, this development has for many simply ‘taken the form of an additive approach’. Also, much has hinged upon questions of disciplinarity – about who ‘owns’ and shapes the discipline for example. The poststructuralist critique of disciplinarity had already, by the time of the emergence of writing around global art history, launched the establishment of the field of visual studies, which attempted to subvert some of the most limiting of those binaries: West and non-West, art and craft, high and low, form and content, aesthetic autonomy and engagement with the social and political, 221

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etc. [. . .] However, though the literature on global art history may draw upon the language of a particular strain of visual culture studies (a critique of disciplinarity), it tends not to embrace its other imperatives (the attention to a broader array of media and non-art forms such as advertising, popular culture, etc. as a way of rejecting the limiting category of art, for example), nor has it engaged at all with feminist critiques. (D’Souza, 2014: x) Keeping in mind the disciplinary changes suggested of visual culture, the underlying argument of this chapter is that the Biennale represents a genuine site/sight of visual contest and progressiveness. This is borne, however, not of the discourse of visual culture, but as imbued with the dynamic of visual culture – that is, the lived, everyday experiences of the visual; a way of seeing and being seen.

Visual literacies Over a decade ago, the writer Bruce Millar (2004) argued that by the turn of the twenty-first century we had witnessed a shift towards a more visually literate audience. He suggests over the last 1,000 years, ‘artistic culture has been primarily literary; its people have entertained, defined and reflected themselves through poetry, plays and novels.’ Whereas by the year 2000: ‘it is possible to detect a profound and unprecedented shift: ours has become a visual culture, and it is the visual arts that seem best equipped to take the pulse of contemporary life, to describe the now’ (2004: 16). Millar writes specifically about British culture, but his remarks can relate more widely, and not least to globalized culture: Visual art takes its place seamlessly in the contemporary world’s globalised economy, in which advertising and entertainment have given audiences around the world common sources of imagery and visual techniques. Literature has had an international reach for centuries – from the legacy of the classical authors to the passion for Shakespeare, but an image or design travels instantly and without the need for translation. (Millar, 2004: 20) This account of a burgeoning visual culture and an audience increasingly adept at relating to and appreciating the visual arts connects with a wider discourse, which during the 1990s gave rise to the aforementioned field of visual culture studies. Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) describe a changing 222

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‘semiotic landscape’, in which the place of language ‘is moving from its former, unchallenged role as the medium of communication, to the role as one medium of communication’ (2006: 120). Kress and van Leeuwen argue how a younger generation is more inclined to engage in visual media. In a comparison of science textbooks, for example, from the early and later parts of the twentieth century, Kress and van Leeuwen show (with the changing styles of page-layouts and information) how images have become ‘the central medium of information, and the role of language has become that of a medium of commentary. Images (and this includes the layout of the page) carry the argument’ (121). Crucially, the social valuation of knowledge in various spheres, such as science and education, has undergone massive change and that generally ‘the authority of the transmitters of social values can no longer be taken for granted’ (122). Less hierarchical society and more extensive global flows of capital and information are part of the shift being described within contemporary visual culture. It is not just cultural and political boundaries which are said to ‘dissolve’, but semiotic boundaries too. The impact of a widening visual culture within contemporary society is of course significant. Arvind Rajagopal’s (2001) Politics after Television presents a critique of Hindu nationalism and what he refers to as the reshaping of the public sphere in India in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The study centres around the television serialization of the Hindu epic the Ramayana, which was screened from 1987 to 1990. David Herbert offers a useful summary of the study’s argument: In spite of official secularism, the serial was broadcast by the state television station, Doordarshan, and authorized by the ruling Congress Party in an attempt to improve the party’s popularity by presenting the image of a harmonious India. Instead, by creating a national ‘visual vocabulary’ expressive of Hindu identity it provided the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] with a powerful cultural resource that enabled the party to transform itself from a marginal political player into the party of government. (Herbert, 2005: 116) Rajagopal’s study is particular for its attention to the audience and indeed an ‘active audience’ – concerned with how individuals consume the television in ways that lend to their own lives. It fits in with the ‘uses and gratification’ model of media studies. In this case the connection between the television programme and people’s everyday lives and rituals has the effect of harnessing a new nationalist agenda. The anthropological instincts of visual culture studies is important for revealing how the visual is our culture, or part of our culture, rather than it 223

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being a specific category of cultural consumption. Another good example of this comes from a research project Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual Cultures (2007–2010) – published as Post-Critical Museology (Dewdney et al., 2013). The study took place in the wake of the opening of Tate Modern in 2000, which had a huge impact on the re-branding of Tate. The study focused on the re-positioning of the original London Tate (in Pimlico) as Tate Britain – which became the official site of the National Collection of British Art (from the Tudor period of 1500s to recent acquisitions). Of particular interest for Dewdney et al. was Tate Britain’s exhibition in 2008, The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting. On the one hand, we can see this exhibition as a product of new art history. It was a critical account of many works in the national collection (between 1780 and 1930), understood through the lens of contemporary critical thinking. Yet, the findings of the Tate Encounters project are rather at odds with prevailing theory. Two key factors established what the authors of the study refer to as a ‘crisis of representation’: first new technological advances (notably the World Wide Web and mobile computing) and, second, shifting demographics, ‘ever greater accumulation and movement of capital and labour in urban areas’ (Dewdney et al., 2013: 5). The argument advanced by the study suggests that: at Tate Britain the general crisis of representation takes the specific form of a complex confusion of curatorial practices in relationship to the National Collection of British Art and the aesthetic logic of the modernist display of works that mitigates against the development of new audiences and inhibits a fuller exploration of the new informational networks. [. . .] [the study also considers how] racial and minority ethnic categories fail to match contemporary identities and, when used as a means of targeting specific groups to improve diversity statistics in museum attendance, fail to change core museum attendance demographics. (Dewdney et al., 2013: 5) With respect to visual culture specifically, the study argues for an ‘expanded field of visual culture, which it is argued is present for audiences as a feature of everyday life, but not as yet developed in the practices of the art museum’ (Dewdney et al., 2013: 15). The study refers to ‘transvisuality’, or ‘seeing on the move’ (13) as a modality that is misunderstood by the art context. Reference previously to Jitish Kallat’s curatorial decision to exhibit the Powers of Ten and Vsauce, rather than simply refer to them as influences, is arguably acknowledgement of this transvisuality. The complacency, however, of museum practices is still far from diminished. The curator, Nicolas Bourriaud, for example, is seemingly blind to transvisuality when he argues 224

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unconvincingly that ‘[m]illions of people shoot, compile, and edit images with the help of software available to everyone. But they freeze memories, whereas the artist sets signs in motion’ (Bourriaud, 2009: 88). The artwork might indeed be characterized as setting signs in motion, but Bourriaud reveals his bias for the art world, against a wider visual culture. The idea that Flickr groups, social media exchanges and YouTube videos only ‘freeze memories’ is a gross simplification (Murray, 2008).

Divisions of the sensible, or the ‘noise’ of the Biennale As you walk about Fort Kochi you cannot help but notice numerous wall murals and graffiti. These artworks, most of them flaking away with the passage of time and humidity, are mixed in a busy, layered street culture, made up of dramatically tangled communication wires, clothing hung out to dry, bill posters, stencilled signs saying ‘no bill posters’, displays of fresh produce on stalls, crates and matting, and tightly packed, eclectic shop window displays. Many of the murals are traces from the Biennale in 2012 (some of which have been repainted), but others are unofficial and anonymous works

Figure 9.4 Fort Kochi, July 2014. Photograph: Sunil Manghani.

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of art; the speech of a city that now recognizes itself as one sprawling canvas. All of these signs, symbols and objects act as a ‘prompt language’, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s phrase from the opening of One-Way Street (1997). A form of action and writing. ‘Only this prompt language shows itself actively equally to the moment’ wrote Benjamin (1997: 45). One particular mural I spotted in Kochi struck me as a sort of ‘metapicture’ of this fact. It consisted simply of the phrase ‘absence/presence’ in bold, black letters, written across an outside wall of an urban dwelling. Like Magritte’s beguiling image of a pipe, this work stated very clearly what was in front of me. It was labelled unambiguously, and yet equally there was nothing to look at except the writing on the wall. The artwork was present and yet it was not. And beyond itself, it marked the presence of the ‘biennale effect’ (see Chapter 1), and simultaneously spoke like a ghost. Like the child’s game, fort-da, it ‘read’ as a visual reminder of the Biennale of 2012 and its anticipated return. In black and white terms, it urges us to think about what art means in its context – notably a local-global context. As metapicture, it points out a problematic: The ‘art’ of global art is strangely both fully present (in that it underpins the global art market, and is the ‘content’ of biennales), yet, frequently, it is absent as something we can relate to as global art’s content.

Figure 9.5 ‘Absence/Presence’ graffiti. Fort Kochi, July 2014. Photograph: Sunil Manghani.

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Crucially, as Rogoff (2002: 26) notes, images ‘do not stay within discrete disciplinary fields such as “documentary film” or “Renaissance painting”, since neither the eye nor the psyche operates along or recognizes such divisions.’ Instead we can understand (and study) visual culture as experienced in a more fluid and complex manner; like a ‘scrap of an image’, for example, which ‘connects with a sequence of a film and with the corner of a billboard or the window display of a shop we have passed by, to produce a new narrative formed out of both our experienced journey and our unconscious’ (Rogoff, 2002: 26). As an unofficial artwork and mere ‘writing on the wall’, the absence/presence graffiti is both itself a ‘scrap of an image’ and a plain description or index of its own condition. Taken synecdochically, the Kochi Biennale might be best thought of as a laboratory of the visual in its broadest sense, not just the visual arts. And if truly a ‘people’s biennale’ then it ought to be so in the sense of the ‘division of the sensible’, of what and for whom some things are made present, others absent. As noted at the start of this chapter, Rancière’s account of the ‘sensible’ (regarding out sense aesthetics) leads to the understanding of politics as aesthetic. There is no split between ideation and sensation, but rather these are part of the same. In other words we sense the political – not necessarily to make sense of the political, but rather to consider its sensation; that it comes through the senses. Thus, the body is the medium of politics. There is an underlying Althusserian argument to Rancière’s account. It is about how – through the body – our subjectivity is interpellated; how we assume a form of being hailed, as defined through the body. The moment we ‘turn to look’ is not simply a moment of visibility, but is of an aesthetic form, an aesthetic operation – the sense of sensing. Rancière’s use of the word ‘division’ is then crucially to ask what social, political divisions (and differences) are encoded (and made to appear natural) within our everyday aesthetic experience. Rancière’s account gets at a critical question about a democracy of senses. Before any form of governance takes place, in which we make particular decisions about the distribution of wealth and resources, Rancière (2004b: 12) reminds us ‘another form of distribution precedes . . . the distribution that determines those who have a part in the community of the citizens’. As Mirzoeff (2009: 18) puts it: ‘The “people” does not mean every person alive, but only those people who count and are counted.’ In relating this to the aesthetic, Rancière provides an anecdote from Roman history: During a time of upheaval, the Roman Senate was surrounded by the people demanding change but the senators announced that they could hear nothing but noise. Only the political elite could speak the language of politics and so the speech of the plebs [the ‘people’] on this subject was nothing but noise. (Mirzoeff, 2009: 18) 227

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Here, noise is not merely a category and evaluation of difference. It is the aesthetic of the political (or in this case an aesthetic kept outside of the political). Rancière goes on to cite the figure of the ‘police’ to refer to how we then regulate the aesthetic of politics: The police say there is nothing to see, nothing happening, nothing to be done, but to keep moving, circulating; they say that the space of circulation is nothing but the space of circulation. Politics consists in transforming that space of circulation into the space of the manifestation of a subject [. . .] It is a dispute about the division of what is perceptive to the senses. (Rancière in Mirzoeff, 2009: 20) In thinking back to Rajagopal’s account of Indian television, the British study of Tate galleries, or Bourriaud’s distinction between the artist and ‘everyone’ else, we can consider different accounts and possibilities of the division of the sensible – of potential (and real) redistributions and affordances through forms of visual culture. In the case of one, I am in dispute: Bourriaud’s remark of how most people engage with image-making suggests of more open, relational aesthetics – a kind of democracy (through the ‘ease’ of translation and transculture) – yet in fact is heavily policed by the regime of certain curatorial practices and hierarchies. His is a policing of the boundary of art. However, there is a further, crucial step. In Rancière’s account, structurally speaking, democracy has no proper place within the political (he develops this line of thinking in reference to Aristotle and Plato’s accounts of structures of society, and their aversion to democracy as a political system). Politics defines a state (and an aesthetic) of distribution. By contrast, democracy is supposedly without divisions. It is both noise and harmony at the same time. The division of the sensible, and the idea that the demos, the ‘people’, must always somehow be out of step with the political offers some complexity to the idea that the Kochi Biennale is a ‘people’s biennale’. What do we really mean by this? It could be a reference to its relationship to local residents: as visitors, as suppliers, and as workers. It could be those simply who are able to enter into its organization, to participate in making the Biennale. It could be in relation to some form of regional representation. Or a national construct: the Indian Biennale, as alluded to at the start of this chapter. Of course, it will be all of these things and more. It all depends how we choose to cut it. Nevertheless, what it purportedly contrasts with is a more insular, itinerate and internationalist group who frequent a circuit of biennales and related events around the world. Arguably, then, it is a ‘people’s biennale’ – a site of democracy – precisely because all of these 228

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different divisions and distributions are constantly at stake; they are being heard all at the same time. What is more, the Biennale has been able to foreground these different divisions. The argument being made, then, is of a biennale as ‘democracy’, as a site of a complex and ‘noisy’ visual culture, over and above a biennale as a site of reified art production. The Kochi Biennale is a sight/site of ‘disputes’, which begin even before you enter any one single venue, or even any one of its iterations. The effects of the Biennale begin before we even enter its domain; it affects us, with or without us being party to its changes.

