One of the first things that strike you as you enter the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016’s main venue, the Aspinwall House, was the fact that there were multiple routes, either of which you could take, as you started on the exhibits. This was a deviation from earlier editions, and a welcome one for it spelt out in a nutshell the core idea of multiplicity that wove the biennale together—a multiplicity of ideas, world views and perceptions.

Two works stood out in the central, open grounds. The Swiss Bob Gramsma’s massive ‘Riff off OI # 16238’ was a concrete slab that jutted out of a square crater in the ground. We in Nepal are familiar with a sight such as this, thanks to the earthquakes. It looked as if the ground had sunk and pushed up the base of a building from its foundation. In actuality, it was a sculptural reproduction in concrete and steel, of the excavated site, that was turned up at an angle to provide a blueprint of the dugout hole. One might easily have bypassed it as a construction site gone wrong, until you paused and wondered at the inversion at its many levels. Near it stood a piece that would be difficult to miss, one that risked falling into the banal, the Slovenian Ales Steger’s ‘The Pyramid of Exiled Poets’ 2016. It referenced the Khufu pyramid in Giza, was monumental and was covered with a layer of locally sourced cow-dung that had dried and cracked into the shape of thousands of cow-dung patties that we in this part of the world are familiar with as fuel. The sheer scale of the work pushed it towards the superficial and accessible, but once you entered the pyramid’s depth and negotiated the dark, narrow and claustrophobic alleys inside to the sound of read-out poems of Dante, Bertolt Brecht,  Cesat Vallejo and others. It was an unnerving experience, and conveyed to us the experience of exiled poets through history, through direct sensory perception and allusion.

Poems were woven through KMB 2016, and quite unexpectedly so. India’s Sharmistha Mohanty’s immersive environment brought us, through projection on walls and floors, ‘I make new the song born of old, 2016’, an installation with poem and sound. It required quiet absorption and reflection and a willingness of the viewer to spend time with it, and instigated questions like ‘what does language mean to you,’ and ‘how the words become space’. An excerpt:

Make broadness broadness

From narrowness

Lead lead us

We see nothing

Behind nothing ahead

Sound again, in its pure form and not words, was vital to Japan’s Yuko Mohri’s ‘Calls 2013-2016’, which were kinetic sonic sculptures that pulled the seemingly random and non-accessible into the realm of our rational awareness. ‘She makes the invisible, the unseen, the disappeared, visible through sculptural forms that respond to the space they find themselves in. Mohri uses contextual conditions, including the accidental human presence or absence, to animate her work,’ read the label. As we moved around the sonic sculptures, the air moved and disturbed magnetic fields that sent off sudden waves of electricity that caused a bell to chime here, a horn to blow there, a bell to ring at yet another corner.  We were ghosts moving through space, setting off reactions in a material world. The presence of the immaterial vs the material, of those that have passed away and those that are living were again addressed through sound and vibration in UAE’s  Lantian Xie’s work, involving dozens upon dozens of whirring ceiling fans, but failed to reach the introspective heights that Mori’s work did. Materiality and presence were intriguingly explored in Austrian Martin Walde’s wax sculpture (Multiple Choice 2012) that responded to viewers’ presence through the switching on of an infra-red bulb above a wax figure of a man, causing it to melt with every passing second of your presence. The message here was negative no doubt, but given the worldwide upsurge of xenophobia, the refugee crisis, the marginalisation of migrant labour in societies, the rhetoric of fear that is taking over - this melting figure was a necessary mirror that we must look into.   

Given the many venues, it was more than possible that you would pass TKM Warehouse by. But two works stood out in this space. The first was the Australian Alex Seton’s marble sculpture, ‘Refuge 2015’. It was a work that did invoke layers of meaning in terms of its content, and was easy to decipher, given even a mediocre awareness of global issues. But the fact that it was finely carved out of white marble, inevitably introduced classical resonances and helped weave the piece into past histories and impending nightmares. In an adjacent room stood the very complex but immensely rewarding installation by the Polish Alicja Kwade’s ‘Out of Ousia 2016’. 

The Greek word ‘ouisia’ may roughly be translated into ‘being’ or conversely, ‘substance’. The work comprised an intersecting concrete wall, a mirror and a wooden frame with objects like rocks and branches placed around it so that as you circled around its four sections, each set of objects seemed to seamlessly bleed into the next and you ended up receiving mixed images on your retina and accessing a ‘notional, parallel plane where verifiable objects and their makeshift doubles are jumbled and confused.’ Your memory of the objects just viewed were interrupted by the what was immediately placed before you. A superb play on memory and comprehension. 

The most pervasive, the most visible and yet the most low-key of all works at KMB 2016 was Argentinian Sergio Chejfec’s ‘Dissemination of a Novel 2016’ that could be read on many improbable roadside walls around the city. An English translation of his Spanish novel ‘Baroni: un viaje’ or ‘Baroni: A Journey’ was still being inscribed on the city’s many walls as we toured the biennale in early January. Flyers bearing printed text from the same had also been given out at street corners, we heard. A text that explored ‘ephemerality, the body and language,’ the presentation of work materially embodied its very content, and therefore was not only intriguing, but gratifying too. It felt we were chasing a narrative that constantly eluded us with its incomprehensible proportion and yet the fragments piqued our interest enough to keep up the chase. Something like what the biennale theme itself did, which was ‘forming in the pupil of an eye’ that tried to bring us the multiplicity of the universe reflected back at us from a single point, the point being KMB 2016 itself.