Creative Brands Kochi Muziris Biennale Special Edition July - Aug 2015 by Creative Brands - Asia Pacific & Middle East

MAY-JUNE 2015 | VOLUME 3 | ISSUE 2

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Publisher Ramji Ravindran

Knowledge Partner Viinod Nair

Editor-in-Chief K.G. Sreenivas

Art, Design & Photography Prasanth Kumar Rajeev M.S Aneesh Raveendran

Registered Office Creative Brands – Asia Pacific-Middle East B-62-B, Third Floor, Kalkaji, New Delhi – 110019 www.creativebrandsmag.com

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Volume 3, Issue 2, may-june 2015 Printer

ablo Picasso, the great master, said: “Everything you can imagine is real”.

One of the central preoccupations of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014 was that of imagination: imagination as a function of history, memory, and interpretation on one hand, and imagination as a function of dialectical temporalism on the other. The dialectics of history and time was of the essence in the excavation of memory and detritus that together became the hyphen between Kochi and Muziris. Riyas Komu, one of the founding thinkers of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and Director of Programmes of the Second Edition, says, “It has brought back a strong historical memory. It has also shown us how history can be built or looked at as a 'future' project. It was the idea of the future of history that was part of the biennale's inception.” Komu succinctly defines one of its axioms — that of reimagining the future, a future predicated on the past. Muziris is that real imaginary — what Picasso says of his art: 'everything you can imagine is real'. It is to social and political imagination that Bose Krishnamachari, President of the KochiMuziris Biennale Foundation, appeals to, when he says: “The KBF's mission is to draw from the rich tradition of public action and public engagement in Kerala... and build a new aesthetic that interrogates both the past and the present.” The Biennale, therefore, was an attempt at a re-imagination of life itself. 'Art is life', so went one of its leitmotifs. Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988), that great American novelist and science fiction writer, often called “the dean of science fiction writers”, says: “Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist — a master, and that was what Auguste Rodin was — can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be... and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body.” [Emphasis added] The Biennale, as Jitish Kallat, Artistic Director & Curator, described it as “not only an observation deck but also a toolbox of self-reflection”. It was this self-reflection that sought to build a compelling vision and “portray her exactly as she is... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be” amid the equally compelling images that make up the (her) present. This dialectic, however, imprecise, defined the praxis of the Biennale. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale raised important questions — relating to the essential human condition, the role of humanity, and the politics of what constitutes community and cosmopolitanism. In 1959, one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), who straddled the intersections of painting and sculpture and who represented the seminal transition from Abstract Expressionism to later modern movements, such as the Neo-Dada movement, declared in a catalogue for the landmark exhibition 'Sixteen Americans', organised by the Museum of Modern Art, New York: “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)” [Emphasis added] It led to a cataclysm of sorts in the art world of the 1950s, transforming the discourse on that enigmatic question of all: what is art? Rauschenberg had compelled the focus of the art world away “from the ivory tower to the street and the gutter”. His objects were everyday detritus (though by the 1960s he moved away from this practice). The Biennale also did detritus. This second and final Kochi Biennale edition of Creative Brands brings to you a rich tapestry of conversations and stories, drawing on what Kallat calls “a proliferation of intuitions and prompts (that) become the tapestry which is the exhibition”. When the 108-day festival, showcasing 100 main artworks displayed by 94 artists from 30 countries in eight venues of the hoary port city of Kochi, ended on 29 March 2015, we recall what Okwui Enwezor, Curator of the ongoing 56th edition of the Venice Biennale, the world's oldest, said: “The Kochi Muziris Biennale is the 21st-century Biennale.”

K.G.Sreenivas Editor-in-Chief

Publisher Ramji Ravindran

Knowledge Partner Viinod Nair

Editor-in-Chief K.G. Sreenivas

Art, Design & Photography Prasanth Kumar Rajeev M.S Aneesh Raveendran

Registered Office Creative Brands – Asia Pacific-Middle East B-62-B, Third Floor, Kalkaji, New Delhi – 110019 www.creativebrandsmag.com

Printed by Ramji Ravindran Conceptual Pictures Worldwide Private Limited #10-3-89, 3rd Floor, R-5 Chambers, Humayun Nagar, Hyderabad – 500028 Ph: +91.40.6720.6720

Editorial enquiries kg.sreenivas@creativebrandsmag.com

Sales & Distribution Enquiries: sales@creativebrandsmag.com

Subscribe at: subscriptions@creativebrandsamag.com Subscription enquiries: +91-40-67206721

Volume 3, Issue 2, may-june 2015 Printer

ablo Picasso, the great master, said: “Everything you can imagine is real”.

K.G.Sreenivas Editor-in-Chief

CONTENTS

Dear Readers,

06, COVER STORY

elcome to Second Special Edition of Creative Brands dedicated to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014.

We are delighted to feature the likes of leaders such as M.A. Baby, former Education & Culture Minister of Kerala — one of the founding forces behind the biennale — and Thomas Isaac former Finance Minister of Kerala; actor, director, and artist Amol Palekar; entrepreneur Jose Dominic of the CGH Earth Group; internationally acclaimed curator Yuko Hasegawa; artist Madhusudanan, who after exhibiting at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale was chosen for the ongoing Venice Biennale, and a host of other artists and thinkers, who, together, gave shape to now the globally celebrated Kochi Biennale. We, once again, extend our gratitude to Bose Krishnamachari, President, Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foundation, Riyas Komu, Secretary, Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foundation, and Curator of KMB-2014 Jitish Kallat for giving us this opportunity to be part of this great event. We would also like to congratulate Sudarshan Shetty, the newly appointed curator of Kochi-Muziris Biennale for 2016. One of the most innovative contemporary artists in India, Shetty has widely exhibited his works at home and abroad. His work also encompasses three-dimensional work, such as sculptures and installations. We wish him great success for KMB-2016. Like the last edition, all our interviews of KMB-14 are available on our website www.creativebrandsmag.com Starting the next edition, we would be doing a special series, focusing on India's Maharatnas and the Navaratnas, the country's iconic Public Sector Undertakings or PSUs as they are called. Here's to some great reading! Ramji Ravindran Publisher

PROMONTRY OF HISTORY: Jitish Kallat, Bose Krishnamachari, and Riyas Komu say how the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has redened the dialectics of art and history...

16, Art for Art's Sake:

14, Dialectics of Art: “People are getting an opportunity to open up to philosophical questions and questions relating to our very existence. The KochiMuziris Biennale ushers in a new world of ideas and aesthetics,” says former Education & Culture Minister of Kerala M.A. BABY

20, Art Central:

Rising economic prosperity has led to increasing material consumption that can be disastrous for any culture and civilisation. Equally important is spiritual consumption in terms of our ability to appreciate art, music, cinema, and aesthetics, says former Finance Minister of Kerala Dr. Thomas Isaac

“I feel that unless we make art and culture an essential, inevitable part of our lives, we can't have a richer life... If we accept that as a concept then we would know the role of art and artist. And we would learn to respect art,” says Amol Palekar

24, Breaking Down Walls:

36, Aesthetics of Politics:

“The rst edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has been acknowledged and recognised around the world and far exceeded everyone's expectations. The second one, I believe, has excelled the rst one,” says Jose Dominic, Head of the CGH Group and one of the patrons of the Biennale

“The biennale is a political activity and I don't think it's an innocent activity. But the politics is also very different from that of the West,” says internationally acclaimed lmmaker and artist Madhusudhanan

56, The Continuum of Art: “Art probes, art objects. Art sees. Art almost knows. Design takes this seeing and knowing and makes into something that is translatable and usable, and almost becomes part of the fabric of e v e r y d a y l i f e , ” s a y s D r. G e e t h a Narayanan, Founding Director of Srishti School of Design

48, Telling Strokes “A cartoon is drawn in an atmosphere of implied conict or actual conict. But the issue is not even religion — it is probably the mobilisation of politics through religion which is coming into conict with cartooning. I have not seen any religious person who has been anti-cartoon per se,” says E.P. Unny, Chief Political Cartoonist of The Indian Express

28, Art of Partnership

32, rawing Conceptualism

44, Immanence, Incense

52, Portrait of the Artist

60, Sounds, Resonances

64, Art of Co-Creation:

66, Metaphor as Reality

CONTENTS

Dear Readers,

06, COVER STORY

elcome to Second Special Edition of Creative Brands dedicated to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014.

PROMONTRY OF HISTORY: Jitish Kallat, Bose Krishnamachari, and Riyas Komu say how the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has redened the dialectics of art and history...