References Beller, Jonathan L. (2006) The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Benjamin, Walter (1997) One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso. Bourriaud, Nicolas (2009) The Radicant. New York: Sternberg Press. Dave-Mukherji, Parul (2014) ‘Art History and Its Discontents in Global Times’, in Jill H. Casid and Aruna D’Souza (eds.), Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn. Williamson, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, pp. 88–106. Deluca, Kevin and Peeples, Jennifer (2002) ‘From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the “Violence” of Seattle’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 125–151. Dercon, Chris (2014) ‘KMB Is a Blueprint for the “Museums of the Future”’ [video interview], Kochi-Muziris Biennale website: http://kochimuzirisbiennale.org/ chris-dercon-kochi-muziris-biennale-is-a-blueprint-for-the-museums-of-thefuture/ [Accessed 25 February 2015]. Dewdney, Andrew, Dibosa, David, and Walsh, Victoria (2013) Post Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum. London: Routledge. D’Souza, Aruna (2014) ‘Introduction’, in Jill H. Casid and Aruna D’Souza (eds.), Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn. Williamson, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, pp. 7–23. Elkins, James (2003) Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York: Routledge. Elkins, James, Frank, Gustav, and Manghani, Sunil (eds.) (2015) Farewell to Visual Studies (The Stone Art Theory Institute Volume 5). Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Foucault, Michel (1976) The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books. Habermas, Jürgen (1985) ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project’, in H. Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press, pp. 3–15. Herbert, David (2005) ‘Media Publics, Culture and Democracy’, in Marie Gillespie (ed.), Media Audiences. Maidenhead: Open University Press, pp. 97–135. Jõekalda, Kristina (2013) ‘What Has Become of the New Art History?’, Journal of Art Historiography, No. 9. Available Online: https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/jc3b5ekalda.pdf

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Kapur, Geeta (1978) Contemporary Indian Artists. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House. Kapur, Geeta (2000) ‘Detours from the Contemporary’, in When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika, pp. 267–296. Klein, Naomi (2001) ‘Sign of the Times’, The Nation, 5 October 2001. Available Online: http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2001/10/signs-times Kress, Gunther and van Leeuwen, Theo (2006) ‘The Semiotic Landscape’, in Sunil Manghani, Arthur Piper, and Jon Simons (eds.), Images: A Reader. London: Sage, pp. 119–123. Millar, Bruce (2004) ‘The Eyes Have It’, FT Magazine, Issue 57, 29 May 2004, pp. 16–21. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (ed.) (1998) Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (1999) An Introduction to Visual Culture. First Edition. London: Routledge. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (ed.) (2002) The Visual Culture Reader. Second Edition. London: Routledge. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2009) An Introduction to Visual Culture. Second Edition. London: Routledge. Murray, Susan (2008) ‘Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics’, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 147–163. Nugent, Stephen and Shore, Chris (eds.) (1997) Anthropology and Cultural Studies. London: Pluto Press. Rajagopal, Arvind (2001) Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rancière, Jacques (2004a) The Philosopher and His Poor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rancière, Jacques (2004b) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum. Rogoff, Irit (2002) ‘Studying Visual Culture’, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader. Second Edition. London: Routledge, pp. 24–36. Simons, Jon (2000) ‘Ideology, Imagology, and Critical Thought: The Impoverishment of Politics’, Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 81–103. Warner, Michael (2002) Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.

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10 TOWARDS A NEW ART EDUCATION Anannya Mehtta

In a massive rundown warehouse, twenty people are frantically working late into the night. People are clearing away debris from the floor, drilling nails into large, newly whitewashed walls, and marking the walls with measures of canvases that will soon be hung onto these empty facades. Deep in concentration, some artists work on site-specific installations, while the works of others are still to arrive from colleges across India. Three days remain for the Student Biennale to open. Many students will have travelled out of their hometown for the first time to come to Kochi for this big art show. The somewhat derelict and disorderly old spice godown is crowded with discussion and nervous chatter. There is an air of restlessness, accompanying the months of anticipation and diligent preparation. Tensions and excitement culminate in this temporary green room. Meanwhile, the audience prepares itself for the curtains to lift. The Student Biennale staged at Kochi carries in its fold stories and realities that simultaneously unravel in far-off locations.

This chapter reflects on the layered processes related to the Kochi-Muziris Student Biennale 2014, which was a pilot project of the Kochi Biennale Foundation, and conceived as part of its ‘Higher Education Programme’. Its ambition, as represented on the official Biennale website was that ‘it aimed to create an alternative platform for students from government-run art colleges in India to reflect upon their art practices and exhibit their works to a global audience. The aim was to bring together the works of art students from across the country under one roof.’1 The Biennale would serve both as a snapshot and a survey of the diversity of styles and pedagogic traditions extant in India’s art education system. A team of curators were chosen through a competitive process. Once selected, each curator visited designated colleges across the country to interview MA and BA art students (in their final year of study) as well as faculty members, and ultimately nominated a small selection of student artists to display their 231

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Figure 10.1 Mohammed Ali warehouse, Student Biennale venue. The warehouse is located in Jew town about 2km away from Aspinwall House, one of the central Biennale venues for the main Biennale. Image taken in the early hours of the morning after installing the exhibition that is to open the next day. Photograph: Umang Bhattacharyya. Courtesy of Anannya Mehtta.

work in Kochi. The curators were encouraged to embed themselves in the colleges to help develop curatorial themes as well as to examine educational infrastructure. Based on the numerous interviews with staff and students, a key finding of the chapter is that students are exploring new art practices despite their education and not because of it, and that the Biennale provides a venue not only for showcasing work, but also for re-energizing the outlook of Indian art education. This chapter, then, considers what the participating students and curators brought to the Student Biennale and what they gained. It considers the interactions that occurred between the university colleges and the Biennale curators, and how the Student Biennale effected and informed art practice and viewership. Another point of interest is how the sense of space and place informed its final outcome. At different stages, the Student Biennale took on a different character: it was a launching platform for students, it was a place for learning and exchange, and at instances it was even a market place where works of art could be purchased. For both Bose Krishnamachari and Riya Komu – renowned artists and co-founders of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale – the Biennale is a forum for 232

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new discourse and learning with arts education being one of its vital components. In an interview with Manoj Nair, Riyas Komu says ‘[t]he physical space of the Biennale is what inspired people. . ..because we have been a society short of spaces for art. The Biennale is going to be a higher education about spaces for artists’ (Nair, 2015: 44). The Student Biennale project sought to work with government-run art colleges across the country as a means to better understand and bring change to the existing art education system in the country. As one of the fifteen participating curators, I spent two weeks at two colleges in the eastern state of Odisha. Odisha is among the poorest states of India. It has a large Adivasi population, known in government nomenclature as ‘Scheduled Tribes’. Much of the land area is covered in forests and richly endowed with mineral deposits. Rich in traditional art and culture, Odisha is home to the Udaygiri and Khandgiri caves, the temple town of Puri and the famous sun temple of Konark. In Bhubaneswar, the state capital, I spent time at the Bibhuti Kannungo College of Arts and Craft, which was established in the year 1983–84. In addition, I travelled to a small semi-urban town called Khallikote, two and a half hours southeast of the capital in Ganjam district, to visit the Government College of Arts and Craft, Khallikote. The college, established in 1957, is housed in the palace of the erstwhile Raja of Khallikote. The college building is a monument vestige to a bygone era. Ganjam is a coastal district bordering the state of Andhra Pradesh. It is home to a large number of poor peasants and has a sizeable fishing community. The Student Biennale was an independent project from the main Biennale, which its curator, Jitish Kallat, conceived as ‘a viewing device rather than the object of viewing’ (Nair, 2015: 47; see also Chapter 6). The coming together of artists and viewers as participants in the project was critical to Kallat’s vision of the Biennale as opposed to it being a space separating the viewer as the consumer of art and the artist as the producer of the art. In the case of the Student Biennale, while the approach was very similar, it required a higher degree of collective effort in its production. This was largely due to the limited resources of the Student Biennale project than a determined plan. Inevitably, the role of the curator in this setting was one that cut across various ‘roles and responsibilities,’ from clearing spaces to the planning and the physical installing of artworks. The curatorial emphasis lay in interrogating practice in its fullest sense, as a way of learning and being. The approach was to use the exhibition as a space to critically describe and think through ideas on the ethics of making and becoming. The project afforded me the opportunity to immerse myself in a university context for three months. This entanglement – the curator with college students – was critical in framing both the artworks finally exhibited and the inspiration and thinking that simmered in the curatorial 233

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Figure 10.2 Student Biennale venue before its renovation. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale has generally used old, at times abandoned buildings in the city to house the exhibition. Photograph: Mohammed Roshan. Courtesy of Anannya Mehtta.

consciousness for months before. Being embedded in an institutional context was key in building my curatorial narrative for the Biennale and as well as that of my colleagues. The exercise allowed for a mapping of the ground reality of these art institutions. Many of the curators who were part of the Student Biennale, including myself, had limited experience of interacting with small town, government-funded art colleges in India. Broadly speaking, the methodology used to explore the inception of ideas and their final outcomes was that of participant observation. This implied observing processes and contexts as well as having many open-ended, even meandering, conversations with students, teachers, alumni and others who belonged to these art colleges. Spending time with students in their art colleges and outside allowed one to better understand the context in which their art was conceived and produced, rather than solely focusing on the outcome of a particular ‘art product’. Various practitioners and scholars have explored art curation and what it entails. While some simply believe that curation is a selection of a set of ideas brought together to tell a compelling story, others have a more 234

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complex and multilayered understanding. The emerging connection(s) and interaction between the objects and curator have a predominant value in deconstructing the idea of curation. As stated by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, a founding member of the Raqs Collective, at the Experimenter Curators’ Hub in 2014, ‘curation is a kind of cartography of aesthetic magnetic fields, the drawing up of a map of relationships of affinity between objects and processes, artworks and situations, that remain distant from each other until the curator discovers and reveals the possibilities of their mutual attraction and interaction’ (Sengupta, 2014). Irit Rogoff further extends Raqs Collective’s understanding of curation in an interview in Arterritory (Ivanov, 2013). In talking about teaching on the subject of curation, asserting its core concepts as a form of epistemology, Rogoff suggests there is ‘a whole set of potential in the curatorial for knowledge production: assembling things that aren’t necessarily connected historically, or stylistically, or any particular way under the aegis of some totally invented title that then produces a relationship between these things’ (cited in Ivanov, 2013). Rogoff’s understanding of curation is focused on how curatorial processes are a way of knowing, understanding and making as a means to demystify or problematize concepts and ideas. Her theoretical approach to knowledge production in curation offers a useful way of understanding the basis of the curatorial style underpinning the Student Biennale.

Figure 10.3 College of Art and Craft, Khallikote, Odisha. Photograph: Anannya Mehtta.

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University/Biennale The development of the curatorial narrative for the Student Biennale was informed as much by the spatial and temporal engagement in the university setting as it was by the artworks displayed. And the parallels between a university setting and the framing of the Biennale were compelling. In a university, scholarship, study and ideas are foundational in shaping art practice, which similarly inspired the staging of the Biennale. In addition to being an ‘exhibition space’, the Biennale sought to transform itself into a learning academy, and a part of which was the dialogue between the two seemingly distant worlds of the Student Biennale and the main international Biennale. The latter, of course, has access to many more opportunities in terms of international exposure and engages in transnational dialogues on art, while the former lies at the base of the pyramid in terms of an artist’s development. Indeed, in many cases, students from the government colleges would not have visited their state capital city, let alone have the opportunity to exhibit alongside well-known international artists. Many of the students were aware of the opportunity to interact between the two worlds but paradoxically also saw this as an extension of the university, as it was a chance to learn, explore and witness the unfolding of varying art practices. For the curators, the Student Biennale was an attempt at understanding the opaque world of government-run art colleges. The layered and iterative processes that led to the development of the curatorial stance speak to Rogoff’s understanding of curation. The former director of the Tate Modern, Chris Dercon, has referred to the Biennale as ‘productionist,’ implying the artist-led and collective effort involved in its conception, execution and staging. He echoes this point in a video interview when he remarks, ‘the Kochi Biennale is not only making a difference, it is also showing us the way how to make things differently’ (Dercon, 2014; see also Chapter 9). The existence of multiple projects within the main Biennale, and including the Student Biennale, the Children’s Biennale and collateral events, should be understood as being part of the emergence of different experiences and ways of making, as suggested by Dercon. Installing an art show requires a certain form of thinking, to be entangled in questions that start with ‘what if’ while being embedded in one’s material and contextual reality. Thinking as a process is often cluttered. It is never easy, often unrequited and often unresolved with questions unanswered and projects only half undertaken. Much of university life entails projects and processes that allow one to explore and experiment with thoughts, materials, identities and ideas. The process of thinking inhabits varied time periods, allowing one to be far away from the centre of an event but to be simultaneously part of it. Many of the students I spoke to came from villages

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and semi-urban townships across India but nonetheless felt connected to a larger more vibrant art scene through the help of senior students from the same college or their hometowns. In this sense, the Biennale project was an extension of the student’s university experience. It became a forum for students, curators and viewers to engage in conversations about art practice and reflect on these conversations. Even though physically afar from the college, the exhibition had a sense of being embedded in each college’s contextual reality and yet allowed and encouraged imagination and exposure. The process of the installation of the exhibition, the informality of the space and the ‘collective engagement’ in launching the Biennale required a certain D.I.Y ethic, an attitude that ‘we can do it ourselves’. At the same time, the Biennale was also markedly different from the university setting. The exhibition and the conversations that it fostered made visible how poorly run and how precarious the existing infrastructure was in most colleges. The students often were able to fulfil their academic and artistic needs despite the college and not because of it. The Biennale, then, provided a particularly unique platform for students, curators and interested audiences to explore synergies and divergences from their specific pedagogic styles. In addition to a learning and exchange platform, it functioned as a market

Figure 10.4 B.K. College of Art and Craft. Bhubhaneswar, Odisha. Sculpture department. Students working after college hours. Photograph: Anannya Mehtta.

