contents  december 2016–march 2017  |  VOLUME 68 NUMBER 2

The Kochi-Muziris Biennale

edited by Natasha Ginwala

14 Kochi-Muziris: Biennale as South Asian Form

Natasha Ginwala

22 Muziris and the Many Pasts of Kochi

Riyas Komu

30 Caste Slavery and Structural Violence in Kerala

Sanal Mohan

37 Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the Biennale Phenomenon

Geeta Kapur in conversation with Natasha Ginwala

45 A Biennale in the Making

Bose Krishnamachari

50 Impressions on the Second Kochi-Muziris Biennale

Dieter Roelstraete and Abigail Winograd

56 Towards an Open Archaeology: On Vivan Sundaram’s Black Gold

Nada Raza

61 Mandalay Hall, in Memoriam:

Reflections on a Collateral Project during KMB 2012
Zasha Colah

66 An Artistic Creed: Responses to Benitha Perciyal’s Fires of Faith

Rosalyn D’Mello

70 Imagined Futures: Works by Marie Velardi

Meera Menezes

74 The Eyes Have It: Naeem Mohaiemen’s

Kazi in Nomansland and the Crisis of History
Murtaza Vali

78 Whorled Explorations
Jitish Kallat in conversation with
Robert E. D’Souza and Sunil Manghani

82 Liquid History of Vasco da Gama

Sarnath Banerjee

92 Make-Belong in Retrospect: The Artists’ Cinema at KMB 2014

Ashish Rajadhyaksha

100 Solar: A Meltdown

Ho Rui An

104 Log Book Entry Before Storm

Raqs Media Collective

114 Stream of Stories

Sudarshan Shetty in conversation with Anindita Ghose

118 Contributors

The thematic advertisement portfolio on the inside cover and
pages 1–9 features the activities of the Kochi Biennale Foundation
and images of street and site-specific art in and around Fort Kochi
during the first edition of the Biennale.

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 Kochi-Muziris:
Biennale as South Asian Form
Natasha Ginwala

Temporal Institution

T
he biennale has been called an “unstable institution”,1 and in the
globalizing terrain of contemporary art there has been a wide distribution
of biennales, since the mid-1980s—signalling a tendency of the exhibition
complex toward stepping outside the white cube and into a broader social
web of transactions with the public domain. While the neoliberal gentrification of
cities has perpetuated an intensification of biennale-making, perhaps in this innate
destabilization lies “anti-systemic” potential and a subversive edge that permits the
biennale to remain a source of reinvention—as time-based institutions that thrive
in constant shape-shifting, assembling temporary communities, renewing minor
histories, escalating migratory patterns of art workers and developing commissioning
strategies that engage cities as artistic pressure points across a networked cartography.
While the conception of the “biennale effect”2 is no longer a radically new
phenomenon, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), launched in 2012 in Kerala, has yet
to be comprehensively examined. In the first two editions, KMB has foregrounded
a dynamic narrativization between Biennale sites and the Malabar Coast, bringing
forth interrelations of cosmopolitan pasts and an itinerant present, while also staging
the expanded role of artist-curator. This essay situates KMB as a public forum that
corresponds with an aesthetic language grounded in the local realm and its political
imagination, while also tuning into key developments within the international sphere
of contemporary cultural practice.

Regional Shifts, Vernacular Contemporary

There has been a steady rise in the circulation of intra-regional exhibitions and
discursive platforms in South Asia. It is refreshing to observe the processes by which
a deepening engagement within the South Asian and Southeast Asian “cultural
neighbourhood” is becoming more nuanced and lasting with support networks
extending from non-profit spaces and archives to private museums and commercial
galleries. It has thus, become vital to mark this trajectory with specificity, while also
indicating the broadening international presence of South Asian artists and curators
at biennales, museums and cultural festivals, and recent generations who have taken
up institutional life abroad.
At the same time, the biennale form itself is a construction site at different
crossroads in South Asia, as newly shaped formats in addition to Kochi such as the
Colombo Art Biennale (founded in 2009), the bi-annual platform Dhaka Art Summit
initiated by the Samdani Art Foundation, and soon to be launched biennales in

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 Karachi, Lahore and Kathmandu, among others, continue to develop—holding
promise to further contribute to the cultural ecology of this region. I seek to include
here a categorization for a language of praxis within this sphere of cultural activity—
not as a watertight reference, but an intuitive concept with holes: “vernacular
contemporary”—a nomenclature that acknowledges that there is no way to pull away
from the swell of competing globalisms that routinely transact with South Asian
contemporary art and biennale-making to embrace a romantic ideal of the “local”,
an ideal that is not entirely desirable.3 However, this vernacular contemporary as an
active sign performs an interruption in the smooth flows of neo-liberal finance feeding
directly into cultural dispositif—preventing the deadening of a non-Westernized
orientation of criticality, decolonial aesthetic coefficients and a subversive political
grammar to counter nationalism. It speaks of a regional zeitgeist that is accented
through a material aesthetic and knowledge framework that is proactively anchored
in situated narratives, articulating from buried pasts, producing affect in informal
learning and sensory comprehension, while also cultivating an interdisciplinary
socio-temporal collectivity.
In their curatorial note for the inaugural edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale,
its founders Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu recall the basis for the naming of
Kerala—rooted in Kera Vriksham, the coconut tree that bears manifold uses. Through
it they allegorically evoke how this littoral has remained seeped in early forms of
internationalism and mercantile trade, tying it to multilingual origins located in
Malayalam, Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish.4 Elaborating upon this cosmopolitan
legacy of Kerala is not a straightforward embrace of colonialist internationalism
but rather, an assertion of non-confirmative currents in the spread of people, ideas
and intercultural microcosms—vitally relinking the subcontinent itself. KMB has
underscored the significant presence of South Asian artists to overrule an India-centric
approach within exhibition-making and discourse in South Asian contemporary art.
Consider art works from the 2014 edition, such as Colombo-based photographer
Menika van der Poorten’s visual chronicle of the Sri Lankan Eurasian “planter”
families in Where Are You From (2012) conveying the complexity of origins, lifestyle 1.