16, Art for Art's Sake:

20, Art Central:

24, Breaking Down Walls:

36, Aesthetics of Politics:

28, Art of Partnership

32, rawing Conceptualism

44, Immanence, Incense

52, Portrait of the Artist

60, Sounds, Resonances

64, Art of Co-Creation:

66, Metaphor as Reality

COVER .. .....STORY ......

REATIVE BRANDS presents BOSE Krishnamachari, President, Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foundation; JITISH Kallat, Artistic Director & Curator, Kochi-Muziris Biennale; and, RIYAS Komu, Director, Programmes, Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Three men, one mission... Three artists, one vision... Bose and Riyas — among the founding visionaries of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India's first, and, today, among the world's best. Jitish — among the world's leading contemporary artists — the helmsman of the Second Edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Together, with a dedicated team at the KochiMuziris Biennale Foundation, and government, artists & art lovers, a wide of global cultural institutions, and legions of ordinary men and women from around the world came together to build the Second Edition of the KochiMuziris Biennale. Editor-in-Chief K.G. Sreenivas met Bose, Jitish, and Riyas at the historic Pepper House at Fort Kochi for a conversation hedged by a bustling Calvathy Street. (EXCERPTS) Jitish Kallat, Bose Krishnamachari, Riyas Komu, welcome to the final episode of the Creative Brands In-Conversation Series. You are at an important crossroads as it were. At the end of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014, Jitish what are the impressions, images, and imaginations that you bear with you as you walk out of Aspinwall House, one last time? At a fundamental level, it's trying to map what one is seeing at the end of the project on to what one saw at the beginning of the project. To me it is also an exploration of the whole idea of enquiry as to how do you begin to ask questions of yourself and where do you find the answers. For me, it has been a journey or a conversation one undertakes in an ever-shifting field of bio-signs. So you are trying to frame a word or a sentence in an emerging terrain and make meaning of it. So at this point, it is extremely rewarding in terms of the wide reviews I have received — directly, via emails, online, and all the other sources — that people have found 'connections' because the exhibition was built with a set of leitmotifs. And I hope the viewers would see the project coming together as an after-image with the curatorial intentions taking residence in the corridors of the artwork.

PROMONTRY

OF HISTORY Jitish Kallat, Bose Krishnamachari, and Riyas Komu say how the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has redefined the dialectics of history and art and the politics of cultural engagement and intellectual enquiry... “To me it is also an exploration of the whole idea of enquiry as to how do you begin to ask questions of yourself and where do you find the answers. For me, it has been a journey or a conversation one undertakes in an ever-shifting field of intuitions”, says Jitish Kallat, Curator of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014.

Bose, what would you reﬂect back on? Of course, your work continues, it's neither a full-stop nor a comma... When Jitish was chosen by the eight-member committee, now I feel they made the right choice and he has done an incredible job. Jitish has given us enormous strength; in fact, Riyas would often say that his work has added another pillar to

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In science, invention is all about knowledge and information, but the way they are consumed, speaks volumes about our ignorance. If you are ignorant about the effects, a single ignorant decision can usher in untold damage. This applies to any sphere of our everyday life. My project seeks to address these issues...

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PROMONTRY

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There is an elitist connotation to art... People think the art world is elitist and is a white cubian sort of world. Here at the biennale it is open to all classes of life — it has erased those borders and it has become a people's biennale. People have become more and more intellectually receptive. The biennale's ripples have spread far and wide...

Bose Krishnamachari, President, Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foundation

our foundation and vision. We learnt a lot from his curatorial practice. The city, too, taught us a lot. Also Riyas's programming has added a lot of strength to the project. It has become more social, more political, and more engaging. It is a beautiful moment... Riyas, it's too close to the event to be taking up a historical or vantage point to evaluate the event, yet the Kochi-Muziris Biennale sought to rehistoricize, if you will, not in a revisionist sense, what you set out to do in the beginning. How do you read what the biennale has achieved? With the three of us sitting here, it's very interesting to go back to our college days where we studied and started out. What that campus taught was the idea of doing things rather than just discussing possibilities. When Jitish came on board as Curator, I could see his wit, intellectual rigour and his understanding of time, people, society and context. It took me back to those days when all of us had a sense of revolt; and today this project embraces the possibility of re-reading history or even contemporary art history. The site and its history complement that effort. As a four-year-old organisation, it's some way or other achieving strength to articulate what is necessary for the time. At this biennale, Jitish has evoked, with a completely different kind of rigour, the history of a site with a uniquely distinct power of perception. Jitish has invested a lot in the possibilities of the power of reimagining! There is a great tendency in this project to re-evaluate what has been said and what has been written, and revisit the terminologies one used to talk about

art, history, and aesthetics. Bose: The survey used to happen in Delhi and Bombay, now I think many people are doing the survey in Cochin to ﬁnd new talent and new ideas... Jitish, when you set about deﬁning your vision, how did you break free from received notions or received constructs? I actually at no point presented anything as a resolved issue. In fact, for me the perennial provisionality was extremely essential. So even while some of the things that I can see at the end are uncannily close to what I set out to do in the beginning, the recurring thought was for this biennale to produce themes and not reproduce things. So I did not want to set out with a goaloriented mission saying that this is the vision that I would like to replicate in the exhibition. But, in fact, it was through exhibition making I found an everevolving vision... I was looking for a selforganising intelligence within the project manifesting itself through participation rather than administration. Bose: Jitish, whenever you used to send out letters to artists, you used to say how they were like prompts... I like that idea. I could never take a curated show with a theme. You can have a theme and pick a work maybe. But when you say prompts there are possibilities, there is openness... there is a possibility of dissatisfaction, you know! I always liked the idea of nonthematic projects. Jitish: As prompts and intuitions inhabit

any form of intellectual or creative practice, I was wondering if they could be set asail to reach out and return with i n t u i t i o n s a n d p r o m p t s. S o t h i s proliferation of intuitions and prompts becomes the tapestry which is the exhibition. In any enterprise, as is the wont, and particularly in a creative enterprise, how did you perhaps resolve any creative differences you may have had? Rather did you have any creative differences at all in putting together this enormous enterprise? Jitish: Our roles were very different. Our roles were deﬁned, we overlapped may be in terms of the occasional dialoguing... But on the whole our work was pretty much deﬁned. Riyas: This foundation has not reached a stage where it has become an institution with a two-year plan lead-out. At its inception, what we were mainly targeting to achieve was the exhibition. Once Jitish came on board, he almost created a platform to work on and we were only supposed to support that. That decision was internally very strong. So I was given a completely different job — that of programming, which I felt should never ever contradict Jitish's job in any manner... Under the large umbrella of the project, each one of us dreamt a bigger dream... We could also discuss anything and everything under the sky. Bose: When we proposed Jitish's name we

had told the advisory committee that we were looking to someone who would be an artist himself and understood art and theory. And everybody was happy with Jitish's choice, for he is meticulous, wellknown, and well-connected... Everybody felt that he would bring to our vision a new direction. Riyas, the other day you spoke about how the biennale had exposed the city's vulnerabilities. Obviously, there is a lot of pressure of expectations from the three of you from the public, a public which is perhaps disillusioned by the traditional institutions of governance. Probably they look up to you as an agent of change. Do you think the Foundation can assume the role of an activist or how do you think the Foundation can possibly navigate this sea of expectations? From its inception, this has been a biennale of resistance or struggle. What are the main reasons for that? One, I think is ignorance. In such a context when you are doing a project where the site has never been exposed on a scale like this, the ﬁrst impression one can get is that we are 'parachuting' something into a society that doesn't have the capacity to understand or respond to or read what has been placed in front of them. We have been through that crisis — the ﬁrst edition itself was a crisis. What the biennale has in general provoked is a sort of understanding of one's history and that's the larger reading that's happening. In a cultural place like Kerala the major appreciation for this project has come from alternate spaces or alternate