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place. Numerous gallerists who visited the exhibition were interested in buying the works on display. Framed as a project to encourage exchange and produce a new discourse between students, institutions, artists and viewers, the Student Biennale project was led by two mentoring institutions: the Foundation for Indian Art and Education (FIAE), based in Goa, and the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, based in New Delhi. Through the help of both these institutions and the nature of interaction between the curator and the students within the university environment, the project attempted to understand the existing infrastructure, management and pedagogic style or the lack thereof specific to each university. The knowledge that arts education in India is in need of a serious revamp is well known. The syllabus has not been changed for years and the style and teaching methodology is wedded to what is today considered an outmoded, even archaic, conceptualization of art. FIAE was set to produce a white paper after studying all the data collected from the experience of the individual curators having visited these institutions so that change could potentially take place at the policy level. In November 2015 the Kochi Biennale Foundation organized a two-day seminar on arts education in India, under the title of ‘State of Schools: Reality and Prospects’.2 One of the outcomes of this seminar was the recommendation to extend the period of curatorial association with the art institutions from three months to eighteen months. This decision augurs the possibility of more considered and hopefully deeper deliberations on reviewing the curriculum at various art colleges in India. Recently, there has been some media coverage of the dramatic and wellpublicized student protests in the Delhi College of Art and the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, over long-standing issues such as administrative mismanagement, poor infrastructure and lack of proper teaching (Gill, 2015). At the Film and Television Institute of India (in Pune), for example, students protested at the choice of the individual appointed to head the institution. Their concern has been that the person in question lacks the stature and suitable skill to head a national institution for film. At the Delhi College of Art, roughly half the student body stopped attending classes on the last day of August 2015, to lodge their protest at the lack of transparency, endemic corruption and clear signs of decay of an institution that they felt had let them down (Gill, 2015). The immediate trigger was the refusal of the painting department to give students access to art materials stored in cupboards. The college was in a state of abysmal neglect and disrepair. Seventy percent of its teaching staff was missing, no changes had been made in the curriculum for years, and many departments, such as printmaking, barely functioned as they were devoid of basic machines, printing presses and rollers. The college gallery is always said to be locked 238

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and the toilets unusable. The students and protestors submitted written complaints to the administration, marched to the Delhi secretariat and the chief minister’s home. The protests led to innovative ways of addressing the systemic problems. Artists joined students in registering their support. As a further means of showing solidarity, lectures were held for students in the open-air, during protest sit-ins and on footpaths outside the campus of the Delhi College of Art. As is apparent from these protests and others, students in many of the government-funded institutions are tired of institutional negligence and indifference. The narrative of decline is also associated with Mumbai’s prestigious art school, Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art, which has been said to be in the throes of neglect. This has led to the city’s well-known conservationists and architects to come together to restore the building. However, the money that went into this work has inevitably caused concern, with some students feeling that the upkeep of the building was prioritized over pedagogy (Jaisinghani, 2008). Overall, there are various recurring problems that could well trigger a more systemic revival of the institutions in question potentially supported by both the government and

Figure 10.5 B.K. College of Art and Craft, Bhubhaneswar, Odisha. Painting department. While I was visiting the art college I would often sit through various classes. This is an image of a life study class in progress. Photograph: Anannya Mehtta.

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private philanthropy. In this context, the Student Biennale – as a project of discussion and interaction – represents a critical and timely intervention to open up new critical discourse and knowledge building. It allows for a collaborative examination of what art colleges in various parts of India currently encompass and/or are aspiring towards. A focus on processes, an insight into the messy and partially constructed worlds from where such art originates, the student’s backgrounds and the context of their decrepit art colleges are essential in providing a holistic understanding of both the artwork but more importantly the impact of the Biennale on the participating students, curators and viewers.

Building a picture Approximately 108 government-run art colleges were invited to the Student Biennale, with the hope that one college from each state would be represented at the exhibition in Kochi. Predictably, many colleges did not respond and finally around forty institutions took part. Most of the colleges are located in places far from the big cities, in sleepy urban or peri-urban towns. Typically, the college infrastructure is basic and the professors are not particularly motivated to change their teaching styles or to let students experiment with ideas outside those prescribed by the professors themselves. Thus, making available the space and platform for students, institutions and young curators to engage in a creative practice of a scale commensurate with a Biennale was undoubtedly a significant marker in the contemporary exhibition history of India. The call was an ambitious one. The project gave freedom and flexibility to curators to shape their interactions with the students and develop art practices based on their personal experience and approaches, with a focus on both the process of curation and the final outcome. Each curator went in with her own set of questions, methodologies and perspectives with regard to the choice of works that would most appropriately represent their designated universities. Vaishnavi Ramnath, one of the Student Biennale curators who was based at both Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts in Mysore and the Government College of Fine Arts in Kumbakonam, points out that ‘[o]ne of the first questions that arose when beginning the curatorial process was the relationship between the artist/institution and the curator’. Due to not having any prior connection with the university at which she was based, Ramnath notes ‘my entry point into these institutions seemed rather unanchored. The only parallel that I could find to this ambiguous status was in the waters of the river Kaveri that flowed near Kumbakonam and Mysore and perhaps ironically, was instrumental in the rise of strong Tamil and Kannada identities in the two towns. The river became the metaphor to imagine the way 240

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the curator’s figure was inserted into the narrative and for the fluid way in which the process of curation took place.’ Ramnath’s statement is indicative of the freedom given to the curators to allow for different curatorial perspectives to emerge, allowing each institution to be shown through the vision or experience of the curator as much as the objective reality of the artworks displayed. Many curators embraced the freedom and flexibility and were able to work with it in an innovative way, making the process a collaborative experience that focused as much on the process as on the final exhibit. Charu Maithani, who visited the College of Arts and Crafts in Patna, suggests ‘the exhibition creates curatorial interventions through semi fictional textual accounts,’ and goes on to say, ‘these texts have emerged out of conversations, incidents and encounters of the past and present. The texts are mnemonic hauntings that activate the phantom of the institution.’ For some the entry into a foreign institution was not easy to negotiate because of an unwelcoming administration or a student body indifferent, even hostile, to an outside curatorial presence. The insider–outsider tension and the strangeness of the environment in which they had to work, coupled with a largely unwelcoming college bureaucracy, led to strained conversations. Pallavi Paul, another curator, remarks, with regard to her experience of working with RLV Tripunithura as well as the Government College of Fine Arts, Thrissur, that ‘many students initially maintained a distance from me and the project owing to a combination of confusion and suspicion aroused by the arrival of a self designated “curator”.’ In addition to conceptualizing the upcoming exhibition, curators were tasked with assessing and surveying the government art institutions with the purpose of understanding the strengths and shortcomings of the available facilities and pedagogy. The rationale for including a mapping exercise to survey the art colleges was to help to both document the current state of the institutions and inform future policy, ideally with the aim to transform the state of art schools and facilities across India. All curators were asked to fill in detailed questionnaires regarding the basic infrastructure and working methodology of the institutions visited. This questionnaire probed into facilities available at the library, relations among the faculty, the state of the studio spaces and so forth. As a result, one became conscious of the socio-economic and infrastructural status of the institution. For example, after visiting the B.K. College in Bhubaneswar it became apparent that although the college had an official gallery space it remained unusable and locked for most part of the year, used only for an annual exhibition where the students displayed their work for examination and for public viewing. Of course, constraints can in themselves prompt creative outcomes. The state of disrepair of their university seemed to act in part as a springboard 241

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for some students. For example, the college campus and its surroundings were littered with waste materials, which some of the students experimented with in their work. These artists engaged with their contextual surroundings, borrowed from it, felt inspired by it, and this dovetailed with the curatorial narrative that I was beginning to build for myself based on my own exposure to the same surroundings. In the works displayed from the colleges in Odisha, the theme of working with disused objects, with items in disrepair, with waste products and with broken and wrecked objects and materials became increasingly central to the students’ artistic vocabulary. In other sites, students and curators had similar experiences with their immediate surroundings. In Kashmir, where students struggled with materials to develop artworks, they used performing arts as a means of expression, often blurring the boundaries between the material and the visual. The exhibition staged by the students from Kashmir comprised of a selection of random objects found after a devastating flood in the region. Students wove fantastical stories around these objects and their experiences of pain and devastation – both personal and institutional. For example, one of the students worked with a mobile phone found after the floods and created around it a story where the phone had magical powers, requiring no battery life and an ability to connect with people who were no longer alive (Kathjoo, 2015). The phone could connect the artist to her deceased grandfather, and to Picasso, Van Gogh and Michelangelo among others. Elsewhere, Aryakrishnan R., a curator assigned to work in Srinagar, describes a similar situation: we got together and started to think of the situation we were in; of flood, of Biennale and producing some artwork(s). Objects were scattered around the campus, displaced by sediments of mud, also things washed away by water. We had to find ways to deal with the flood, and the objects, as there was an urgency both conceptually and at a practical level to make a work of art. What is a flood? How natural is it? How much is the contribution of human intervention in the damage caused? What gets erased by such major forces, what opportunities does it bring? (Aryakrishnan R.) The tension between the creative processes of building a narrative around the students’ art practice often emerged from the critique of the spaces that they inhabited and the institutions of which they were a part. It is clear, the marrying of an ethnographic style of curatorial research and the mapping of the infrastructure of institutions affected the outcomes of the mapping process and the development of the curatorial narrative leading to 242

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the emergence of site- and context-specific narratives. The Student Biennale helped contextualize and accumulate within a space, different ways of thinking about art practice and the various artistic works, with a hope of starting enduring conversations encompassing the two. The Biennale helped reassert that different ideas and methods of generating knowledge need flexible and open platforms of engagement.

The city as studio: life at college As a curator attempting to understand an art institution, the biggest challenge was to capture the experiences of students through the course of their degrees and to make visible their learning trajectories over two to three years. To understand how students learn we cannot focus on just the curriculum, on the passing or failing of exams, or the artworks produced in their final year. Learning is something that is influenced by the political economy and the material reality in which the art college and the student is embedded. This cross-fertilization of the surrounding context and

Figure 10.6 Students from B.K. College of Art and Craft, Bhubhaneswar, Odisha, at the local bus stand, which is often visited by students after college hours to practice sketching. The bus stand is both a studio space and a place for commerce since it is here that students frequently sell their sketches to travellers as well. Photograph: Anannya Mehtta.

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theoretical ideas of and on ‘art practice’ interspersed with the experiences and challenges of living in a city produces imaginative forms of expression. These very expressions subsequently shape the idea of practice as being embedded in a knowledge network of links, layers, fault lines, and also conversations and friendships that are part of university life. It is through this network of associations that one is able to better understand the kind of artworks emanating from the institution. At B.K. College of Art and Craft, Odisha, I saw entire groups of students reproduce, with minor alterations, paintings and drawings similar in style to well-known artists who would have graduated from the same college. Those being copied would have found success in the national and international gallery system. Most students seeing that particular style as being in demand would create many such near replicas with the hope of being able to sell these works more easily or use these to apply to a master’s programme at one of the better known art schools in Delhi, Baroda or Shanti Niketan. This is reflective of the ongoing conversations and sharing that many present students have with their predecessors, often filling the gap left by the college faculty. Many of the students I spent time with worked with cheap material that they could afford and easily source. Kedarnath Majihi from the College of Art and Craft, Khallikote, before enrolling at the art college, worked at his elder brother’s electrical repair shop doing semi-skilled work. At the college, he enrolled in the sculpture department. Majihi uses thrown away and damaged electrical wires and tube lights as his basic material to make large light-based sculptures. The use of these specific materials was not a random selection but one that emerged from his experiences prior to being at the art college. One can then ask whether the lack of materials was a hampering factor in Majihi developing his art practice or instead served as a catalyst for the uniqueness of his usage of materials and structure. The answer is of course unclear but perhaps it is a combination of a lack of choice and certain very particular choices that coalesce to give Majihi his specific style. For Majihi and many others, their location greatly influenced their practice. During my time in Bhubaneswar I interviewed many alumni of the B.K. College. Pinaki Mohanty recounted to me that his distinct memory of being in college was one that centred on the word ‘abhav’ or ‘want’. He explained this not as a feeling that reduced his self-esteem but one that on the contrary made him develop his sense of self and his art practice. In order to earn money for rent he would carve statues of prominent politicians and historical figures as a night job, which was part of the government’s municipal and road works programme. Mohanty would hide the details of his night job from his fellow students for fear of being ridiculed. As he put it: ‘we worked by night and attended class by day.’ While I was travelling with 244

Figure 10.7 Kedarnath Majihi, from College of Art and Craft Khallikote, showing me one of his electric sculpture works. The college had no electricity in various parts of the building, hence many stray pieces of wire were attached to each other to make it long enough to work. Photograph: Anannya Mehtta.

