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| Artist Nikhil Chopra during his 51-hour-long performance at Aspinwall House, Fort Kochi. |
The ancient port city of Muziris, perched at the mouth of the Periyar River near the tip of the Indian subcontinent, offered harbor to merchant fleets of Greece, Rome, Phoenicia, and Egypt in the earliest centuries of global maritime trade.
Romans
disembarked from their ships with hoards of gold, glass, wine and linens, and
set sail again with stores full of black pepper and pearls. This bustling
seaport—described by the early Sangam bards as “the city that bestows wealth to
its visitors indiscriminately, and the merchants of the mountains, and the
merchants of the sea … where the rumbling ocean roars, is given to me like a
marvel, a treasure”—disappeared without a trace in the 14th century, washed off
the face of the earth by a cataclysmic storm, and buried by silt from the
Periyar river.
That same
flood opened up a new harbor to the south, at Kochi. In the centuries that
followed, the city of Kochi, sought after by explorers and traders—Portuguese,
Dutch, English, Chinese, and Arab—became at once the center of the spice trade
and a vital outpost for Western colonizers. Along with the conflux and
conquests of the “Age of Discovery,” Kochi became the center of advances in
ideas, in particular in astronomy and mathematics.
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N.S. Harsha's 'Punarapi Jananam Punarapi Maranam', 2013, acrylic on canvas,
tarpaulin, approx. 12 x 80 ft, at Aspinwall House.
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Trade,
travel, colonial conquest and cosmological inquiry: the 2014 Kochi-Muziris
Biennale, curated by the artist Jitish Kallat, uses these histories as
coordinates to guide an exploration into contemporary art production in India
and around the world. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale is India’s first and only
biennial, inaugurated in 2012 by the artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas
Komu. Situated between a number of venues in Fort Kochi—once the seat of
Portuguese, Dutch and British military and economic occupation—and the city of
Ernakulam on the mainland, the former warehouses and office compounds that
serve as the sites of the Biennale are in themselves important reminders of the
past.
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| Madhusudhanan's 'Logic of Disappearance', 2014, charcoal drawings on paper, 26 x 16 in (each), at Aspinwall House. Courtesy of the artist. |
Kallat
evocatively describes the 2014 Biennale, titled Whorled Explorations, as a
“temporary observation deck hoisted at Kochi” from which a particular vista of
contemporary art could emerge. The allusion and image is quite powerful,
conjuring the maritime history of the region—a lookout poised on a narrow
platform, precarious by nature but offering the widest potential view. Kallat’s
telescope was aimed not only at the horizon, but also the stars: Whorled
Explorations evokes oceanic, cartographic, temporal, and historical themes, and
delves into the nature of the planet earth and the wider cosmos that surrounds
it.
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| Marie Velardi's 'Future Perfect, 21st century', 2006, print on paper, 16.14 x 216.92 in, at Aspinwall House. Courtesy of the artist |
Many of the
artists turn their gaze toward the sky: Katie Paterson looks to the moon,
replicating its light; and David Horvitz looks to the sun, documenting it at
the same moment from opposite ends of the globe, as both sunrise and sunset.
Other artists grapple with the vastness of the universe. In a long room of the
main Biennale venue, Aspinwall House, N.S. Harsha’s 80-foot-long acrylic on
canvas painting cannot be viewed straight on in its entirety; rather it must be
navigated from end to end.
Titled
Punarapi Jananam Punarapi Maranam (2013), from a Sanskrit hymn dedicated to the
cycle of life from birth to death, the painting depicts the cosmos as an
elongated ouroboros rather than a vast expanse or plane. Nearby, Pors and Rao’s
Teddy Universe (2009-11), an installation of faux fur and fiber optics
suspended from the ceiling, resembles the starry night sky—in the shape of a
cuddly stuffed animal. Its fuzzy edges not only refer to the toy object it
resembles, but perhaps also to the limitations of our own perceptive abilities.
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David Horvitz's 'The Distance of a Day' at Aspinwall House, Fort Kochi.
Two videos/ colour / 12 minutes each.
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Our
perceptions are shaped and delimited by our contemporary moment, and this, too,
colors our imagination. Swiss artist Marie Velardi looked to the past for an
understanding of the present moment. Her work Future Perfect (2006) mined
science fiction of the 20th century for predictions of the 21st, offering us a
“memory of the future.”
Filmmaker and
artist Madhusudhanan looks to the past as well, finding but fragments of his
own memory, which he has recreated in an impressive series of charcoal drawings
on paper, installed in long rows along the wall of Aspinwall House. Charcoal
figures prominently in the work of performance artist Nikhil Chopra, as a
pictorial and transformative medium, wielded by the character he inhabits for
the performance and inevitably becoming covered with the black material. In his
50-hour-long performance for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, La Perle Noire: Le
Marais (2014), Chopra explored a character of ambiguous identity modeled on
India’s colonial past named the Black Pearl, a reference to the spice that
shaped this region’s destiny—pepper.
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| Anish Kapoor's water vortex 'Descension' at Aspinwall House, Fort Kochi. |
The vortex,
the spiral, the whorl—a “pointer to life-forces” as well as a “mark of
erasure,” as Kallat puts it—is a recurrent motif in many of the works in the
Biennale, from works by Mona Hatoum, Manish Nai, and Wim Delvoye, but perhaps
best exemplified by the installation Descension (2014) by Anish Kapoor.
In an
ambitious display of the sheer power of natural force, he created a rushing
perpetual whirlpool, conjuring up images of mythical monsters and cataclysmic
cyclones, masterfully contained in the gallery space.
From the view
of the “observation deck,” the Kochi-Muziris Biennale reaches across borders,
across space and time, towards the boundless and the unknown. This desire for a
sensual experience of the beyond, tempered only by our own perceptual and
physical limitations, is perhaps encapsulated best by the image of Janine
Antoni performing Touch (2002): the artist precariously, tentatively walking
along a tightrope suspended above a sandy beach; the camera is positioned just
so, and for one moment, it appears as though she is walking along the edge of
the horizon. It goes to show, it’s all a matter of perspective.
The
Kochi-Muziris Biennale runs from December 12, 2014 to March 29, 2015.