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At this biennale, Jitish has evoked, with a completely different kind of rigour, the history of a site with a uniquely distinct power of perception. Jitish has invested a lot in the possibilities of the power of reimagining! There is a great tendency in this project to re-evaluate what has been said and what has been written, and revisit the terminologies one used to talk about art, history, and aesthetics... Riyas Komu, Director, Programmes, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014

voices or the underground. There has always been a marked reluctance in society to discuss immediate issues. Prof B. Iqbal, for mer Vice-Chancellor of Kerala University, who had come visiting, said that Kerala society had been static for the past 20 years and that the biennale had come like a volcano! It has had its ripple effect. So I think we need to understand the historical depth of the impact of the biennale — that is I think the starting point of any discourse. Further, I would chart out certain objectives that we achieved — the first thing being finding infrastructure to accommodate art. When we started out, the amount of space Kochi had, to host an exhibition, was 10,000 sqft! Today, thanks to the biennale, we have 4,50,000 sqft space to showcase art! One bigger message I see that has gone out in a state like Kerala, where literature has a preeminent position, is that as artists we always have a greater understanding of space, a space that is physical and that allows you to discuss your ideas and ideologies. The argument of the biennale has always been for that physical space to exist because art needs that. I think that is the first intervention of the biennale. We never understood some of our greatest revolutionary artists — Raja Ravi Varma was one of those. He was somebody who followed the best technology of his time and he was somebody who also left the state. No Malayali has ever answered that question — why did Raja Ravi Varma leave

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Bose Krishnamachari, President, Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foundation

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Kerala? So, I think it is a kind of a rereading of our own vulnerabilities about our understanding of visual art. The biennale has exposed that... B o s e : M ay I a d d t o R i y a s. . . We experienced it with the ﬁrst biennale too... There is an elitist connotation to art... People think the art world is elitist and is a white cubian sort of world. Here at the biennale it is open to all classes of life — it has erased those borders and it has become a people's biennale. From the ﬁrst edition I could see that there was another sort of seriousness. People have become more and more intellectually receptive. Riyas mentioned Maharaja's College where we held a literature seminar and where, in fact, we didn't talk about art. Every other college in the city has now begun to talk about issues related to education, women, and so on... College campuses are thriving on a sort of urgency drawn from the biennale. The biennale's ripples have spread far and wide... Artists such as you — Bose and Riyas — went out of Kerala and have returned bringing to bear on Kerala and Kerala society a very reinvigorating perspective. Do you think there has been a certain face-off between artists who have left Kerala for Bombay or Delhi or Baroda, and artists who have chosen to work in Kerala? Is there an ideological divide there? Bose: I have been hearing some of the artists saying we can stay back in Kerala and survive. But I think when we look at their career, they live here, they work here, but their work is almost always shown outside or represented by a gallery. Again, I think, we now have a certain kind of possibility of developing residencies and studio spaces. The biennale has brought about that kind of a thing. There used to be mediocre exhibition spaces in Kerala. Today if you go to art colleges, you can see there is a new kind of professionalism and understanding — may be they have adopted it from the biennale... When we were at Jehangir, we used to go out to the masters and learn from them by working with them, by collaborating with them. For a lot of young artists those were incredible moments...

To quickly pick up from there, Jitish, what has changed in art school today since your time? Not too much has changed in art institutions, at least in the ones that we went to. If anything, the distance that the art school is from the reality of the present lies in inverse proportion to the changes outside. The distance seems even further in terms of how the wider art world in India has transitioned whereas the art schools really haven't. That said, the point Bose made about art schools in Kerala is a very signiﬁcant one. My own experience at the Thrissur College of Art's annual exhibition we visited together was incredible. I think just to see across multiple batches and departments the way they had let their art works mix was very very interesting. In a city like Bombay where we had our schooling, art schools have a lot of catching-up to do. Riyas, if you were to go back to art school today, what would you revisit fundamentally? Maybe it is the time we are living in... I think I missed studying Indian art history as part of our education system. That's been one of my arguments when we were putting together our plans as to why not we reverse the process. Most of our art institutions have been established by the British. The diverse nature of our country has produced a variety of art movements — I don't think we take that possibility into account. I think such possibilities are a big opportunity to understand our country better. From my experience of interaction with the Students' Biennale — some of the artists were curators — as you walked through the exhibition you saw the experiences of various regions. If you looked at the works of students from the North-East, there was a huge concern about identity. And students of Jammu & Kashmir reﬂected in their works their angst about their own social and political issues... and so on for students from Orissa. I don't think this discourse is accounted for in an art institution. I have always felt that one needs to focus on the First Year BFA students. The story changes when you look at the work he or she does in their Final Year. So institutions are not multi-disciplinary at all — teachers

follow 35-40 year old syllabi. The best institutions in India that are making inroads have developed new programmes, such as visiting faculty lectures, talks, interactive sessions, learning outside classrooms, and travelling — this is becoming an integral part of art education. One of the chapters in a programme catalogue I am putting together about the biennale is on the Students' Biennale and is titled 'Final Display'. For almost 75-80 percent of art students this would be their final display in their lives! Because they go into different areas for there are no incubation centres and there are no systems in place to help students remain and sustain themselves as artists. These things are crucial and look at the economy of that — how many students take that crucial decision to become an artist when at the same age someone else chooses to become a designer or doctor or an engineer? This is also globally true — only 5-6 percent of art students go on to survive and become artists! I think we should address this issue because we have such diversity in this country. Bose, to take on from where Riyas has left, what should we do to help foster that creative economy around art? Why wouldn't a student of art choose art not only for aesthetic fulfilment, but also for livelihood? If I were to look at JJ School of Art, I would change every available space into a residency and also provide a production centre. We need to have technical expertise in different fields. Suppose an artist comes to our city, he or she shouldn't have to go to another part of the world to pick up materials and essentials. We should have craftsmen, carpenters, welders, and all kinds of engineering stuff. We should have a studio facility such as the Neibt Akademi in Amsterdam. We have to start the learning of aesthetics... it cannot be taught in some ways. I think we need to start it in school itself... more than talking, we should be able to play and learn, make and learn, create and learn, create and invent... Jitish, as a curator, how did you mediate between artwork and viewer at the Biennale?

Largely, an exhibition is successful unto itself if it has within itself its own terms of articulation, especially in an environment such as this where people from diverse demographies converge. Now one wasn't trying to reach out to each and every demography, or an imagined demography, but one was hoping that the exhibition was sufficiently ventilated to have viewfinders from different perspectives. Hopefully, people would have entered, in my absence, those spaces, and my presence would have been the textual citation that occurred from time to time. But that said, my dialogues were mostly about — especially when talking to students — things we didn't know, or things we might have known but couldn't have experienced, and consistently positioning notions about our world within a space of incertitude. For me it was important to have those kinds of dialogues with young people, to actually interrogate with them what it meant to rethink everything we assume as known. It was central to me in an exhibition of this scale and reach, which was why I have often described it as not only an observation deck but equally a toolbox of self-reflection... Riyas, in my conversation with Madhusudanan, he said how the biennale was not an innocent activity, it was a political activity. In conversations with people outside, one question I would often field was 'what is it in there' (inside the confines of Aspinwall House)? How do you communicate the idea that the biennale was not an innocent activity — it's not recreation, it's recreation in some way — but a political activity affecting people's lives?

I strongly believe that nobody takes it as an innocent activity. I feel that people have had great respect for the project because it is political. You can read into the context and you can make different chapters on the project. We can ponder the possibility of how the biennale has made us think of our future... that's one of the politics of the project... as to how it retrieves the better values of the past for the future. Then it also articulates how art is to be understood or imagined. I strongly believe that this biennale has changed perceptions about art. That can also be attributed to the politics of the aesthetic re-reading or intellectual interpretation of the project. I don't think the word political only complements a certain notion of revolt, a certain notion of agitation, or even a certain notion of alertness... So there are people reading it in multiple ways. Jitish: In fact, at a fundamental level, selfreﬂection is a political act. There couldn't be a more political act than asking a question to your own action. So that's fundamentally where you might lodge anything that you might call politics rather than on a placard. In fact, for me it was very very important that within 'Whorled Explorations' there were multiple themes and sub-themes which don't get rendered on placards. Essentially, it has to mirror in you as a viewer in your self-reﬂection, where you own the question, because you created it. From this point on, what is perhaps your collective vision forward...?

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For me the perennial provisionality was extremely essential... I did not want to set out with a goal-oriented mission saying that this is the vision that I would like to replicate in the exhibition. But, in fact, it was through exhibition making I found an everevolving vision... I was looking for a self-organising intelligence within the project manifesting itself through participation rather than administration...

Jitish Kallat, Curator, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014

Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

Riyas: As a Foundation, we have a twoyear programme that will make a little more disciplined from what we have learnt this year. I would say that the message this project also gives curatorially is a statement against being static in your thinking and your way of approaching things and function well with some great programming laid out for another two years. This will keep evolving (with residencies, interactions, seminars, and talks) with more seriousness and a more clinical approach. But we have to churn out everything, with systematic disorder... Maybe as artists, that's our thinking... we expect chaos, we expect accidents... But it will be a very interesting parallel journey with our next curator too. CB

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Jitish Kallat, Curator, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014

Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

..INCLUSION .........