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him on his motorbike through the city, he would often stop at roundabouts in central Bhubaneswar and point to statutes that he and his friends had been involved in making. The statues were of various political leaders and other well-known national figures. For Mohanty, the city was his source of livelihood but also more importantly his muse. It was an open studio for experimenting and nurturing his art practice. Much of what he learnt was by plugging into a thriving ‘sidescene’ or an alternative scene where earning and learning seemed to be conjoined. In order to be at art school he had to negotiate the city through being part of a larger economy. All of these experiences together are what constituted his university experience. At the time of staging the exhibition, the story of Mohanty and others forced me to grapple with questions regarding the boundaries of learning and education. The students themselves can prompt us to perhaps move away from perceiving education as encompassed within the walls and grounds of an institution. Indeed, as a richer picture emerges, the walls of the institution dissipate and instead the college experience merges with the experience of being part of living in a larger city, as is the case of Mohanty. It is hard to fully account for the specific sources of one’s learning. Yet, my experience of spending time at these institutions revealed that the informal and formal educational processes interact with each other. While many of the students from the various art schools came from small towns, remote villages and semi-urban areas, there was a compelling and shared sense of a will to connect and engage with the ‘global’ and the ‘contemporary’. The group discussions I participated in at the colleges very often turned to the subject of connecting the local context with something larger. Very palpable was the sense of being part of a present, or a ‘now’ in an expanded sense; allowing for different multiplicities to stake a claim on the idea of the contemporary. This was a consistent and strongly emerging theme in our conversations. Most student artists at the government art colleges came from fairly modest or poor backgrounds. Their material and social realities both at home and at college were characterized by deprivation. Being at an art school was therefore not the most conventional choice, and most artists faced familial pressures to seek more lucrative professional avenues. Parents and relatives back home consistently nudged them to take up jobs and careers that would provide a steady means of livelihood and would carry a certain status in society. This familial pressure was further compounded by the fact that the colleges lacked basic facilities and infrastructure for them to be deemed fit for art education. Teachers often failed to turn up, the infrastructure in the art studios was of poor quality and basic art materials were non-existent. Most students were expected to pay for their college themselves and if possible send money home while at college. 246

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Despite all these constraints the students’ hunger for knowledge was evident. The struggles they endured with regard to their desire to learn were significant in informing my narrative of what it meant for them to be at college. They thought of themselves as being aware of and contributing to the contemporary, despite their reality that was in actuality very peripheral to the global art scene. Without losing a sense of their own positionality and the regional context that explicitly informed their views, the students were all outward looking. Bhibuti Prusty, a student of B.K. College Bhubaneswar, uses his work to express the ubiquity of plastic waste all over the Indian countryside. Prusty takes a train from Bhubaneswar to his village on a weekly basis. It was from these frequent trips out of the city that he started using waste, predominantly plastic waste, as both the object and subject of his works. Prusty uses textual materials from newspapers and scavenged plastic waste to create collages and canvas-based works to comment on the dystopic nature of our current times. This ‘will to the contemporary’ takes shape in behaviour and

Figure 10.8 Bhibuti Prusty, a student of B.K. College Bhubaneswar, working in the studio. Even in paintings, he incorporates elements of plastic as both medium and subject matter. Photograph courtesy of Anannya Mehtta.

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practice, wherein students have a sense of self-confidence in formulating narratives and counter-readings of the curriculum and the kind of practice that is being taught. Just as the Biennale served as a site for exchange, so too the colleges also served as a site, where specific realities are lived and where daily failures and triumphs are witnessed both in the classroom and in the studio space. Therefore the claims to the contemporary emerged from different experiences, locations, backgrounds and cultures. The sense of creative energy was contagious. Students pursued experimentation even when the curriculum or the staff were not encouraging of it. Vikas is a student of the College of Art and Craft Khallikote, which is in a small, predominantly rural town. The college is housed in an old palace and it operates as a residential art college where little has changed over the last twenty years. The building is crumbling, with long power cuts on a daily basis, lasting hours. In the preceding decade up until 2015, the college had no new faculty appointments. Vikas enrolled in the painting department at the college but primarily uses his smart phone to make small video works in his spare time. He is often told by his teachers in the painting department that he needs to stick to painting in order to graduate from college. Undeterred, Vikas is excited by video as a medium and chooses to focus on it despite being warned of failing his degree. His work shown at the Student Biennale was a video piece, a static frame taken from a stationary train window, which captured the comings and goings of traders and travelling salesmen trying to make ends meet. Vikas’s interest in the video works perhaps relates to a more global appreciation of art and new media. Pursuing his interest in video and new media, despite opposition from his faculty, is symptomatic of the disjuncture between the college and its existing infrastructure and the desire and quest by students to connect to and be part of a larger more open and discursive global art scene.

Biennale as a site of learning The construction and the launching of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale was a mammoth task. It allowed for the condensing of global, national and local considerations of artistic practice, and in the process offered a new approach towards exhibition building in India. Furthermore, as a new kind of art space, it offered a fluid learning environment with education and students at the centre of its endeavour. The complexities and the struggle to stage the Kochi Biennale in the first place resonated with the constraints experienced by the various art colleges. As has been documented (D’Souza, 2013; see also Chapter 1), the Biennale used all kinds of spaces to house the works of art, from old derelict warehouses, former colonial buildings in a state of disrepair and unused vacant lots of land, as well as standard 248

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locations. This ‘infrastructure’ and sense of locatedness gave the Biennale a distinct flavour where the challenges of a lack of display space and the paucity of funding and its attendant problems were as openly a part of the exhibition. This often left the viewer confused and blurred the lines between what was construed as a portion of the site and what constituted the work of art. These tensions, and the struggle and praxis, created a unique and thought-provoking viewing experience, which subsequently for the student artist equally meant rethinking the work and ideas of display, all of which proved more complex than the individual drawings and images. Within the context of the main Biennale, the staging of the Student Biennale allowed for a flexible and fertile play of temporalities and narratives. On the one hand, the visitor was part of the physical event, the Biennale itself. On the other hand, a space was created for the visitor to be embedded in the slower and more confusing reality of understanding what it means to be at a government-funded Indian art college and how that experience informs art practice and curation. The simultaneity of experience was made possible by showcasing art objects that spoke both to the physical staging of the event and to creating platforms for conversations and dialogue. Many of the participating students and curators had been in discussion towards the lead up to the Biennale about the artworks to be exhibited, some of which were commissioned and finalized in the college. Other students worked on site-specific installations, which involved gathering material and being in constant touch with the curators to ascertain the layout of the space and finalizing drawings of what the sculptures would ultimately look like. Kedarnath from Odisha made a site-specific installation that was a mammoth gun with red lights, which comically lit up as though periodically shooting at someone. At the centre of the gun was an inverted image of a woman. The work was kitschy with aggressive repetitive movements. The artist changed various details of the work after having arrived in Kochi ten days before the opening, keeping in mind what was easily available and the space that was allocated to him. In contrast to Kedarnath, Baruna Behera, having previously worked with clay in college, in Khallikote, turned to the use of waste Styrofoam paper plates and waste plastic bottles sourced in Kochi. He created a fantastical world of sea creatures using cut up plastic bottles and an oversized tree trunk from paper plates cut in a filigree form to allow for the play of light and shadow. Both these artists offered playful pieces, and each a poignant take on environmental degradation and the conception of another world. Both of them used the site to alter their works in response to what was allocated to them in terms of space and resources. Given the fact that one does not necessarily become an artist after having procured a degree in fine art, the question that automatically arises is 249

Figure 10.9 Kedarnath Majihi and Baruna Behera working on their site-specific installations at the Students Biennale venue in Kochi. Photograph: Anannya Mehtta.

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what the years spent in an art school mean for a student. The exhibition provides a platform for students to explore this very question through a lived experience. At the Biennale venue, namely the exhibition hall, the students metamorphosed into artists, a sudden change in positionality from a learner to the learned, from a seeker to a sharer. Baruna Behera said of the opening day: ‘I have been working here day and night to get the installation ready. I was nervous and felt like I was giving an exam but on the opening day something changed and I was now a Biennale artist.’ The event of the exhibition allowed students to be part of many different ‘nows’ or contemporaries – the tug of being in more than one time and place, namely the college and the exhibition site, simultaneously. Thus, colleges in remote parts of the country felt the effects of the Biennale. The curators while on site at the colleges represented the Biennale to the colleges, thus shifting the centre of activity temporarily away from the Kochi. Colleges too became ‘centres’, seamlessly acquiescing in their notional relocation to sites of exchange and geography away from Kochi to where the college was actually located. In this way, there arose through the Biennale ways of renegotiating structures and engagement. It is interesting to note, for example, that both Baruna and Kedarnath, as they worked on-site in dialogue with the curator, also kept asking for money to top up their phones so that they could keep their teachers in the loop. There was a constant relay back home with classmates and friends, letting them know what they were experiencing and also seeking suggestions on what they should add or subtract from their artworks. The Biennale offered a space of multiple conversations and ‘sites’ of exchange, with the Student Biennale exhibition itself being a particular site for dispersed and distributed new knowledge. One of the contrasting experiences at the Biennale compared to being in the colleges relates to the actual selection of work. The process of shortlisting artworks and artists inevitably excluded some students, while at the Biennale, there was a welcoming and open invitation to all present. The relatively short time scale for the project placed pressures on this selection process. Longer-term engagement at the college level would certainly help widen participation in various ways. Nonetheless, an open invitation to all was given for the Biennale event itself. The process of cleaning the site, installing the artworks and finding support among artists and others to ‘stage’ the show helped with a wider sense of a collective. In addition to the camaraderie, it also alluded to the challenges of building and running institutions. It served as a reflective moment where those present at the Biennale examined their role in putting it together. This process had a wider impact on the college artists and students in understanding the challenges of institution building and improved understanding of their roles in making 251

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their art colleges work. Another subtle layering did occur when gallerists showed interest in buying some of the artworks on display, creating a more challenging environment for interaction. In learning from its first iteration, the future of the Student Biennale is now being envisioned in a way that is less episodic and will have more sustained engagement between the curator, the university and the students. The frame through which the future of the Biennale is being conceptualized cuts across a spectrum of different actors and involves a series of conversations on art practice. There is a growing appetite to debate and discuss various topics through a range of different formats such as symposiums, seminars, talks and residencies. This more holistic approach towards uncovering and understanding emerging art practices will allow for greater and more intense dialogue between and among artists, curators and institutions and will break away from the idea of the Biennale being an ‘exhibition event’. Given the differences across colleges, the varying economic and material difficulties, and the underlying concerns over a stalled pedagogy, the success and failure of the Student Biennale project lie in it being able to create an open invitational context, an innovative space that allows for both encouragement and critiquing. At the Biennale, the students were accountable to and for the works they had produced and were exhibiting. Working through many of these constraints the Student Biennale worked as an artistic and intellectual ‘trampoline’ for the creativity of the students. It allowed the students to be both exposed and respond to a larger world that opened up due to the Biennale to ask questions about how one looks at the world, and acts through their artistic endeavour to engage with it with independence and their own momentum. If one were to think of the Biennale as a university – as an equalizing and democratic space – it provided an opportunity for practices to unfold and be created, where relationships are perpetually transforming. Through various interactions with the public, through readings and counter-readings of the exhibition, both sites, the Biennale and the colleges, have been activated. The colleges even though far from the Biennale were galvanized by the idea of being part of the larger world of art production, which in turn connected the colleges to a more global and richer art ecosystem, and art market. This in turn impacted on the curatorial staging and the timbre of the stories that emerged. In the college the curators picked certain artworks and projects because of their site-specific context. In Kochi, on the other hand, one was influenced by the space so as to recreate the process and experience emerging from the artwork emanating from the college. The physical process of art installation brought out narratives different from those imagined in the colleges. In Kochi, then, one saw the final staging of the artworks, drawn from all the different colleges onto a single space. 252

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In conclusion, the students, even though from very diverse backgrounds (and levels of opportunity within a similar system of government-funded education), had more in common among themselves than with many of the visitors. There was a commonality of questions that were raised by the students after having been exposed to the various works of art at the Biennale. To a certain extent, this is an important element of what contemporary art today is and what the Biennale stands for and can galvanize. The experience allowed students to ask questions of themselves but also registered a demand for many more open and discursive spaces. Time, space and monetary constraints within the Biennale framework provided a creative context in which to mark an event that is populated by objects for the visitors. However, the objects in question I felt were often less important than the questions that students addressed to themselves and their fraternity. If the impact of the Student Biennale were to last longer than its ‘exhibition’, then it would allow for a more extended engagement with practice, with a view to changing the way art education has thus far been undertaken. The Biennale allows for moments of flux and becoming which lies at the centre of any investigation into the idea of practice and learning. A trampoline is such that the falling and losing of one’s balance is as much a part of the experience as is the rising to a rhythm and sense of control. The Student Biennale in its first iteration was a space that allowed students to both fall and rise.

Notes 1 See: http://www.kochimuzirisbiennale.org/students-biennale/ 2 http://www.kochimuzirisbiennale.org/state-of-art-schools/

References Dercon, C. (2014) ‘KMB Is a Blueprint for the “Museums of the Future”’ [video interview], Kochi-Muziris Biennale website: http://kochimuzirisbiennale.org/ chris-dercon-kochi-muziris-biennale-is-a-blueprint-for-the-museums-of-thefuture/ [Accessed 10 December 2015]. D’Souza, Robert E. (2013) ‘The Indian Biennale Effect: The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012’, Cultural Politics, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 296–312. Gill, G. (2015) ‘The Slow and Steady Death of the Delhi College of Art’, in The Wire. Available Online: http://thewire.in/2015/09/14/the-slow-and-steady-deathof-the-delhi-college-of-art-10704/ [Accessed 28 November 2015]. Ivanov, A. (2013) ‘Tank Thinking: An Interview with Irit Rogoff’, in Arterritory. Available Online: http://arterritory.com/en/texts/interviews/2498-tank_thinking._ an_interview_with_irit_rogoff/ [Accessed 28 November 2015].