choices and alienated existence in the aftermath of settler colonialism. The artist’s Shumon Ahmed,
Metal Graves (2009), 2014.
personal history is also evoked in this ongoing archive as a lived heterogeneity across Photographic print on
South Asia’s encounters with modernity. And, Bangladeshi artist Shumon Ahmed’s Epson premium lustre
semigloss photo paper.
photography series Metal Graves (2009) that exposes an afterimage of shipping at Courtesy Kochi Biennale
the world’s second-largest ship-breaking yard in Chittagong. These steel ghosts tell Foundation.

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 2. secrets of a transcontinental infrastructural legacy as Ahmed’s lens captures them in
K.P. Reji, Thoombinkal
Chathan, at Pepper House,
blurred snapshots and mono-tonal suspension, along with the labour force tackling
2012. Oil on canvas. these toxic fossils awaiting demolition on the Bay of Bengal coast.
Courtesy Kochi Biennale
At Pepper House, one of the key venues in Fort Kochi, the 2012 Biennale
Foundation.
included K.P. Reji’s stunning oil on canvas Thoombinkal Chathan (2012) made
during a residency through the Kochi Biennale Foundation. It presents a local tragic
legend around a Pulaya agricultural labourer who belonged to Chandiroor village
in Kerala’s Alappuzha district, where the artist was also raised. When a flood rises
in the villages’ paddy fields, Thumbinkal Chathan deploys his body to fortify the
agrarian cultivation from erosive destruction. This sacrificial myth also signifies the
dehumanizing treatment endured by landless Dalit subjects historically and in the
contemporary. Sanal Mohan’s essay within this issue provides a social reading to
understand the history of caste slavery in colonial Kerala. This is a critical position
to understand the political milieu in which KMB is held, and the context of art works
such as Reji’s painting. Mohan reminds us: “Controlled by the upper castes, both
Hindus and Christians, especially in Travancore and Cochin, the social and physical
space remained the domain of caste tyranny.” The Biennale’s approach to free access
and broader social engagement with contemporary art is thereby realized within this
enduring dynamic of exploitation.
The ship pictured in the centre of Thoombinkal Chathan references the warships
of the Indian Navy (such as INS Kochi) and massive container ships passing by the
large windows of Pepper House to dock at the nearby international container terminal
in Vallarpadam. CAMP’s multi-channel video installation was a further breakdown of
the incoming and outgoing traffic of commercial goods at the waterfront terminal.
Destuffing Matrix (2012) plots the schizoid geo-cartography of cargo between the
human hand, vehicular transit, computing sensibility and sea current. In the same

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 gallery, K.P. Krishnakumar’s azure-blue sculpture Boat Man (2012–13) revealed a 3.
Sahej Rahal, Harbinger,
hybrid creature, half-man half-boat—his gaze fixed somewhere in the distance is a installation view at
reminder of the eternally watchful navigators on this ancient coastline. Aspinwall House, 2014.
Clay, polyurethane, hay,
found objects; dimensions
Slow Motion, Open Grounds variable.
While walking through the 2014 Biennale, observing the intricate connections drawn Courtesy Kochi Biennale
Foundation.
together by Jitish Kallat from spiralling cosmologies to terrestrial concerns, I was
reminded of an essay by Raqs Media Collective titled “Earthworms Dancing: Notes
for a Biennial in Slow Motion”.5 It suggests a durational mode that considers the
crucial weight of momentum as well as collective immersion in enactments of the
Biennale event, drawing upon the figure of earthworms and the extended time in
which they labour. They write: “Curatorially, a slow-motion biennale is a platform
for the development—rather than the statement—of an argument. Works from the
artists’ atelier will not necessarily arrive at such a biennale fully formed, and may
leave the biennale in a more mature state than when they first reached it.” This
articulation resounds in the case of KMB, as the Biennale Foundation hosts residencies,
exhibitions and public events year round. Through setting up the Students’ Biennale
and Children’s Biennale, the exhibition continues to be a site of pedagogy and
artistic exchange at different levels for a broad intergenerational public. These acts of
reinterpretation and exposure over time, beyond the fixity of the display condition,
the artistic works as organic constellations that become recharged by the site and its
publics, are essential characteristics for the Biennale’s dispersal into the civic sphere.
In considering the dialogical imprint of this second Biennale and its material
approach, I would cite a few works in particular. An abandoned laboratory by the sea
within Aspinwall House played host to Sahej Rahal’s Harbinger (2014), a multi-part
site-specific installation where massive geometric structures and corporeal extensions

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