Though the initial excitement of the biennale must now have worn off, and the end is not yet in sight, this might be a good time to go back and take a look at what the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2016 (KMB 2016) had on offer. Especially so, since the Kathmandu Art Triennale is on the horizon. During my visit I found artist’s spaces tucked into the KMB venues, strewn with to-be-finished work or settings meant for performative practices that would come alive in late January or February again. KMB 2016 is very much about the process of coming into being, instead of delivering a ready-made idea or experience. This is probably why it has been such a hit despite having consciously steered clear of the expected and international roster of biennale artists, and despite having a core vision that challenges received notions when it comes to cultural production.  And perhaps also because it dares to allow space to a certain quietness that will hopefully bring back into fashion ‘intimate reflection’ as opposed to the accessible and monumental. 

KMB 2016 hosts works by around 98 artists from all over the world and this number does not include the many collateral programmes, residencies and participants from the very impressive students’ biennale. Covering all twelve venues is quite an impossible task, and given the high percentage of video works, it deserves a week’s worth of every serious viewer’s time.

On my three-day stay in early January, however, I managed an intermittently rushed but otherwise committed viewing of most of the venues, and have come to realise that most of my favourite works were exhibited in one single venue, the sprawling Aspinwall House on the sea. Let me now lead you, over a couple of editions of this column, through the twelve works that I consider were perhaps the quietest, and yet spoke to me in a whisper that continues to resonate even after a month.

France-born Indian artist Chittrovanu Mazumdar’s ‘River of Ideas 2016’ (sculpture and video installation, dimension variable) on the first floor of the Aspinwall is in obvious dialogue with ‘A Sea of Pain’, which plays itself out on the ground floor of the same building. We must remember in this context that curator Sudarshan Shetty had clearly stated in his note: ‘Is the gap in space like a lag in time? To experience this gap is like pulling open the doors of time. How does that pull in time also become a fold in space?’ The hundreds of incandescent bulbs cascading in a watery flow does bring us a river of lights, and quite materially so, but it also reflects back to us the votive lamps or ‘diya-s’ that are regularly offered on rivers at many places of the subcontinent at the onset of dusk, albeit through the futuristic lens of metal-worked bulbs. It no doubt also refers to the threat that climate change poses to lakes and rivers, to the many ways that industry pollutes rivers and turns the water into poisonous flames—it may well have referred to Phlegethon, the Greek river of boiling blood made popular by Dante on his Inferno, in which the souls of those who committed crimes against fellow humans must eternally boil. Above all, it obviously refers back to the disappeared Saraswati river, that directly relates to Shetty’s vision, which is ‘to draw from mythical accounts of the land of seven rivers, set amidst seven seas, anchored by a mountain at its navel…As rivers flow, overflow and recede, can a biennale accumulate meaning over time and spill into the future? The flow of these streams, their convergence, and divergence inspires a series of questions and propositions about the varied forms and approaches to knowledge presented by the objects performed as part of the Biennale. One of these rivers—a hidden river, whose sightings are elusive and ephemeral—exists in our belief and imagination. Knowing nothing of its origins or its end—quests to find this hidden river give rise to narrative, story, poetry and perhaps to language itself.’ Mazumdar explores these future and past narratives in a language that is crafted by the relations in which the objects in his artwork hold themselves to each other. Be it through books that carry on their pages the images of water flowing across, or the ‘creative cabinets of imagined geographies’ that include crumpled lampshades, iron ladders reaching up into darkness or pebbles from a river-bed. ‘River of Ideas 2016’ is both an abstraction and a distillation of the ‘river’, reminding us of the many ways that water bodies are vital to our habits and rituals. You will have to step into the work spread across a large bridge and four smaller rooms, and negotiate it to arrive at something of your own. The work, like all good works do, doesn’t

tell you what to feel or see. It just lays out the alphabets and you need to form your own words of understanding, and it remains partially elusive for it is a somewhat cryptic language that Mazumdar speaks. Which again is no doubt a reflection of the irrational, the unseen and the elusive that drives the KMB 2016 like a subterranean flow.

Water—the experience or absence of it—plays an important role, and am not here speaking of Anamika Haksar’s theatre and installation piece called ‘Composition on Water 2016,’ whose performance I could not attend, but instead to Latvia’s Voldemars Johanson’s 5.1 minute-long, single channel video loop ‘Thirst 2015’ that records five minutes on the stormy North Atlantic. Projected on a massive screen taking up a whole wall, the ocean waves battle it out with the sky and air. Recorded with a mind-chilling indifference, it reverberated across the Aspinwall floors and even shook the seats we sat on. The sound echoing against the distant walls best utilised the warehouse’s acoustic asset, and created an immersive environment. One in which the onslaught of Nature’s wrath was so overwhelming that it forced us into observing it and recognising ourselves as the puny humans we are, in relation to it. It was scale that mattered here, the size of the screen and the resultant vibrations on the floors and walls, were no doubt vital to the work’s success. And despite the roar of the raging waves, it is an intimate work in the sense it needs to be enjoyed in privacy, and secondly, triggers intelligent reflection rather than a smug ‘gotcha!’

Opposite it stood, or rather balanced, a full-sized, ship cabin that was poised on the floor on one single point of contact. It looked almost as if the massive cabin was floating in air at an angle, with bellowing lace curtains, and its tilted floor-chairs-tables frozen in time. A single cigar lay on an ashtray, ‘forever burning, an offering to the Kappiri Muthappan or ‘the local deity that represents the African slaves that were killed here…’ By ‘here’ is meant Kerala, and this offers us a glimpse into a history that the region inhabits—‘kappiri’ could well be ‘kafir’, the generic name given to abundantly mistreated, African slaves brought to Kerala by the Portuguese  in the 16th century. Later, when the Dutch pushed the Portuguese traders out, the traders killed their slaves and buried them so that their souls would guard the wealth. It is believed that the ghosts of ‘kappiri-s’ abound in Kerala, even today. The benign Kappiri Muthappan is still worshipped in a shrine in Mattancherry in Kochi and so, Lester’s ‘Dwelling Kappiri Spirits 2016,’ not only brought us a whiff of local beliefs, but together with ‘Thirst 2016’, it came across as a symbol for the visible and invisible dialogues going on between the artworks in the biennale, dialogues that question our single-minded pursuit of the empirically proven at the cost of the intuitive.