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Jaisinghani, Belle (2008) ‘After Years, Sir JJ School of Art Begins to Breathe’, The Times of India, 7 November 2008. Available Online: http://timesofindia.indiatimes. com/city/mumbai/After-years-Sir-JJ-School-of-Art-begins-to-BREATHE/articleshow/3682953.cms [Accessed 26 January 2016]. Kathjoo, S. (2015) http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-memory-of-a-delugeand-the-surface-of-water/ [Accessed 28 October 2015]. Nair, M. (2015) ‘Three Is Company’, Arts Illustrated, Dec 2014 – Jan 2015, pp. 42–50. Sengupta, Shuddhabrata (2014) ‘Talk Given as Experimenter Curators’ Hub, 2014, Day 1’. Available Online: https://vimeo.com/105012098; http://www.experimenter. in/web/?q=node/49 [Accessed 27 April 2016].

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11 REGIONAL EFFECTS The rise of large-scale art events in South Asia Amit Kumar Jain

The re-emergence of large-scale cultural events in South Asia has sparked a renewed discourse in large-scale exhibition culture, about the impact as well as the feasibility of such events in emerging countries in the Indian subcontinent. The proliferation of biennales, festivals and summits in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and very soon in Pakistan identifies with each nation’s anxiety to align itself with international trends and sharing a global voice. The biennales from these countries also strive to focus on capitalizing to convert its home city as a cosmopolitan cultural capital, resulting in economic gains, though in reality the impact has been varied. How successful these models have been remains a question that scholars, event organizers, advisory groups, government agencies and arts organizations are working hard to answer, as each nation poses political, social, financial and even environmental threats towards sustaining these events. The aim of this chapter is to look at some of the models and determine their impact on the cultural fabric of each nation, as well as the impact on art making practices, community involvement and city regeneration. A specific focus is made of the role of the KochiMuziris Biennale as a cultural catalyst in the Indian art scene, with a new model that emerged, like other biennales, from the political, social and cultural debates in India. Overall, the chapter draws from the author’s long-term engagement with arts administration and contemporary art in South Asia, including as a curator of the third edition of the Colombo Art Biennale in 2014. It also draws upon research conducted by the consultancy firm KPMG for the first edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012 as well the author’s own independent empirical research regarding this event.

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Biennale culture: models and perspectives The emergence of large-scale art events in South Asia can initially be identified within two schools of thought. Jones (2010: 68–69) comments upon the biennales that were established in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century, tracing their development to the Venetian model, as they were established with similar intentions of modernization, utopian structure, urban regeneration and tourism, knowledge production and international capital investment, as well as the political aspirations of new economies of the world. Niemojewski (2010), on the other hand, has argued that the emergence of new biennales in Third World countries has established a counter-Venetian history (Niemojewski, 2010: 90; also: Hoskote, 2010: 312; Vogel, 2010) and bears resemblance to the Havana Biennale, especially to its third edition titled ‘Tradition and Contemporaneity’, in 1989. This edition marked a new chapter in biennale culture as it inclined towards making the format more discursive and inclusive by integrating a ‘conference’, a platform for debate and knowledge production that since then has become an indispensable aspect of contemporary biennales (Niemojewski, 2010: 90–95; see also Weiss, 2011: 14). ‘Tradition and Contemporaniety’ dispensed with the model of national representation, categorized art under a common thematic and rejected the awards that were associated with the Venetian model. We can further recognize that these biennales were created to generate a discourse from the periphery. Focus was placed upon cultural exchange through the model of a ‘workshop’, whereby artists would engage and experiment in creating site-specific works through exposure to various local cultures and dialogue with their peers as well as their interactions and observations of the local surroundings (Da Silva, 2010: 46–48; Van Hal, 2010: 9;). In identifying the biennale within the above two frameworks, Sheikh (2009: 69) bridges somewhat between the two. He concurs that the biennale has various possibilities in contemporary times and stems from one original (i.e. Venice), while the rest are its translations, and that alone is a factor that complicates the study of the biennale model. According to Sheikh, each and every event takes from the site it is established in and moulds to the requirements of the cultural system it inhabits, responding to the needs of its community (Sheikh, 2009: 97; see also Jones, 2010: 68). Sheikh’s evaluation may seem appropriate when one looks at the development of the various models of cultural events in South Asia that have developed in the last few years. Yet, how different these models are from each other and what role they play in their cultural scenario is a question that this chapter seeks to answer, or at least help further delineate. Van Hal, who has written extensively on biennale models, has also reiterated that

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the study of individual histories of various biennales reveals a better understanding of the development of the biennale culture, not only in terms of the country in the region it is housed in, but also in terms of its global connections (Van Hal, 2010: 5–6). The Venetian and the Havana models remain the two important schools to identify a biennale. Lim and Lee (2006) extended this argument to define a biennale as a biannual, large-scale event that is listed as a ‘must-see’ happening of that region or country and thus attracts global attention and has both short- and long-term effects on the host nation’s economy (Lim and Lee, 2006: 408). While this is a useful, broad definition, it assumes the event of the biennale as having regular intervals, but this is not always the case, as many biennales, including in South Asia, have been inconsistent in their subsequent editions. Based on the history of biennales and that there have been irregularities in their repetition, Neill has simplified the statement to ‘a large scale, international group exhibition that recurs every two to five years’ (Neill, 2012: 52). Neill’s definition also includes triennales and quadrennales and extends to various disciplines such as architecture and design, thus increasing the range of events under a single term of the biennale. Thus, various scholars, including Hoskote, Gardner and Marieke van Hal, prefer to use the term ‘perennials’, as this includes not only different categories of events based on their discipline but also events that are not constant in their repetition, but nonetheless evoke a sense of ‘series’ or continuation (Jones, 2010: 68; Van Hal, 2010: 5; Hoskote, 2012: 107; see also Eltham, 2011). In the South Asian context, the term ‘perennials’ seems most appropriate keeping in mind the irregularity of some of the events such as the Colombo Art Biennale (2009, 2012 and 2014; next edition expected late 2016) as well as the Kathmandu International Arts Festival (2009, 2012; next edition was postponed due to the earthquake of 2015, now due 2017).

The emergence of biennale culture in South Asia Inspired by the World Fairs of the nineteenth century, the inauguration of the Venice Biennale in 1895 marked a beginning of a large-scale model for the public display of art. The Biennale was structured as an art fair with national representations, a model that was replicated by other biennales that were inaugurated till mid-twentieth century. The biennales of the West, including Venice, Whitney and Carnegie, soon came to be recognized as the best that art had to offer, but it would be important to note that these ‘mega’ events always portrayed the Western hegemony, as it was organized by Western scholars, and their tastes. The seeds of global resistance were first sown in 1951, when the Sao Paolo Biennale in Brazil shifted the

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global cultural attention away from the ‘Centre’ to the ‘Periphery’. It was soon to be followed by the (now defunct) Triennale India in 1968 and much later the Asian Art Biennale in Bangladesh in 1982, Havana in 1983 and the Johannesburg Biennale in 1991. These biennales, triennials or perhaps to use the word ‘perennials’ aligned the global south in a resistance to the Western hegemony, adopting the model of the large-scale event to build upon cultural infrastructure in their respective countries and using modern art to stake their claim in modernity, which until then was governed and asserted by the West. Though biennales continued to mushroom across the world in the 1990s and established themselves as important agents of contemporary art, not all events have managed to sustain the interest of the organizers and its public. The Arab Art Biennale, the Triennale India and the Johannesburg Biennale are some examples that succumbed to domestic criticism and bureaucratic lethargy (Adajania, 2013: 169). Barring the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka, which too, is criticized for its outdated and inward-looking approach, South Asia remained absent from the biennale culture that was growing in the world (it is notable that Vogel’s (2010) recent global study of biennales makes no reference to South Asia). It was only in 2009 that the Colombo Art Biennale was planned and inaugurated, parallel to the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka. Simultaneously, Nepal held its first Kathmandu International Arts Festival in 2009. The Dhaka Art Summit emerged as a private art foundation’s vision for contemporary arts in 2012, while the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the largest of the cultural events in South Asia, opened its doors in December 2012. Much more recently, the Lahore Biennale has started taking form and will take on the responsibility of promoting Pakistani visual and performing arts. The proliferation of the biennale as an exhibition form in South Asia has sparked interest in its evolution and its effect on contemporary art production and urban regeneration. Stemming from a common postcolonial history, as well a lethargic and outdated approach by the government to museology, the South Asian large-scale cultural model has taken various incarnations to create individual identities in a region that shares numerous commonalities. Be it a biennale, a summit or a festival, these new voices from the periphery spark investigations into their origins but also their approach to bureaucratic suffrage and economic feasibility in their home nations. In September 2009, the Colombo Art Biennale emerged as the largest contemporary art manifestation in Sri Lanka. Founded by British gallerist Annoushka Hempel and Sri Lankan archaeologist and artist Jagath Weerasinghe, the Biennale’s aim was to promote Sri Lankan art and provide the artist with a platform to rub shoulders with international contemporaries. The first edition titled ‘Imagining Peace’ was planned simultaneously with 258

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the end of the thirty-year civil war in April 2009. Since then the Colombo Art Biennale has completed three editions, while the fourth is scheduled to take place in November 2016. The Biennale continues to grow organically and works with a small team of volunteers within Hempel’s gallery, who are responsible for showcasing approximately fifty artists from over twenty countries (in 2014). For its third edition, the Biennale reserved 50 percent of the artist slots for local artists, and combined programmes, performances and talks. Privately managed and with a collaboration of various cultural agencies, local patrons, and miniscule governmental support, the Biennale has made an effort to bring international art practices to Sri Lanka, which previously has been restricted to a few art galleries. Although the event has gained popularity over the years, its contribution to the cultural landscape is always under scrutiny and to date has not received government support. For a nation that has been ridden with a limbo like situation for decades, plagued with civil wars, uprisings and a curb on artistic freedom, Nepal’s Kathmandu International Art Festival (KIAF) provided a platform for artists to comment upon political, social and environmental concerns. The festival was initially planned as a one-time event in 2009 with a long-term view to convert it into a biennale. Due to the country’s political climate and funding issues, the second and the most successful edition, titled ‘Earth, Body, Mind’, took place in 2012, three years after the first edition. KIAF was conceived and promoted by Sangeeta Thapa, a gallerist and art patron based in Kathmandu, under her not-for-profit Siddhartha Art Foundation. The mission statement of KIAF aims to place Nepal on a global map as a venue for contemporary art, and allows for exchange of artistic practices between national and international artists. As stated on the KIAF website, ‘[t]he festival is about bringing like-minded individuals together in a contemporary aesthetic experience. [It] is about art for a social cause’ (http:// kiaf.artmandu.org). It was the second edition of KIAF that received international attention, external funding and also incorporated various scholars from South Asia as members of the curatorial advisory board. Spread across sixteen venues and showcasing artists from thirty-one countries, the event bought together locations that were both public and private and resulted in attracting close to 500,000 people. KIAF became an important platform for the Nepali art community to showcase their works and get international recognition. The festival failed to meet its third edition deadline due to an earthquake that shook Nepal in April 2015. Though the founders are optimistic about its future, at the time of writing it is unsure when the next edition will take place. In February 2012, the privately funded Samdani Art Foundation established and inaugurated the Dhaka Art Summit, a biennial (or biannual) art event. The aim of the summit is to increase artistic engagement between 259

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artists from Bangladesh and the rest of the world. The summit is organized in collaboration with the Shilpakala Academy and the Bangladesh National Museum; both government cultural institutions that have otherwise remained rooted to traditional artistic formats. The summit, due to the patronage of its founders Rajeeb and Nadia Samdani, has already attracted global attention with partnerships with artists and galleries in South Asia and museums across the world. Curatorial teams from museums such as Tate, artists and curators of the calibre of Rashid Rana, Shahzia Sikander, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Dayanita Singh and Nikhil Chopra among others, and strategic partnerships with Asia Art Archive and the Delfina Foundation and art publications are resulting in creating and expanding upon a discourse, which the Asian Art Biennale in Bangladesh failed to achieve. In a statement issued by the Dhaka Art Summit, it mentions that the summit is: ‘Neither a biennial, symposium nor festival but somewhere in between. . .’ (www.dhakaartsummit.org). In the context of South Asia, where each nation is creative in establishing its cultural identity, this statement or description goes some way to summarize the broader development of biennale culture. Not only does it acknowledge the various forms of the large-scale event, but it also aligns with the various models that co-exist in South Asia, which in themselves are in a constant state of flux. In India, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale emerged in December 2012, attracting international attention as well as local engagement. The Biennale surfaced amidst an economic slowdown that had resulted in a major shift in the Indian art world and slowed the pace at which the markets were growing. After receiving encouragement and support from the Government of Kerala in 2010, the Kochi Biennale Foundation was entrusted to execute a project to create India’s first Biennale. While auction results continued to rise from 2005 to 2008, there was a sharp fall in 2009 when the net worth of the Indian art market fell by 67 percent, leading to a fall in confidence for artists’ prices. This made galleries rethink their programming and private collections and foundations, whose capital had also shrunk during this period, making it difficult to acquire works and sustain the market. Amidst this slowdown, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale emerged as an artist-led initiative, with both public and private funds being utilized towards promoting contemporary art within a region. The Biennale also capitalized on initiating educational and outreach programmes, which have proved successful and remain built into future planning (see Chapters 3 and 10). Led by artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, co-founders and curators of the first edition, the mission for the first edition focused on the facet of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism that has been inherent to the history of Kochi and invited eighty-nine artists from twenty-three countries to react to its historic connections within India and the rest of 260

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the world (Kochi Biennale Foundation, 2012). The Biennale was housed in historic buildings, including some that once belonged to the Portuguese, Dutch and British, who over the last few centuries had traded spices and other goods from Kochi. By focusing on the region’s cosmopolitan history, the Kochi Biennale Foundation positioned the Biennale as a unique model to revive and regenerate a city that, since colonial times, had faded away as a second-tier city. The event attracted nearly 400,000 people in its first edition, and since then has played an important role in the cultural landscape of the country. The Lahore Biennale Foundation is the most recent addition to the cultural fabric of South Asian art events. As part of their ‘Manifesto’, they announced an agenda of a ‘Biennale besides Biennale’, by which they mean there will be ‘a year round calendar of discursive activity that seeks to provide a sustained environment for hosting conversations, intuitions and investigations into visual expression and experience’ (http://lahorebiennale.org/manifesto/). Thus, the foundation, apart from hosting the biennale every two years, will focus on an ongoing programme of stimulating conversations, research, grants, publications and cultural exchange throughout the year, and ensure a sustained environment for art as a tool for social critique. Since its inception and while the foundation works towards hosting its first biennale in November 2017, it has collaborated and contributed to creating creative partnerships with Teertha Artists Collective in Sri Lanka and the Gujral Foundation in India, which funded ‘My East Is Your West’, a collateral project during the Venice Biennale in 2016. The Lahore Biennale Foundation will add to the existing network of galleries and residencies in Lahore and Karachi and facilitate projects and partnerships that are, at times, challenging in the country’s political and social climate, which has led to gallerists moving out of the country and artists looking to exhibition venues elsewhere.