DIALECTICS OF

ART

“The ideas and questions raised by the biennale will create ripples in the thought process of society… At the biennale, artists from Kerala and India get to meet K.G. SREENIVAS others from the world over and reﬂect upon diverse human problems and see how we can build an egalitarian society… People are getting an opportunity to open up to philosophical questions and questions relating to our very existence. This biennale ushers in a new world of ideas and aesthetics,” says M.A. Baby, Former “Art necessarily means a liberal and accepting ecosystem, where contrarian views are accepted, where there is more Education and Culture Minister of Kerala in a conversation with CREATIVE BRANDS. transparency. Art will thrive in that brand of Kerala, where it is green egalitarian, participative, and argumentative… The results thereof we shall see in the years to come — not just in the world of art, but in the world of exploration and experimentation,” says JOSE DOMINIC, head of the CGH Earth Group in a conversation with CREATIVE BRANDS.

arian Alexander Baby, Member of the Kerala Legislative Assembly from Kundara, representing the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is a renaissance man. A visionary thinker and reformer, Baby as Kerala’s Minister for Education & Culture initiated far-reaching reforms of the state's education system. The most outstanding transformation he helped usher in was aimed at making the teaching-learning process a more balanced exercise by introducing a transparent grading system in schools with internal assessments and other modes of critical evaluation. Baby also brought in a radical single-window admission process in Kerala’s higher secondary educational institutions, particularly those run by private managements and riven with the politics and interests of caste, faith, and big business. It brought in the much desired professionalism and discipline in the admission process that had plagued the system for decades. Baby also introduced the country’s first Higher Education Scholarship Scheme in Kerala, which was inaugurated by then Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh. He also helped set up the Higher Education Council, widely regarded as a model for the country’s higher education sector. In the area of culture, too, Baby has made seminal contributions having been the key proponent of the idea of a biennale for Kerala that eventually took the form and shape of India's first and one of the world's most acclaimed biennales — the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. It was at Baby's instance that noted artists Jyoti Basu, Krishnamachari Bose, and Riyas Komu conceived of the biennale. Baby, a passionate man of arts, spoke to K.G. Sreenivas at Aspinwall House one stormy evening. So, how would you locate the idea of Kochi Muziris Biennale in the current cultural climate in the country today? When you mention ‘current cultural climate in the country today’, like a collage so many incidents and questions flashed through my mind — an artist of M. F. Hussain’s stature being asked to leave our country and take shelter in another part of the world; a writer like Perumal Murugan

having to announce on his Facebook page that the “Author Perumal Murugan is no more”; Ghulam Ali, the great singer from another part of our great sub-continent that till 1947 was one, being stopped from coming to our country; then, the demand that a film like ‘PK’ be not shown! Numerous strands within our society exist where intolerance is abundant. Artists, performers, writers, and painters are either forced to leave the country or forced to stop their work. In such times, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is a cultural, creative intervention. It is not only an occasion for celebrating culture, it is also a time for struggle. It is a cultural activity but there is a civilised political dimension also. The ideas of syncretic assimilation are important. In the context of Indian culture this Biennale has many dimensions. During this period of significant cultural revisionism of which you speak about, how, to your mind, one can institutionalise the promotion of arts and culture on scale such as this? I remember a get-together one evening at a friend and artist Jyoti Bose’s flat in Mumbai. Bose, Riyas, and many other friends were there that day. I asked my friends that if we wanted to do something meaningful in order to change the cultural life of Kerala with regard to creative works like painting, installations, and similar experiments in the field of art, what we should do. It is still a [valid] question. In fact, in the year 2000, at the point of the transition in our history from one millennium to another, we had similar ideas. That time in 1999-2000 we had a different government in Kerala. We had started a wonderful programme called Manaveeyam. The idea was that all that is associated with the human activity of creation should be celebrated. That year we instituted an award in the name of Manaveeyam and Raja Ravi Varma for meaningful contribution to the field of painting and the first award was given to K.G. Subramanyan. I was also a member of the jury and the chairman was none other than A. Ramachandran, the great artist. As a representative of the Manaveeyam Cultural Mission I attended the meeting to discuss whether the award should be given to Subramanian or M.F. Husain. A few other names too were there, but the first name was that of K.G. Subramanyan. Ramachandran said, ‘I propose K.G. Subramanyan’, and immediately we

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..INCLUSION ......... was to mobilise the necessary resources — we had then mooted a sum of Rs. 5 crore (and that was insurance alone for original works) for the event. So we went to the government. A shocked government asked us, ‘what is this’!!! So people, unless they have tried to understand the arts, find it very difficult to relate to an art event. I remember, when this file came to the Cabinet and the said amount was put up for discussion, most of our colleagues said, ‘what is this, we have lot of propeople activities to be undertaken, and these are paintings…canvasses… why do you need so much money, what is this.’ Coming back to your question as to how you can mobilise the government to support events that require such huge resources, I would say you first need to have a project to make politicians and bureaucrats culturally literate. Of course, the biennale is doing exactly that work. Today, to the credit of the biennale, it must be said that the event has helped deepen cultural literacy in Kerala…

said ‘yes’. We thought that that would make some impact, but, at that point in time I realised that though we have had great artists like Raja Ravi Varma, K.C.S Panicker, and so on, and despite Kerala being the state with the highest literacy rate, we were still far behind in literacy in arts! In the ﬁeld of arts we, including me, are almost illiterate. So, we thought that this award to K.G. Subramanyan would inculcate some literacy in Kerala. However, to our surprise some people asked, ‘you are giving this award to Subramanyan, but, what is his c o n t r i b u t i o n ? ’ T h a t m e a n s K . G. Subramanyan was not known sufﬁciently. This was a fact! Then I thought to myself what we should do to help eradicate cultural illiteracy. We have only been able to eradicate linguistic illiteracy so far. So, this was the question that I asked my friends. They proposed the idea of a biennale, and we accepted the proposal.

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We requested Dr. Venu, an IAS officer, to discuss this proposal with the artists. So, this was how the entire project began. Most importantly, we wanted to insulate it from political differences, because ideologically Kerala has a new political dispensation every five years. We didn't want the idea of the biennale being discarded by the new government. The political component was taken care of by us while the artistic success of this biennale was solely the work of Bose Krishnamachari, Riyas, Jitish Kallat, and so many others. We had suggested [the idea] to the local MP, K.V. Thomas, who was a member of the Union Council of Ministers then, with whom we held the first meeting in Delhi, where Prime Minister’s personal secretary T.K.A. Nair, Amitabh Kant, another IAS officer. Thomas, a Congress leader, had said Communist-Congress differences should not affect the project. As a team our effort

was also to ensure that budget should not be a constraint. Though we did encounter difficulties in finding the finances, the enormous energy of Bose, Riyas, and other supporters has made sure that the biennale is here to exist as a fact. To add to this — and you were in government as Minister for Education & Culture — from the government’s perspective, which controls significant resources, what is it that they could do to bring about a paradigm shift in mechanisms, in terms of funding and encouraging events of such scale that require immense resources? This is a crucial question, especially, when we plan events of this nature. There again, we need to have mutual trust and cultural literacy among various stakeholders. The political society is hugely ignorant about what is involved in organising a Biennale such as this. When we first spoke about organising various such an exhibition (the first biennale), we found how difficult it