Biennale city Biennales have always been named after the cities they belong to. The main reason for naming a biennale after its native city is because a biennale, especially in the examples of Kochi and Colombo, draws from the historicity of the city. As suggested with the preceding accounts of the large scale events in the region, a biennale is also responsible for the regeneration of a city and can boost cultural tourism (Baniotopoulo, 2000; Roces, 2005: 51, 56–57; Eltham, 2011; Sorabjee, 2013: 85; Marchart, 2014), which holds very well for all the South Asian biennales. The decline of a city does not only relate to economic regression but also relate to a range of political, social, cultural or environmental factors. The strongest case for the large 261

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amount of museums and biennales mushrooming in the last decade of the twentieth century is based on the success of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which restored cultural status to the industrial city of Bilbao, which had seen rapid decline and large-scale unemployment. The museum helped make the city into one of the most visited destinations (Baniotopoulo, 2000, see also Shin, 2010: 406). Similarly, the Liverpool Biennale was established in 1999 with the aim to revive the industrial town of Liverpool as a new cultural city of the United Kingdom and to cultivate a large gallery and residency network. Within a few years, the city was able to attract international attention that not only resulted in enhancing its image but also created employment, involved its community, and had a positive economic impact on local businesses. These effects were further enhanced in 2008 under the European Capital of Culture programme, when Liverpool was granted the title, prompting a year’s programming of cultural events across the city. It can be said, the success of the Liverpool Biennale helped in the application for Culture Capital status, so suggesting of a cycle of ongoing development through ‘investment’ in culture. The relationship between a biennale and its city is evident with successful editions of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Dhaka Art Summit and the Kathmandu International Art Festival, which have brought in thousands of visitors to their exhibitions, created or assisted alternative spaces to support cultural infrastructure of the city, and even inspired the government to come forward and support. Kochi was named as ‘Biennale city’ by the then mayor for Kochi in 2012 and the success of the Biennale has resulted in an increase in tourism, higher occupancy in hotels and increasing the standard of living by creating job opportunities and other economic related benefits. The decision by the BJP-led Indian government in 2016 to designate Kochi as a recipient for Smart City investment grants can also be partly attributed to the success of Kochi-Muziris Biennale. While the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is funded by private donors, corporate sponsors and international agencies, the government has come forward to support the event financially as well as give access to some of the historic buildings that are now used as venues. The other mega events of Dhaka, Colombo and Kathmandu are held in both public and private locations, giving access to the local community that may not see contemporary and experimental art in state-run galleries. The South Asian biennales, especially Kochi and Kathmandu, have done well to use unconventional spaces such as abandoned warehouses, public gardens and community walls to display art, making access more viable and art more democratic. By changing the guard and tackling ‘location’ or ‘locality’, the two events, especially Kochi, have provided a breath of fresh air to the abandoned and unused warehouses that otherwise languished 262

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in the urban landscape as mere remnants of a colonial past (Shin, 2010: 407). Furthermore, buildings in Kochi such as the Aspinwall House, Pepper House and Matancherry warehouses, which have continued to serve as cafes and residencies since 2012, have become symbols of resistance to the ‘white cube’, a phenomenon of Western modernism, where an isolated, sanitized space for introspection and dialogue homogenized the artworks it housed (Filipovic, 2010: 323; see also Weibel, 2007: 138–146). Similar projects are also planned for the upcoming edition of the Colombo Art Biennale in 2016, where the biennale is planned (at the time of writing) as a site-specific intervention on Slave Island, converting community centres and public spaces into art interventions. The Lahore Biennale Foundation has also sent out an open call for public art projects titled ‘Bagh-E-Jinnah (Lawrence Gardens) as well as ‘Intersections’ that will support public art at Istanbul Chowk, Lahore. The project titled ‘My East Is Your West’, a collateral event during the Venice Biennale, was installed in the crowded Liberty market in Lahore, attracting thousands of local visitors to come and share real time with the audience in Venice during the 55th edition of the biennale held in 2015. The two editions of the KIAF, which were held in private as well as public spaces, such as the zoo, capitalized on a flourishing street art culture and invited artists to work at important junctions in the city as well as the city’s old neighbourhoods. The festival that is the largest manifestation of art in Nepal has only been successful due to the self-driven artists who go beyond their means to contribute through their art as well as their time. This selfless motivation and a hunger to be social activists were also visible during the recent earthquake in 2015. Though the next edition of the mega event stands postponed, the contribution of the artists to rebuild their neighbourhood through art (be it through therapy or by building sustainable projects) could arguably be viewed as some form of third edition of the Kathmandu International Art Festival. The artists, working in groups, adopted various sites across the Kathmandu valley and rehabilitated people through art. This is indicative of the ongoing interest that surrounds the festival, and its impact on working collaboratively. Of all sites of South Asian mega events, the city of Kochi visibly enjoys the benefit of ‘monopoly rent’. According to Sheikh, monopoly rent is the increase in the perceived value of the place, which accrues on the basis of exclusivity (Sheikh, 2009: 69). Based on the study conducted by the consultancy firm KPMG in 2013 and on ground interviews conducted by myself, the Biennale was responsible for increased rentals in Fort Kochi, Matancherry and Veli by 10 percent, 13 percent and 24 percent, respectively (KPMG, 2014: 17). The Ministry of Tourism awarded the Biennale the accolade of ‘Most Innovative and Unique Tourism Project’ in 2012, 263

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thus, confirming and elevating the city of Kochi as a cultural destination. The Biennale not only saw an inflow of tourists, but it also raised the state income from tourism by 4 percent during the course of the event as the average number of nights spent by a tourist increased by 14 percent (KPMG, 2014: 17). Durbar Hall, which was restored for the purpose of the Biennale and now boasts of being one of the best equipped public art galleries in the country, has set the benchmark for multiple conservation projects to be adopted across the country. Regeneration of a city is also measured by the number of jobs an event can create and lead to an increase in social and cultural standard of living (Baniotopoulo, 2000; Shin, 2010: 406). The KochiMuziris Biennale became a tool for employment as it directly affected an estimated 182 people during its tenure, which included both permanent and temporary employees including volunteers (KPMG, 2014: 17). The public relations company added another six employees while other sectors like hospitality, security and logistics added another seventy-six personnel. The benefits of biennale tourism were also enjoyed by the state of Kerala, which saw an increase of 52 percent in domestic tourism and 8 percent in international tourism during the first month of the Biennale, and an increase of 12.22 percent in revenue in 2013 (KPMG, 2014: 16). Thus, the monopoly rent enjoyed in the case of Kochi is evident through the figures stated above though impact can only be ascertained through successive editions. Each and every mega event has an overall impact on the economy, as public transport (airlines, railways, buses, trucks, taxis/auto rickshaws) is used for travel, hotels are booked for accommodation, restaurants cater to various travellers and gift shops capitalize on the large number of tourists. The Biennale creates an impact on its surrounding, each having a ‘trickledown effect’ on the local economy, without directly receiving the benefits of this exchange.

The South Asian art event: a post-museum? The proliferation of biennales, festivals and summits in the South Asian region can be attributed to various factors, which include creation of a post globalization identity, a sense of belonging as well as economic impact, particularly regarding cultural tourism (Baniotopoulo, 2000). Moreover, these mega events can be linked to an act of resistance (Hoskote, 2010: 310) that can further be classified under resistance to political, social and even cultural lethargy. As suggested previously, in reference to Sheikh and Jones (see Sheikh, 2009: 97; Jones, 2010: 68), a biennale adapts itself to the requirements of its host nation, to fulfil gaps in their cultural infrastructure. The Biennale, festival or summit seems to have done that, by inserting itself into a complex network of government and private museums, residencies, 264

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galleries and art fairs that exist in South Asia. By contrast, the South Asian museum model, though a boon to the preservation of cultural heritage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has remained tied to its colonial roots and has not been able to cope with changing modes that were governing the art world. While there are some changes taking place, most of the museums – the wonder houses of yesteryears – are now warehouses of dead objects, with little or no relevance to their audience. The lack of motivation among its staff members, as well the lack of knowledge in modern museum management, has resulted in outdated interpretive methodologies and the deterioration of objects in public collections. Rustom Bharucha (2000: 11–14) is very critical of the state of the museums in India and how they have not been able to become ‘entertainment houses’ or alternatives to popular culture of cinema, for the masses. Different formats and public venues have been required to develop more contemporary cultural engagement. The defunct Triennale India and the outdated Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka, for example, created opportunities for newer models or postinstitutions for showcasing contemporary art (Kreps, 2000: 202; Hlavajova, 2010: 298; see also Mathur, 2005: 704), which included artist residencies and experimental spaces such as Khoj (India), VASL (Pakistan), Britto (Bangladesh), Teertha (Sri Lanka) and the now-defunct Sutra (in Nepal). Such spaces provided opportunities for cultural exchange as well as allowed for a zone of experimentation that was beyond the scope of the academic institutions. Privately funded arts organizations such as the Devi Art Foundation, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Gujral Foundation and Sanskriti Kendra among others are some of the initiatives that have been working in New Delhi largely without government support. In Mumbai, the public–private partnered Bhau Daji Lad Museum and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangahalaya dominate the cultural fabric of the city. Apart from a few more non-profit initiatives like the Indian Foundation for the Arts and the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) that engage in project funding and public programmes, the contemporary Indian art scene relies mostly on the India Art Fair (established in 2009) and private galleries. In Bangladesh, the Bengal Art Foundation has been working for many years promoting performing and visual arts through their annual musical festival and their galleries across Dhaka. The recently established Samdani Art Foundation is behind the Dhaka Art Summit that has attracted curators, museum professional galleries and artists from across the globe at a great expense for the promoters. In Nepal, the Siddhartha Art Foundation is behind the Kathmandu International Art Festival, while the Nepal Arts Council, a publicly and privately funded arts organization, has taken landmark steps to promote Nepali art at the 265

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India Art Fair in 2016. The Sri Lankan art scene is managed by a handful of art galleries and two privately funded events, Colombo Art Biennale and Colomboscope, which are partly supported by international cultural institutions. In Pakistan, the Rohtas Gallery in Lahore and the Canvas Gallery in Karachi have played an important role in showcasing contemporary art. Kratz and Karp (2006: 1) have defined a ‘museum’ as ‘temples of civilizations, sites for creation of citizens, forums for debate, settings for cultural interchange and negotiation of values, engines of economic renewal and revenue generation’. A few of the factors mentioned earlier, such as a setting for cultural exchange, economic renewal and revenue generation, can also be attributed to the biennale, which, at least in the South Asian context, has assumed the role of an alternative space to a museum. Moreover, the biennale as a platform encourages experimentation, discourse and deliberation that enables the artist to look beyond institutional boundaries (van Hal, 2010: 4). The Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India is a very good example in relation to these considerations of the museum and its alternatives. In an interview I held with co-founder Riyas Komu (in 2014), he said that the Kochi Biennale is also the outcome of a vacuum created by the apathy of the government-run museums and the limited success of the private initiatives. Komu echoes Hoskote’s ideas of a biennale as resistance, which he directs against a mindset, both local and national, that was reluctant to change (Sandell and Dodd, 2010: 10; also Sorabjee, 2013: 85; see also Chapter 3). The Biennale aims to create a platform for arts production and art education, especially through its extensive outreach and residency programmes, that sustain the Biennale calendar beyond the duration of the scheduled three months. Based on the large attendance figures (approximately 900,000 visited the first two editions) as well inviting a large range of demographics from India and abroad, the Biennale has become a contact zone for dialogue and community engagement. Its success can be judged as how the term ‘biennale’ itself has been adopted by the local populace and equated to large art gathering. In Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, Hooper-Greenhill (2000) suggests our understanding of the museum has changed. It has shifted from the modernist museum, which is based upon the transmission of knowledge (suggestive of hierarchies and gatekeepers), to what she terms the ‘post-museum’, which, through more fluid processes and collaborations, focuses upon cultural approaches to objects and art. Critical to Hooper-Greenhill’s account is the concept of ‘visual culture’, which she argues ‘as a concept and a methodology refuses to accept the distinction between high and mass culture’. As a field of study, she notes, visual culture ‘raises theoretical questions about the social practices of looking and seeing, which are related 266

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to processes of learning and knowing’ (2000: 4). Arguably, with numerous workshops and programmes for school and college students, the KochiMuziris Biennale can be considered in similar terms to Hooper-Greenhill’s post-museum, which Rustom Bharucha envisioned as a ‘clearing’ that allowed for freedom in traditional museum set-ups (Bharucha, 2000: 19; also Kreps, 2000: 202; Golding, 2005: 51). The Biennale, contrary to the accusations by various segments in Kerala (Chandran, 2012: 5), has been able to become an active zone of outreach by involving an audience that was previously excluded (Chandran, 2012: 5; see also Crooke, 2011: 170; Sorabjee, 2013: 87). The first two editions have involved more than 50,000 school children, who have toured or performed an activity at the Biennale. To critique the infrastructure, pedagogy and the influence of government-run art institutions in contemporary times, the Biennale, in its first edition, envisioned a higher education programme as a Student Biennale that invited selected graduating students from fourteen art schools in India to create works that were shown during the course of the Biennale. In the second edition, in collaboration with FICA, the Biennale reached out to young curators who surveyed the academic structure of public institutions and were given an opportunity to curate from across the country (see Chapter 10). These projects not only aimed to converge the growing talent from across India at one venue but also provide a base where artists and curators who were not in contact with each other could exchange ideas and engage in a critical dialogue about pedagogy in India (Bydler, 2011: 473–474). The Biennale broke the tradition of ‘learning by the book’ by providing the emerging talent a lived experience at one of the world’s most popular mega events (Jain, 2014; also KPMG, 2014). In the South Asian context, the discursive model of the Havana Biennial has seemingly been retained. Kochi, as well as Colombo, Dhaka and Kathmandu, has encouraged seminars in its programmes, creating an ongoing debate about regional politics as well as sharing knowledge on art production. The emergence of the biennale, the festival and the summit are directly related to a form of resistance (Hoskote, 2010: 310; Marchart, 2014) and can trace their origins to the lack of a thriving art scenes in their respective countries (van Hal, 2010: 20–23). Except for India, the neighbouring countries lacked a gallery infrastructure and markets, as well as a lack of vision in governmental institutions. The perennials of the South Asian region have thus re-structured the biennale model to create a space for contemporary art. While not all have been successful in breaking the elitist nature of the event, Kochi, KIAF and Dhaka Art Summit have attracted thousands of visitors over the duration of the events. Kochi-Muziris Biennale opened its first edition with an unticketed event at the parade ground in Fort Kochi, 267

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inviting members of the political class as well as auto rickshaw drivers. The biennales of South Asia mark a convergence, of local and the global, of the elite and the grassroots, of tradition and the contemporary, and this convergence is in turn rewriting the history of biennales (Harris, 2011: 1; Weibel, 2013: 20–27).

Conclusion: peripheral voices The term ‘periphery’ has been used by various scholars in reference to the decentralization of the existing notion of modernity, as well as debates on inclusion and exclusion associated with the growing number of biennales in the global south (Weiss, 1995: 48; Sheikh, 2009: 69; Niemojewski, 2010: 90–95; Van Hal, 2010: 5; Wallace, 2010: 15–16; Hoskote, 2012: 107; Petersen, 2012: 196; Marchart, 2014). This shift from the old world centres to newer locations in Asia and Africa, which has led to the emergence of a new biennale culture, has been associated with an economic and cultural tool that ascertained their identity in global cultural politics, especially in a postglobalization period (Van Hal, 2010: 6). This new development can be seen to be re-writing art history (Weibel, 2013: 20–27) through the convergence of people from all over the world to a common platform to engage in a discourse that creates commonalities in pluralities. The politics of inclusion is also significant within the South Asian region. Post Havana Biennale, the global south emerged as a new voice from the periphery to stake its claim in modernity; the city of Kochi has emerged from within regional politics, shifting the focus from known art centres of New Delhi and Mumbai. The founders have emphasized the important role that Kerala has played in the cultural map of India, with leading artists from the state, including themselves, being represented in India and abroad. Kochi, with a high literacy rate and cosmopolitan history, easily found itself in this dialogue. Within the region itself, Kathmandu, Colombo, Dhaka and Lahore have emerged from the periphery, not to stake their claim in modernity but to develop a cultural infrastructure of their host nations. The artists from these nations had already made their presence felt globally, and with a booming Indian art market, they were often showcased much more often in India than their own countries. Their inclusion in the Indian art scene (Rashid Rana was often referred to as an Indian artist in many listings) or their exclusion from their own defines the biennale culture in the South Asian region. It is because of these available cross-currents between the countries of South Asia that we can begin to offer new perspectives on the study of biennale culture. It is also possibly to begin to speculate on the future trajectories of the large-scale art event in the region. Two hypothetical situations that can exist in South Asia emerge. Keeping in mind the 268

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potential for ‘biennale fatigue’(as has been seen elsewhere in the world), as well the constant struggle to gain public support and funding, two bold, if speculative, scenarios can be envisaged. By working across the region there is scope for greater collaboration and the situating of a stronger regional cultural fabric within the wider global context of contemporary art, politics and culture. Based on an earlier model of the Arab Art Biennale (established in 1973 in Baghdad, Iraq), which was a rotating art biennale held across the Arab world, and Manifesta that emerged almost two decades later, there is the possibility for a similar regional large-scale event for South Asia. While the Arab Art Biennale faded away after two editions, Manifesta has successfully rotated its exhibitions in Rotterdam (1996), Luxembourg (1998), Ljubljana (2000), Frankfurt (2002), San Sebastian (2004), Nicosia (2006 – cancelled), Trentino–South Tyrol (2008), Murcia, Spain (2010), Limburg, Belgium (2012) and St. Petersburg (2014). While cultural movement within the European Union is much easier and more established compared to the economic and political circumstance of South Asia, a South Asian Biennale could arguably create greater financial stability as well as allow its respective promoters to focus on creating a substantial educational and outreach programme during the non-exhibition years. Such a model would also lead to less exhibition fatigue, given the emergence of multiple and overlapping creative projects in a region. So, for example, a South Asian Biennale could rotate between Kochi, Colombo, Dhaka, Kathmandu and Lahore, giving an opportunity to each nation to curate and showcase art in its cities. A biennale of this structure would allow for the cultural community to share a platform to negotiate political boundaries, as well share and build upon an existing network of artists, museums and residencies, with the long-term goal to portray a common South Asian region. With a common corpus that is allocated to the host nation, as well continuous fundraising activities, this kind of approach would relax the burden for each country on raising funds every two years. Of course, a shared regional biennale presents its own challenges, most importantly the political tensions that remain in the Indian subcontinent could hamper the establishment and growth of such a biennale, and ongoing problems could persist in terms of the free movement of artists, artworks and monies. Nonetheless, there is an appetite for such an initiative among many within the art world. Multiple efforts have already been made in connecting the region, including, for example, Khoj’s and Vasl’s Aar-Paar project; Devi Art Foundation exhibitions from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka; and JSW Foundation’s South Asian residency Abhisaran. The India Art Fair in 2016 launched the platform section that invited South Asian not-for-profit institutions and galleries to participate under a common umbrella. While there are efforts to create a 269

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workable South Asian model, the vacuum for a continuous regional debate has yet to be fulfilled. Another model for a regional biennale might be considered a translation of both the Venice and the Havana models, to create a single South Asian Biennale with dedicated pavilions for nations from the SAARC region. In the last two decades, India has emerged as a central market for the South Asian artist community, with both the cultural infrastructure of galleries, an international art fair, residencies and museums supporting exhibitions and sales, and the collectors who have easily accepted the inclusion of artists from neighbouring countries in their portfolios. For a proposed South Asian Biennale to adopt the Venetian format of national pavilions, which would be funded by countries, could nonetheless continue to work in the mould of the Havana format to prompt a unique curatorial concept, education and outreach programmes with a specific focus on each pavilion, a platform for dialogue on common issues of the region and arts and focus on cultural exchange. The model would allow for each nation to prepare budgets that could work for their independent pavilions as well a shared percentage for all programming and marketing. The creation of such a model would allow for museum and biennale visitors to acquaint themselves with contemporary practices of the region within a single iteration of a biennale. A significant dilemma, of course, would be to decide which country would host such an event, as each nation would strive to capitalize on the monopoly rent accrued by establishing such a large-scale national, regional and international event. Whatever future the large-scale art event has in the South Asian cultural landscape, it is likely to serve multiple purposes and continue to need to fill the vacuum that has been created due to political, social and cultural lethargy. Arguably, art perennials of South Asia function differently than biennales across the world as they adapt to the differing appetites for contemporary art between nations. Esche, in defining the biennale, has termed it as a ‘good place’ or a ‘no place’ in context to its contribution to its host nation (Esche, 2011: 13; Gardner and Green, 2013: 442–443). In South Asia, the biennale comes forward as a ‘good place’; a confluence of knowledge production, an incubation of art programmes especially its production and most importantly as a tool for regeneration through cultural tourism. It is hard to predict the future of large-scale art events in South Asia, either independently or as one, but certainly its presence in South Asia has created a renewed and a parallel interest in contemporary art. The various models have not only been influential upon each other but have also asserted that ‘biennalogy’ remains a subject that requires more questioning, not only in the region but in a broader, globalized art discourse. 270

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References Adajania, Nancy (2013) ‘Globalism before Globalisation: The Ambivalent Fate of Triennale India’, in Shanay Jhaveri (ed.), Western Artists and India: Creative Inspirations in Art and Design. Bombay: The Shoestring Publisher, pp. 168–185. Baniotopoulo, Evdoxia (2000) ‘Art for Whose Sake? Modern Art Museums and their Role in Transforming Societies: The Case of the Guggenheim Bilbao’, Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies. Vol. 7. Available Online: http://www. jcms-journal.com/articles/10.5334/jcms.7011/ [Accessed 1 February 2016]. Bharucha, Rustom (2000) ‘Beyond the Box’, Third Text, Vol. 14, No. 52, pp. 11–19. Bydler, Charlotte (2011) ‘The Global Horizon for Art Events’, in Jonathan Harris (ed.), Globalization and Contemporary Art. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Limited, pp. 464–478. Chandran, T.V. (2012) ‘What Is Wrong with (Kochi) Biennale?’, The Baroda Pamphlet, Vol. 1, No. 1, Vadodara: Desire Path Publishers, pp. 4–6. Crooke, E. (2011) ‘Museums and Community’, in S. Macdonald (ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies. Second Edition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Limited, pp. 170–185. Da Silva, Jose (2010) ‘Real – Time Curating: Participatory Image Making in Art and Culture’, in Miranda Wallace (ed.), 21st Century – Art in the First Decade. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, pp. 46–51. Eltham, Ben (2011) ‘An Interview with Anthony Gardner about Biennales’. Available Online: http://culturalpolicyreform.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/an-interviewwith-anthony-gardner-about-biennales/ [Accessed 29 May 2014]. Esche, Charles (2011) ‘Making Art Global: A Good Place or a No Place’, in Rachel Weiss (ed.), Making Art Global (Part 1): The Third Havana Biennial 1989. London, Vienna and Eindhoven: Afterall Books in association with Academy of Fine Arts & Van Abbemuseum, pp. 8–13. Filipovic, Elena (2010) ‘The Global White Cube’, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader. Norway and Germany: Bergen Kunstall and HatjeCantz, pp. 322–345. Gardner, Anthony and Green, Charles (2013) ‘Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global’, Third Text, Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 442–455. Golding, V. (2005) ‘The Museum Clearing: A Metaphor for New Museum Practice’, in D. Atkinson and P. Dash (eds.), Social and Critical Practice in Art Education. London: Trentham Books, pp. 51–66. Harris, Jonathan (2011) ‘Introduction: Globalization and Contemporary Art – A Convergence of People and Ideas’, in Jonathan Harris (ed.), Globalization and Contemporary Art. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1–16. Hlavajova, Maria (2010) ‘How to Biennial? The Biennial in Relation to the Art Institution’, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader. Norway and Germany: Bergen Kunstall and HatjeCantz, pp. 292–305. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (ed.) (2000) Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. New York and London: Routledge.