How do you visualise institutionalising a culture of art and art education in our system, which really doesn’t consider art relevant to the vitals of life. How would one do the restructuring of such a system in light of our conversation? There has to be a general discussion in our society where artists, art lovers, and curators, among others should come forward and think about what we should be doing. However, we did lay some groundwork — for example, in our last government, artist Shri. Ramachandran was invested with the responsibility of studying the scene of art education in Kerala and how it could be restructured. Following his report we set up an interuniversity centre for study and research in plastic arts with Dr. C.S. Jayaram as its director. May I hasten to add that whenever we plan to do such initiate innovative activities there are always bureaucratic hassles, but then, I always recall what Albert Einstein had once said: ‘Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds’. We did encounter similar difﬁculties, but the Ramachandran committee report did

bring about meaningful changes in the sphere of art education. It also helped the Biennale. In Kollam, for instance, students of a government school, with the help of its parents-teachers association, have now decided to organise a Student’s Biennale. So, the impact of the biennale can be felt in different ways in Kerala. We have to encourage this, and only then would we be able to create an environment where the government would also be compelled to take steps to institutionalise an event such as the Biennale. What, to your mind, is the material dialectic between the Biennale and society, the Biennale and culture, the Biennale and a civilisation? It’s a deeply philosophical question that you have asked. I would simplify it by looking at what has been the impact, dialectically, of the biennale upon society and different sections within. The ideas and questions raised by the biennale will create ripples in the thought process of society. We had a huge rally of my party (CPI-M) recently. A topic that we discussed there was the impact of global warming and how many islands and lowlying areas would get submerged within another 100 years or so. At the biennale, Swiss artist Marie Velardie’s work discusses exactly the same question. She did this work in 2007, where she predicts what would happen a hundred years from now. In 2107, she says, many islands of Mali would be completely submerged. We have Munroe Thuruth (island) in my constituency, which is poised to get submerged sooner than later. Events such as this can be calamitous for humanity. So, the future of this beautiful humanity on this beautiful earth is being discussed in this biennale. At the biennale, artists from Kerala are also getting to meet others from the world over and reﬂect upon diverse human problems and see how we can build an egalitarian society. People are getting an opportunity to open up to philosophical questions and questions relating to our very existence. This biennale ushers in a new world of ideas and aesthetics. CB

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Two aspects are absolutely vital from a long-term strategic perspective: First, institutionalised funding and budgeting, both governmental and non-governmental, for the KochiMuziris Biennale is critical to the biennale’s security and success. Second, securing permanent spaces for the exhibition is equally critical. Both the government and the private sector need to ensure that the biennale has a home to call its own…

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homas Isaac, a well-known and widely published developmental economist, steered Kerala’s ﬁnances during the previous Left Democratic Front-led government. A Member of the Kerala Legislative Assembly representing the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Dr. Isaac is clear in his mind about the position of art in society: That art is central to the spiritual well-being of a society, and that, equally, funding is central to any developmental vision. “The government, if it chooses to, can give core support to stabilise the ﬁnances. But for additionalities, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foundation will have to sit with corporates for CSR funds or other donor foundations. Now the problem is the Foundation does not have core support with a lot of uncertainty plaguing it thereof. However, the processes need to be made much more systematic and transparent because government funding demands certain procedures. But the very nature of this enterprise is not very amenable to government procedures. Therefore, it is important to have one core programme, which then should be supported by the government. I think there needs to be an ar rang ement where it becomes a per manent feature of government budgets.”

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“The problem is Kerala is getting hooked to a consumption culture as our economic well-being rises. It can be disastrous for Kerala's culture, ecology, and society in general. Deﬁnitely your consumption levels will have to grow, but what components of consumption? It cannot be material consumption alone — your spiritual consumption in terms of the population's ability to appreciate art, music, cinema and so on. So human beings spending more and more time to earn more and more money and consume more and more is a vicious circle — we should break out of that,” says Dr. THOMAS ISAAC, former Finance Minister of Kerala, in an interview with CREATIVE BRANDS.

K.G. SREENIVAS

(EXCERPTS) Is it in the nature of the political economy of art that government as an institution has been traditionally reluctant to invest in art? I think Kerala has reached a stage where the government will have to increase its investment in art manifold. Kerala’s material well-being is rising fast — we are today one of the fastest-growing states in India. Our consumption level is secondhighest in India. With certain consensual strategies being adopted in the state for accelerating this growth, Kerala could become a medium-growth ‘country’. Now, as our economic well-being rises, the problem is Kerala is getting hooked to a culture of consumption. It can be disastrous for Kerala’s culture, ecology,

and society in general. Consumption needs to grow, but what should be its components? It cannot be material consumption alone. It should be spiritual consumption in terms of our ability to appreciate art, music, cinema, and so on. So we spend more and more of our time to earn more and more money and consume more and more... it is a vicious circle we need to break out of. This can be done by government by investing heavily in schools, colleges, and village libraries to help ordinary people to, say, learn music or appreciate music, or pursue other artistic talents. So even if you are not an artist, you should be able to enjoy those great cultural products. Our lives would then be richer. My vision of Kerala development today — it was not so 10 years ago — is that the state will have to increase its investment in the cultural sector. What was done by the last government was not sufficient — I think that it’s a major self-criticism I would do as its then finance minister. Kerala should have invested more... What areas could/should government invest in? Once you think of investing in culture so that it enriches peoples’ lives we need to identify the key sectors. One I think is schools. Today, the traditional music and drawing teachers have all but disappeared. Students should be able to take part in extracurricular activities. The second is Kerala’s vibrant library and art societies — they need to be financially supported and nurtured. The third is Kerala’s academies. The fourth one, importantly, is to institutionalise a system by which artists and their associations are supported by government to let them pursue their artistic mission. If you want a liberal society that is a risk the government will have to bear. So, Kerala needs to rethink its cultural policy to a great extent. Today, however, government funding has been flowing into government institutions — it’s a comfortable thing in the sense that they follow government procedures, the formalities are met, and a bureaucrat or a politician will be comfortable with that. But anything outside that, such as supporting the biennale, becomes a little

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Cultural development is a very important component of the development process. Without that I am sure we are going to create a cultural monstrosity in Kerala which you can see in the consumerist culture that is fast growing here. So as an antidote, it is important that the idea is embedded in the planning process itself...

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Installation titled ‘Erasure’ (2011) by Vietnamese artist Dinh Q Le at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014. The picture above shows the remains of a wooden boat and thousands of photographs (above and facing page) that are part of an archive Le has created from images left behind by ﬂeeing Vietnamese families during the bloody ﬁght between Vietnam and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge in the years following the Vietnam War.

uncomfortable for them. The ﬁrst question they raise then is that of accountability as if accountability means sticking to certain rules, or that only ofﬁcials have accountability. There can be other ways of establishing accountability appropriate to a particular sector. But the way the question of accountability is being raised denies such a possibility — it is largely bureaucratic thinking. Secondly, there would be a section of narrowminded cultural strategists. The third is, regardless of our openness to the rest of the world in terms of economy, Kerala is by and large limited to Kerala traditions and arts despite the fact that there is such a large number of Keralites outside Kerala. So, all of these have contributed to a certain reluctance on the part of government in supporting this enterprise. In the last government there were some buffers such as the Culture Minister and myself who could understand what was happening and the need for it. I apologise

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not only from the cultural point of view but from the perspective of an economist himself. How do you position the biennale from the perspective of tourism? For one, I think, we should make Kochi into a ‘world-class city’ — though, of course, I do not belong to that tribe who swear by the idea — in ter ms of transforming the city into a proper metropolis with much more cultural and recreational facilities. Kochi is a barren city in ter ms of art and culture. Thiruvananthapuram, Thrissur, and Kozhikode have a much richer cultural background. Therefore, the government should support such initiatives, which come to the city — that is number one from the perspective of metropolitan growth in the city. Second, cultural tourism is very important from the perspective of Kerala’s development. Tourism can have several adverse effects,

but tourism that understands our culture and its nuances thereof, I think, has a lot of potential. For example, the Muziris project is a cultural project that seeks to preserve the more than 2000-year-old cultural history of that area in Kochi in terms of its monuments, institutions, and lifestyles and so on. So an event such as the Biennale gives you a longitudinal cross-section view of how Kerala has evolved culturally. My rough calculation — when there was a controversy about supporting biennale — is that the kind of free advertisement Kerala has got through the biennale internationally far outweighs the kind of money the government of Kerala has given the Biennale. So what are we cribbing about?!!! Look at the opportunity cost it has got via coverage in The New York Times or elsewhere! So I think it makes eminent economic sense to support the biennale, the cultural perspective besides.

You spoke about the nature of deepening globalisation and its pulls and pressures. You cannot obviously legislate culture whereas there is increasingly a tendency to do that. How do you take this out of the ambit of government and put in the necessary resources to help develop an environment that is receptive to culture? In this country of ours, the government will have to be the main patron of art and culture because government is public resource. Secondly, cultural development is a very important component of the development process. Without that I am sure we are going to create a cultural monstrosity in Kerala which you can see in the consumerist culture that is fast growing here. So as an antidote, it is important that the idea is embedded in the planning process itself. But then can the government-led cultural institutions decide what should be good theatre or what should be a piece of good painting. No. Such an enterprise would be a failure from the beginning, particularly at this stage when everything is opening up. It isn’t viable for government to micromanage things, but government should certainly oversee such projects while the support it lends should be selective... It’s not that anybody who comes forward can be supported — that right lies well within the domain of government. But a certain philosophy says it cannot support let’s say artists’ initiatives... I won’t say it’s a public versus private debate — it is, ultimately, artists, their vision, and their aspirations that matters. Here the public-private dichotomy doesn’t hold. Let’s take the Commonwealth Games, which comes directly under the government... Lucky that the government is not holding the biennale! I think it is very important to give artistic freedom and support independent artists’ initiatives as much as possible. What were the deﬁning impressions you gathered from the biennale? The biennale, as a whole, opens up people’s minds to a much larger spectrum of possibilities of artistic expression. Even if we don’t enjoy all of these, the fact is great artists think differently from us. So this is a festival that opens up Kerala to a larger world of art. Today, there is nothing

in Kerala that parallels the biennale. Look at the ambience of this biennale — ascetic, clean, and tidy! The ambience, too, is interesting. Finally, where do you locate art in the political economy of a nation's life? Art has become a vehicle for investment. Partly, as it is a unique product, its value can only appreciate — its value can only increase. Therefore, it’s an important part of our creative economy and that’s what mainstream economists need to think about. In sync with our lifestyles, there will be great demand for decorative art, not that everything you see is decorative in nature. But what I am interested in is, as our economy grows and people become wealthier, and as more and more basic material needs are being met, would people take a route where consumption becomes an end in itself in our cultural life? Perhaps we might reach a point in time with robotics and automation and so on that we may need to work only for an hour to meet our consumption needs. So what do you do for the rest of the time? Would you consume more material goods or lie back and enjoy all these artistic works? Therefore, the ability to appreciate and enjoy art should become part of our development vision. CB

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As our economic well-being rises, the problem is Kerala is getting hooked to a culture of consumption. It can be disastrous for Kerala’s culture, ecology, and society in general. Consumption needs to grow, but what should be its components? It cannot be material consumption alone. It should be spiritual consumption in terms of our ability to appreciate art, music, cinema, and so on. So we spend more and more of our time to earn more and more money and consume more and more... it is a vicious circle we need to break out of...

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mol Palekar is one of India’s most widely recognised faces of cinema who once represented the quintessential next-door ‘hero’ in a wide variety of character roles he essayed with consummate ease. Palekar, who began his career as a painter, was at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014 where he, along with his wife Sandhya Gokhale, had curated an Artist’s Cinema package titled ‘Personal is Political’. Palekar was in conversation with Editor-in-Chief K.G. Sreenivas at Old Harbour Hotel at Fort Kochi. (EXCERPTS) You have been associated with the Biennale for long... What do you think does the biennale do to the city, to its culture, to civilisation? I have always felt that awareness about and the spaces available for visual arts in our day-to-day life have been unfortunately very less. As far as people in general are concerned, visual arts as part of their dayto-day life is not what it should be in our country. If we start with that as our premise then what the Kochi Biennale has done is tremendous — not only in terms of pure awareness but also awareness as part of our day-to-day existence... I began my career as a painter with a master's from JJ School of Arts and I began my creative journey in 1967 with a solo show. So I have been privileged in dabbling in various creative ﬁelds — be it visual arts, theatre, plastic art and so on... So from that perspective, the space for visual arts is far less than that for other areas. Cinema is the most popular genre and, therefore, as an actor, the focus and the spotlight and everything else that comes with it I have enjoyed it all... I have also enjoyed tremendous success in theatre. But very few people know about my journey in visual arts. So when I see every corner of this city come alive with visual arts, it’s something that’s very heart-warming. Rhetorical as it may sound, yet, what do you think is the state of art? Where does society stand in relation to art? Especially for people who govern us, art doesn't seem too relevant for them... I agree... It doesn’t seem relevant. I look at it as the tragic part. Why art alone? Culture doesn’t seem to be an important factor for those who govern us. A cultural voice is not supposed to make any dent. So when we talk of people who govern us or people whom we select to govern us, we need to probe what really is important to them. And how culture, how arts, and the role of art, could not only be important but also inevitable in our day-to-day life — this is something we need to probe deeply.

ART CENTRAL “Cinema is something different, life is something different... This is where I feel that unless we make art and culture an essential, inevitable part of our lives, we can't have a richer life... If we accept that as a concept then we would know the role of art and artist. And we would learn to respect art,” says AMOL PALEKAR, famed cinema and theatre actor and director in conversation with CREATIVE BRANDS.

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As an artist I am extremely concerned... I am at a loss for words... Where do I stand! As an artist, does my voice make any difference? What I should express, what I shouldn't, what I should say, what I shouldn't, what I should eat, what I shouldn't, what should I drink, what I shouldn't... all of these are directly or indirectly connected with my creative existence. But if this is being questioned, then I think my existence is being questioned...

In light of what you said at the Artists’ Cinema series at the Biennale, do you think there is a serious, serious civilisational crisis at the moment as we speak? Is art fraught? As an artist I am extremely concerned... I am at a loss for words... Where do I stand! As an artist, does my voice make any difference? What I should express, what I shouldn’t, what I should say, what I

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shouldn’t, what I should eat, what I shouldn’t, what should I drink, what I shouldn’t... all of these are directly or indirectly connected with my creative existence. But if this is being questioned, then I think my existence is being questioned and I feel very perturbed. If everything is going to be determined not by me but somebody else, that is, what I should be ‘seeing’, what is my culture, what is my language, what kind of air should I breathe... if all of these are going to be decided merely by numbers... I am disturbed... Do you think, under the circumstances, artists along with other civil participants of society could forge an alliance against such revisionist tendencies? Unfortunately, no revolution has been ever made by an artist in no country... But a mindset is always created by the artist. If we look at history and ask for that one revolution created by an artist and which government was overthrown by an artist there is none... Therefore, you can safely say that artists are irrelevant... they don’t create revolutions, but to create a mindset, the atmosphere, and the sensibilities, it is always the artists who have done that. Therefore, as an artist, I have immense faith in the role of an artist. My role, albeit small, is yet crucial... A lot of us have watched your movies. As a quintessential, next-door middle-class hero, who has never been the megastar, the big superstar, the roles you did, the music in which your roles were framed, the kind of stories that were told, do you think we could have a next-door boy as our next hero, as our ideal? Let me give you a different kind of example. The same boy next door (Arvind Kejriwal, Chief Minister of Delhi), who was not larger than life, who did not possess any quality of the superhero, we have just seen that happen in the Delhi elections... So it is reﬂecting in our day-today life, why don’t you want to look at that? Why do we still keep it aside from our life and look at something else? Cinema is something different, life is something different. I fail to understand this. This is where I feel that unless we make art and

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culture an essential, inevitable part of our lives, we can’t have a richer life. I genuinely believe that whatever art gave me in life, it has made my life extremely rich. Whatever I am today it is because of contributions from visual arts, theatre, cinema, music... All of these have made me richer than I could ever envisage. If we accept that as a concept then we would know the role of art and artist. And we would learn to respect art. From a civilisational, cultural perspective, how, to your mind, could we institutionalise what you just said — of making art integral to our lives? Let come back to the stage where I am now... I call this homecoming... and ah homecoming has attained a totally different connotation today (laughs). But I think my homecoming is much better! This is where I belong. I started my journey as a painter and I genuinely hope and wish to die as a painter. So in that sense it is a full circle... that is my gharwaapsi! That said, after all this journey — my dabbling in other ﬁelds and acquiring different experiences and perspectives — for the last two years I have been only a painter. I have had my shows in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Baroda, and Delhi. The response to my work as a painter has been very heart-warming. There were people who came to see my work because they have loved my work in cinema, they may come there because they have been my ardent fans in Golmaal or some of my early ﬁlms. Once they come there and look at this phase I see how their perception about me an artist changes — they talk about my art, they talk about how they do not know anything about visual arts... I try and give them a different perspective and I tell them it is okay not to know about visual arts. I know nothing about music, but I enjoy music, so why can’t we both appreciate visual arts in the same manner, in the same breath. So the inability to understand a form of art needn’t become a barrier to appreciating art... I see the glimmer of a dialogue and I can see a small window opening up and this man will now have a different outlook towards visual arts, culture, and to so many other things in life. And if I have been able to do that I

might have just given that little push and helped make a beginning... I think we can all then make our lives richer, happier, peaceful, and more fulfilling. You spoke about making a full circle... What were those (seamless) convergences you as an artist have seen and experienced in painting, art, visual culture, cinema, theatre... It's so tough and difficult to cover it... You are talking of almost 50 years of time of my creative career. I can definitely say that I have been privileged to have indulged in so many different fields and see for myself how differently I could explore and express myself in visual arts, theatre, cinema... I feel overwhelmed that I was a b l e t o d o i t . I f e e l mu ch m o r e overwhelmed that whatever different path I chose and I tried to explore was never a mainstream path. People liked the choices I made. People liked my fumbling and stumbling along that different, tiny little road... They only applauded it and that’s what gave me strength. My connect with the Biennale is exactly the same. Why I feel this connect with the biennale is because of these youngsters — Bose, Riyas, Jitish — who have been trying to create a different way of looking at life, a different way of living life. They have managed to create a nice ripple in our art scene not only in the country, but also on an international level. This is simply great! And if all of us in some way or the other can try and extend this, we would be a happier lot. CB

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Culture doesn't seem to be an important factor for those who govern us. A cultural voice is not supposed to make any dent. So when we talk of people who govern us or people whom we select to govern us, we need to probe what really is important to them...