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Hoskote, Ranjit (2010) ‘Biennials of Resistance: Reflections on the Seventh Gwangju Biennial’, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader. Norway and Germany: Bergen Kunstall and HatjeCantz, pp. 306–321. Hoskote, Ranjit (2012) ‘A Biennale for India’, Domus, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 106–109. Jain, Amit Kumar (2014) ‘The Impact of Kochi-Muziris Biennale’, M.A. Thesis. University College London. Jones, Caroline (2010) ‘Biennial Culture: A Longer History’, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader. Norway and Germany: Bergen Kunstall and HatjeCantz, pp. 66–87. Kochi Biennale Foundation (2012) India’s First Biennale: 12\12\12 [catalogue]. Kochi: Kochi Biennale Foundation. KPMG (2014) The Kochi-Muziris Biennale. [Report]. Kratz, Corinne A. and Karp, Ivan Karp (2006) ‘Introduction’, in Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto (eds.), Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 1–31. Kreps, Christina (2000) ‘Curation, Museums and Intangible Heritage’, in E. Hooper-Greenhill (ed.), Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 193–208. Lim, Sang Taek and Lee, Joung Sil (2006) ‘Host Population Perceptions of the Impact of Mega Events’, Asia Pacific Journalism of Tourism Research, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 407–421. Marchart, Oliver (2014) ‘The Globalization of Art and the “Biennials of Resistance”: A History of the Biennials from the Periphery’. CuMMA PAPERS #7 Available Online: http://cummastudies.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/cummapapers-7.pdf [Accessed 26 January 2016]. Mathur, Saloni (2005) ‘Museums and Globalization’. Available Online: http://www. academia.edu/3720504/Museums_and_Globalization_2005_ [Accessed 26 January 2016]. Niemojewski, Rafal (2010) ‘Venice or Havana: A Polemic on the Genesis of the Contemporary Biennial’, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader. Norway and Germany: Bergen Kunstall and HatjeCantz, pp. 88–103. O’Neill, Paul (2012) The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Cultures. Cambridge, MA: London MIT Press. Petersen, Anne Ring (2012) ‘Identity Politics, Institutional Multiculturalism, and the Global Artworld’, Third Text, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 195–204. Roces, Marian Pastor (2005) ‘Crystal Palace Exhibitions’, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader. Norway and Germany: Bergen Kunstall and HatjeCantz, pp. 50–65. Sandell, R. and Dodd, J. (2010) ‘Activist Practice’, in R. Sandell, J. Dodd, and R. Garland Thomson (eds.), Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 3–22. Sheikh, Simon (2009) ‘Marks of Distinction, Vectors of Possibility: Questions for the Biennial’ in The Art Biennale as a Global Phenomenon, Open, Vol. 16, pp. 68–79.

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Shin, Youngsun (2010) ‘Residents Perceptions of the Impact of Cultural Tourism on Urban Development: The Case of Gwangju, Korea’, Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 405–416. Sorabjee, Deepika (2013) ‘Magically Real: The Making of India’s First Biennale’, International Gallery, Vol. 16, No. 1. Mumbai: Gallerie Publishers, pp. 84–88. Van Hal, Marieke (2010) Rethinking the Biennial, PhD Dissertation. Royal College of Art, London. Vogel, Sabine B. (2010) Biennials – Art on a Global Scale. Wien: Springer-Verlag. Wallace, Miranda (2010) ‘Introduction’, in Miranda Wallace (ed.), 21st Century – Art in the First Decade. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, pp. 15–16. Weibel, Peter (2007) ‘Beyond the White Cube’, in Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective. Karlsruhe: HatjeCantz, pp. 138–146. Weibel, Peter (2013) ‘Globalization and Contemporary Art’, in Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (eds.), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of the New Art Worlds. Germany and London: ZKM/The MIT Press, pp. 20–27. Weiss, Rachel (1995) ‘The Long Process of Getting to the Edge of the World’, The Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 39–56. Weiss, Rachel (2011) Making Art Global (Part 1): The Third Havana Biennial 1989. London, Vienna and Eindhoven: Afterall Books in association with Academy of Fine Arts & Van Abbemuseum.

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Against All Odds (2012) 40, 49, 79, 86 Ali, Uzma Azhar 71, 72 altermodernity 10, 11, 78, 172, 175, 217, 218 Ananth, Deepak 62, 63, 70 Arab Art Biennale 258, 269 art biennales 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 19, 27, 45, 74, 209, 269 art education 19, 46, 80, 209, 231–53; building a picture 240–3; city as studio, life at college 243–8; site of learning, biennale 248–53; university/biennale 236–40 art history 8, 18, 78, 175, 209, 211, 216, 219–21 Art: Interrupted (2015) 17, 84, 85, 87, 116, 117 artistic production 47, 102 Art Now (2012) 48, 72 Asian Art Biennale 19, 258, 260, 265 Aspinwall House 11, 12, 84, 140, 157,164, 165, 171, 175 Atlas des iles perdues (2007) 98 Attia, Kader 102, 103, 105, 110, 112 Augé, Marc 78 Baswani, Manisha Gera 163–4 Belting, Hans 7, 8 Benjamin, Walter 226 Bey, Hakim 74 biennale 5, 7–11, 13–15, 25–9, 32–6, 58–9, 83–4, 86–8, 99–100, 209, 217, 228–9, 255–9, 261–4, 266–70; contemporary 53, 256; contemporary globalised 51, 196; distinctive 38,

76; emergent 4; first-ever 58, 73; first Kochi 84, 133; inaugural 164–5; people’s biennale 3, 18, 84–7, 94, 203, 209, 211–18, 227–8; placing the 4–9; student (see Student Biennale); through the object 9–16 biennale, inaugural Kochi-Muziris 3, 113, 116 biennale culture 7–8, 38, 268; models and perspectives 256–7; in South Asia 257–61 biennale effect 4, 10–11, 15, 19, 26, 30, 32–8, 49–50, 53, 55, 74, 100, 102, 105, 226 biennale event 47–8, 93, 251 biennale fatigue 269 biennale format 4, 15, 19, 25, 28–9, 33, 35–6, 41, 48, 51, 53, 91, 168–9, 194, 214; global 25, 37 biennale memory 14 biennale model 37, 78, 256, 267 biennale organisers 42, 50, 86 biennale phenomenon 33, 58 The Biennale Reader 27 biennale’s developments 32, 115–16 biennale’s launch 38, 41 Blom, Ina 11, 13, 14 Bourriaud, Nicolas 78, 172, 175, 176, 178, 217, 218, 224, 225, 228 Bowering, Hattie 17, 84, 116, 117 Bublatzky, Catherine 58, 72 Choy, Lee Weng 34 Clemente, Francesco 169, 172, 173–4 (images), 175, 176, 177

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collateral artwork 18, 113 collateral projects 180–3, 185–6, 188, 199, 204, 261 Colombo Art Biennale 19, 255, 257–9, 263, 266 contemporary art, social gestus of 160–78; Ebb and flow 176–8; frames within frames 164–9; painting’s expanse 169–76; painting’s precedence 161–4 contemporary Indian art 30, 32, 44–5, 48, 71–3, 238, 265 contemporary Indian artists 11, 38, 44, 47, 70, 169 Coomaraswamy, Ananda (History of Indian and Indonesian Art) 60 Critique of Everyday Life 52 cultural diplomacy 10, 17, 63–4, 66 Cultural Politics 3, 4, 27, 77, 78, 100 cultural politics: biennales and India 99–102; geopolitics and hope 102–6; optics of ethics 111–12; satellites visions 106–10; of ‘Whorled Explorations’ 97–112; world is flat 106–10 culture industry 37, 45, 50, 185, 205, 220 curation: artist-led 17, 113; as dialogue 132–59 curatorial work 91, 135 Dean, Corinna 33 Delanty, G. 35 democracy 175, 195, 227–9 Dercon, Chris 69, 84, 92, 214, 215, 217, 218, 236 Domela, Paul 51 D’Souza, Aruna 221 D’Souza, Robert E. (‘The Indian Biennale Effect’) 3, 17, 27, 29 Eames, Charles and Ray (Powers of Ten [film]) 99, 103, 104, 111–12, 139, 152, 157, 217, 224 ‘The Earth Turns without Me’ (2010) 154 economic liberalisation 32 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 108

The Emancipated Spectator 28, 38 End of Empire (sculpture) 18, 113, 180– 206; art as life 203–6; making works 196–203; participations 187–92; politics of place 192–6 ‘Epilogue’ (2011) 132 Eruda (2006) 161, 162 exhibition spaces 5, 85, 236 Fabianczyk, Magda 181 Fels, Donald 182 Fillitz, Thomas 9 Film and Television Institute of India 238 The Fluidity of Horizons (2014) 165 Fort Kochi 164, 186, 201, 225, 263, 267, framed artwork 154 Gandhi, Mahatma 61, 89, 177, 213, 215 Gielen, Pascal 45 Glimpses of the USA 104 global art scene 53, 55, 58–9, 71–4, 247–8 global contemporary art 23 globalisation 30, 32, 42, 44–6, 50–1, 53, 88, 195 Gowda, Sheela 12 graffiti 183–4, 204–5, 225 Guggenheim effect 37 Harris, Clare (‘The Buddha Goes Global’) 58 Heidegger, Martin (‘The Age of the World Picture’) 110 Hoskote, Ranjit 29, 40, 41, 48, 160, 266 identity, cultural 47, 59–61, 260 Independence Disillusionment (2014) 102 India Art Fair 51, 265–6, 269 Indian art, growing international interest in 32, 40 Indian art community 70–1 Indian artists 11, 25, 32, 40–1, 44, 46–8, 62, 70, 74, 87, 161, 214, 268; young up-and-coming 38, 40

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Indian artscape 17, 58–9, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71–5; making of 58–74; soft power 63–7; truly international 68–74 Indian art world 32, 38, 116, 260 Indian biennale 25, 30–1, 38, 52, 87–90, 149, 211, 228 Indian biennale effect 25–55, 100; biennale discourse 27–30; global futures 48–9 Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) 63–5, 67–8 ‘India Shining’ slogan 44 international artists 3, 18, 41, 88, 190, 236, 259 International Monetary Fund 44 Jeychandran, Neelima 181 Jones, Caroline 7, 256 Jose, David 188 Joyce, James (Finnegans Wake) 100–2 Kallat, Jitish 18, 33, 44, 51, 70, 80, 94, 97, 99, 102–4, 111–13, 132–59, 161, 162, 163, 165, 214, 216, 224, 233 Kapur, Geeta 46, 47, 58, 71, 214 Kathmandu International Art Festival (KIAF) 259, 263, 267 Kester, Grant 188, 189, 202 Kochi Biennale Foundation 4–6, 11, 14, 41, 59, 63, 76, 79, 115–17, 140– 2, 144–5, 164–6, 172–5, 212, 260–1 Kochi-Muziris Biennale 1, 4, 7–8, 10–11, 17–20, 23, 25–7, 30–41, 43–6, 50, 58–60, 69–71, 73, 163–4, 178, 260, 262; making 115–31 Kochi Student Biennale 19, 209, 231–6, 238, 240, 243, 248, 249, 251, 252, 253, 267 Komu, Riyas 5, 8, 17, 29–30, 37–8, 40–1, 52, 55, 59, 77, 80–3, 132, 161, 232, 260, 266; interview with 76–95 Krishnamachari, Bose 5, 30, 38, 40–41, 52, 55, 59, 80, 85–7, 124, 161, 232, 260 Kwon, Miwon 43, 194 Lahore Biennale Foundation 261, 263 large-scale art events 4, 19, 59, 209, 255–7, 259, 261, 263, 265, 267–71 Lee, Yongwoo 33

Levy, Sylvain 60 Liverpool Biennale 262 local community 5, 77, 86, 181–3, 197, 199, 215, 262 Majumdar, Nandy 61 Martin, M. 36 Marxism 47 media reality 115 Millar, Bruce 222 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 215, 218, 227 Modi Doctrine 88 Muziris 3–5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 17–20, 23, 25, 26, 30, 32–41, 43–6, 48, 50, 51, 53, 58–60, 66, 67, 70, 71, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 90, 92, 94, 97, 100, 111, 113, 115, 116, 132, 133, 161, 164, 178, 180, 186, 195, 197, 209, 211, 215, 231, 232, 248, 255, 258, 260, 262, 264, 266, 267 Nayar, Parvathi 165, 166, 169, 214 Neto, Ernesto 12, 14, 117, 126 Noufal, Surya 182, 183 Nye, Joseph 64–6 Paasche, Marit 91, 92 Paik, Nam June 109 Panicker, K.N. 81 Papastergiadis, N. 36 Pathak, Akshay 69 Pepper House 12, 263 Pepper Tent (2014) 172–5 Powers of Ten (1977) 99, 104, 111–12, 139, 152, 157, 217, 224 private spaces 35, 41, 43, 180 Project Mausam 88–9 Pushpamala, N. 166, 169, 171 Rancière, Jacques 15–16, 18, 23, 28–9, 31, 38, 55, 195, 206 Ray, Satyajit 61 regional effects 255–70 Rushdie, Salman 7, 8, 69 Said, Edward 92, 187 sculpture 11, 13, 18, 65, 113, 180, 184–7, 191–5, 197, 199–206, 249 Sengupta, Shuddhabrata 81, 235 Sher-Gill, Amrita 61, 62

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Shetty, Sudarshan 55, 94 Singh, Karan 66 Smith, Terry 35 social gestus 18, 161, 163, 165, 167–9, 171, 175, 177 soft power 10, 30, 45, 55, 59, 63–7, 89–90 South Asian biennale 19, 269–70 South Asia, large-scale art events, 255–70; biennale culture 256–61 Storr, Robert 40 Storz, Christoph 12 Student Biennale 19, 82, 92, 231–6, 238, 240, 248–9, 252–3, 267 Sundaram, Vivan 39 Szewczyk, Monika 10 Tharoor, Shashi 63, 64, 66, 67, 68 Triennale India 46, 258, 265

Velardi, Marie 98 Venice Biennale 10, 19–20, 32–3, 40, 89, 257, 261, 263 visual culture 18–19, 102, 175, 183, 185, 209, 211, 213–16, 218–22, 224, 227–9, 266; democracy of 211, 213, 215, 217, 219, 221, 223, 225, 227, 229 Visual Culture Reader 218–19 visual literacies 222–5 Vogel, Sabine 28, 34 Western imperialism 10, 44 ‘Whorled Explorations’ 17, 51, 70, 97–112, 133, 150, 157, 161 World Bank 43–4 World Biennial Forum 40 Yoko Ono 143, 146, 153

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