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ose Dominic is the head and ‘Brand Guardian’ of the Casino Group of Hotels, Fort Cochin, and he has been the pioneer of what has been called experiential and responsible tourism as opposed to purely consumption driven tourism. Dominic has also been a patron of the Kochi Muziris Biennale and is deeply involved with the discourse in art, culture, society, and politics. Today, the globally acclaimed ‘Kerala model of tourism’. owes a large debt to Dominic. (EXCERPTS)

BREAKING

K.G. SREENIVAS

DOWN WALLS

“Art necessarily means a liberal and accepting ecosystem, where contrarian views are accepted, where there is more transparency. Art will thrive in that brand of Kerala, where it is green egalitarian, participative, and argumentative… The results thereof we shall see in the years to come — not just in the world of art, but in the world of exploration and experimentation,” says JOSE DOMINIC, head of the CGH Earth Group in a conversation with CREATIVE BRANDS.

What to your mind does the biennale do to the city? A biennale is the Olympics of art. Artists from around the world have exhibited here but there is more to it than all of that. The ﬁrst edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has been acknowledged and recognised around the world and far exceeded everyone’s expectations. The second one, I believe, has excelled the ﬁrst one. In that sense the biennale is the best news going out of India, although what’s going out of India now is not so nice — about aggression against women and about restrictions. In the Kerala context it was about the intent to bring in prohibition. And now we have this about Maharashtra bringing in the prohibition on beef. No drinking on Sundays, no kissing on all days… that seems to be the news going out of India... quite inappropriate for a liberal, diverse country such as India. But the biennale has stood out as an exception. From the perspective of the tourism industry that I am associated with, this piece of good news means that if the biennale is happening in Kochi, it must be a community or a state that is highly liberated and evolved. Then it is surely a place for us not only to visit but also a place to live in. So that’s a very powerful message. But sadly the power of this event has not been fully acknowledged by the state government. Perhaps the best investment that the government can make is to promote the biennale. So what draws people to Kochi? The one component or the inherent attraction of a destination (such as Kochi) is not just about the backwaters, the elephants, or the forests. I think it’s the temper of the people… their emotions… all that is a

reason why people go to a destination and keep going back. And the others are the facilities a destination offers. But one of the most important things is the image of the destination, and the image that such an event like the biennale can create is very powerful. Look at it from the point of view of the industry: how does one chose to go to a particular destination today? People have all become travel savvy — travel is no longer limited to the maharajas of the world. But we have many many negative images going out… And then amidst all of it, we have the story of art and culture, diversity, and contrarian views that together make a destination. And not to mention the history or histories of Kochi…? The Mayor of Kochi says, ‘Kochi is biennale city’. Last year on the streets of Fort Kochi around Aspinwall House we even had a bucket brigade! Shopkeepers, autodrivers, and hundreds of others went around the city and collected funds in a bucket and it was not insubstantial, going into a few lakhs of rupees. The reaction was spontaneous! That is an example of what the biennale can do, of people beginning to take pride in their history, their arts, and their culture. This biennale talks about the legendary Spice Route. Muziris was a port of ancient India and from this port went the goods ancient India produced. It also brought in many people along with the Chinese ﬁshing nets, predating the European period in India. Legend has it the Apostle St. Thomas himself came to the coast of Kerala and why did he choose to come here of all the places in the world? When he came here there were already four Synagogues existing here, yet many chose to follow in his wake… The Biennale is a modern expression of those events or such ideas of syncretism and civilisational movements. These are the facets of history which come out, and, of course, in modern times we had had the Dutch, the Portuguese, and the English who set foot in India. In a sense the venues of the biennale have been chosen in such a way so as to represent a walk through history and art. And it’s this combination of art and history, and the social and cultural implications of it that made the setting of the biennale so powerful!

Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

..INCLUSION .........

BREAKING

K.G. SREENIVAS

DOWN WALLS

Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

A vignette from the legendary K.G. Subramanyan’s ‘War of the zlics’ (2012) displayed at David Hall at Fort Kochi during the Biennale.

So art needs that ecosystem… Art necessarily means a liberal and accepting ecosystem, where contrarian views are accepted and where there is more transparency. If there were to be a phrase ‘Made in Kerala’ (akin to ‘Make in India’ propounded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi) I would say it would stand for a green, participative, inclusive, and even argumentative idea. That said, if the brand of Kerala were to be a green, egalitarian, participative, and argumentative one, art would thrive in that brand. So the biennale’s implications are much more than we can imagine… it’s more than art, it’s an event that traces the evolution of this part of the world through the spice route, the colonial times, through the red ﬂag of hammer and sickle, then the period of the NRK (Non-Resident Keralite) who went all over the world. Today, there are 3 million Keralites living in the Gulf alone and there are a few million in Europe and America, sending back something like Rs. 72,000 crores during the 12-month period ending in March 1, 2014! Look at the ideas, the attitudes that also ﬂow in. Kerala, in that sense, is the most global community. It is an old story that has come out of the spice route. And the second part that has taken shape postIndependence is tourism.

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Last year on the streets of Fort Kochi around Aspinwall House we even had a bucket brigade! Shopkeepers, auto drivers, and hundreds of others went around the city and collected funds in a bucket and it was not insubstantial, going into a few lakhs of rupees. The reaction was spontaneous! That is an example of what the biennale can do, of people beginning to take pride in their history, their arts, and their culture…

Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

You have taken us through a grand sweep of history, of the philosophical underpinnings of the evolution of Kerala culture, its politics and its economy. Do you think we have some sort of a civilisation crisis at the moment? And where does a movement like the biennale position itself, vis–a–vis this crisis? When you say civilisational crisis, I believe that in the evolution of India or of Kerala in particular, we are a stage in development, when what we took for granted of being yourself, what you took for granted of being liberal, the ability to accept contrary views, all of that is under threat. We are seeing some elements of George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984' creeping in — as to what you should do, what you should drink, what you should not do, and so on! That, I think, is a crisis, facing the community or our civilisation. In that sense it translates itself into so many forms. In Kerala, the ﬁveyear alternative politics between the Left and the Right has added its own dynamics — of accepting left, right

A frontal inside view of the sprawling and historic Aspinwall House that became the main exhibition site of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

and many things in between. Today I think some of the winds of intolerance, a certain Talibanistic attitude, have had an impact here too. That does not auger well for any destination or state. In a way I think events of global art or of liberal thought will make people ‘think’. When you attend the biennale it opens our minds, especially of our children. The results thereof we shall see in the years to come — not just in the world of art, but in the world of exploration and experimentation. It breaks the narrow walls we have built around ourselves! From the governance perspective there has always been an issue of funding. Governments traditionally have been reluctant to invest in art… The biennale is like an art fair and it is an investment in our ecosystem. Yes, the g over nment today recognises and acknowledges the power of the biennale. That’s why it happened here with enormous support. Raising resources has been big trouble, but what makes it all work is the spirit of achievement and fulﬁllment not only of the people who are

associated with the biennale, but also that of the volunteers, the students who have worked with the artists themselves. For them taking part in the Kochi Biennale has now taken on a new dimension — it's almost like a pilgrimage. That said, resources do remain a big challenge. The ﬁrst time, despite all odds, it happened. The second time, we continued to struggle and despite the odds it did happen. However, despite the resistance or the inability to accept its value in building Brand Kerala, the biennale and the changing attitudes towards it will pay rich dividends in the times to come. Ours has been a Camelot story — suddenly everything is coming into place and the planets are all aligned. That is the spirit of art and of the community, both here in Kochi and around the world. Kochi today is truly global. From the pepper corn, which represented globalisation, to the ability to see the world in a grain of sand, or in this sense a pepper corn, the biennale helps people think and think globally. CB

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When you say civilisational crisis, I believe that in the evolution of India or of Kerala in particular, we are a stage in development, where we are seeing some elements of George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' and '1984' creeping in… That does not auger well… In a way I think events of global art or of liberal thought will make people 'think'. When you attend the biennale it opens our minds, especially of our children… It breaks the narrow walls we have built around ourselves…

Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

A vignette from the legendary K.G. Subramanyan’s ‘War of the zlics’ (2012) displayed at David Hall at Fort Kochi during the Biennale.

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Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

A frontal inside view of the sprawling and historic Aspinwall House that became the main exhibition site of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

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Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

.CO-CREATION .............

ART

OF PARTNERSHIP

With little support coming from government, “private participation is essential, through spaces, or through corporate sponsorship… This biennale would not have been successful without the funding it has received from private and private sector donors,” says ISAAC ALEXANDER in conversation with CREATIVE BRANDS.

saac Alexander is Managing Director of the Avenue Group of Hotels. Alexander and his wife Tinky Mathew partnered the Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foundation by lending the group’s heritage waterfront property, the historic Pepper House, in Fort Kochi to house part of the exhibition, an artists’ residency and studio, and a travelling installation called the Laboratory of Visual Arts (LaVA) — a curated collection of over 5,000 books and 1,800 DVDs on the visual arts by artist Bose Krishnamachari. When Alexander first decided to partner with the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, he had little idea about the scale or significance of the event. After all, the idea of a biennale itself was far removed from mainstream understanding of its artistic or cultural import. Besides, it was India’s first biennale. Alexander was in for a revelation. “I think it was one of the most significant events to have happened in this part of the world. I was not fully aware of how big this event would be. When we actually decided to partner with the foundation (Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foundation), I was not fully aware of the scale of the event. After seeing the scale of the works in the first edition of the biennale, the participation, and the global media coverage of the biennale, I was sure this was a new chapter for Kochi,” says Alexander. “It had opened up a new world of opportunities. There couldn’t have been a better way of revival for Kochi,” he adds. Soon Alexander and his wife Tinky Mathew had decided to lend the 16,000 sqft Pepper House to the Foundation to host part of the exhibition starting with the first edition of the biennale in 2012. The erstwhile Dutch pepper godown stood at a stone’s throw from Aspinwall House, the main venue of the 108-day biennale which showcased 100 main artworks by 94 artists from 30 countries. However, it wasn’t merely handing over the ageing space to the foundation — it meant considerable work besides. “We have had this property for about

15 years and every year we would carry out a restoration of the building, so that the building did not come crumbling down, because it had been abandoned for the longest period of time for many decades. Once we decided to partner with the biennale, we carried out a lot of restoration, just making sure the structure was safe. We also replaced some of its materials such as the woodwork and the pillars,” explains Alexander. The young entrepreneur, who runs the Avenue Group of Hotels and Resorts in Kochi, points out that the event “from the economic perspective, has lent a big boost to the local economy with considerable numbers of tourists landing in the city from abroad to visit the biennale”. “Besides it has also helped little known artists and the smaller galleries, not to mention the interests of artists in the country and abroad who chose to come and work here in the city’s studio spaces and spice godowns,” Alexander adds. The mega event has had its fair share of agony, with funding lying at the heart of it all. “Private partnership is key,” says Alexander, while pointing out the inadequacy of government support. “The government does not do enough in the state or country, for that matter, so private participation is essential, through spaces, or through corporate sponsorship. This biennale would not have been successful without the funding it has received from private and private sector donors.” Referring to the aesthetics of the show that attracted over 500,000 visitors from around the world, Alexander gives full credit to Curator Jitish Kallat. “Jitish has done a brilliant job in curating and lending a perspective to the works in relation to the ideas and notions of cosmic connections, time, and space,” adding, “from a creative and aesthetic perspective, it has left a strong impact on the art world.” The biennale had also witnessed considerable debate on key socio-political issues. Alexander believes “art has a big role to play in society. Such events play a multifaceted role by generating awareness

Pepper House

and addressing the problems that we face today.” Having now been part of the second edition of the biennale, Alexander has ambitious plans for Pepper House. “The story of Pepper House has changed a lot in terms of our vision for its future. The biennale has created a change in direction for Pepper House, so now we see it as more of a cultural enterprise and transforming itself into a platform for culture, art, and design.” “We visualize Pepper House as a creative laboratory for forward thinking and interdisciplinary dialogue, and also as a centre for engaging art and people,” he adds. Much credit goes to Alexander and his group in funding the development of Pepper House. However, he says, “we are still trying to ﬁgure out how to do that in the years to come”. Sustainability is critical, he adds. “All the funds that have gone into Pepper House for now has been through our own funds, but it’s not sustainable, so we will need participation from various sources. But it’s a space that has generated a lot of interest in our community so I think, ﬁnding a sustainable structure would be important.” CB

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.CO-CREATION .............

ART

OF PARTNERSHIP

Pepper House

Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

TRIANGULATION .. ..............

igi Scaria is a versatile internationally acclaimed multimedia artist and sculptor who has shown his works around the world, including at the 54th Venice Biennale. Forty-two year old New Delhi-based Scaria showcased his installation titled ‘The Chronicle of the Shores Foretold’ — a giant 2.5 tonne steel bell, 13 feet tall and 16 feet across at its widest — on a disused dock at Pepper House at Fort Kochi, an 18th-century Dutch-style godown. ‘The Chronicle’ sought to blend and explore the intersections of mythology and history. (EXCERPTS) When you initially conceived of this project — The Chronicle of the Shores Foretold — how did the 'bell' come to your mind in line with Jitish's Curatorial Note? I was more interested in the aspects of history and trade routes, rather than relationships with the idea of 'space' because Jitish's concern was probably more about the existence of mankind in the world and the universe in one sense. I approached the idea essentially from two-three angles: First, that of our colonial past; second, that of the spiritual-religious history associated with it; and, third how the local population had received/experienced it all through the centuries. What was that process of reciprocation? These were the areas I was more interested in. However, the initial idea never had a bell as a form — it came more as an idea akin to the Philosopher’s Stone or magnet.

SCULPTING TIME “My visualisation was that of something emerging from the sea and attracting things from its surroundings. It was then it struck me that a bell would be appropriate, which, in turn, would have stories to tell... The bell also represented the idea of time,” says artist and sculptor Gigi Scaria

What was your visualisation then? My visualisation was that of something emerging from the sea and attracting things from its surroundings. It was then it struck me that a bell would be appropriate, which, in turn, would have stories to tell. I have a Roman Catholic background and my childhood was ﬁlled with stories associated with the many churches in and around Kottayam (my hometown). Then Kochi itself, the venue of the biennale, has had rich a colonial history. All these ideas ﬁtted in well with the image of the bell. Besides, the bell also represented the idea of time in the

sense that you can actually sculpt time. Besides, Kochi's local history and its power is a very important aspect — for you are also receiving a local space. And you brought in the Mopla (Muslim) Khalasis for the installation? Yes, so there is a local-global dialectic. Which was why, I brought in the famed Mopla Khalasis of Malabar as part of the labour-intensive perfor manceinstallation. The Khalasis, who work with gut and tradition, have had a long and fascinating history along the coast of the Arabian Sea. Your installation stands at the intersection of history, colonialism, labour, and reciprocation. How did the Khalasis respond to your project, the idea, and what was the scale of their involvement? The Khalasis do seek glory in their past, but they are also in a way unique because of technology, today, no one really does what they can do! They make their work look rather easy while using traditional pulleys instead of modern cranes. But Khalasis don't come cheap either and I travelled to Kozhikode to meet them. I told them it would be more like a performance — I wanted them to sing along as they erected the bell. It was the traditional paatu-marupaatu (a song and a counter-song as it were), which is actually a secular song extolling other faiths and godheads as well. These songs are improvised on the spot and helps ease the pain of labour. These songs are, however, deeply layered and can, in one sense, be related to Suﬁsm. Why I brought in the Khalasis was also to illustrate how the nature of labour had changed, yet how the Khalasis had remain largely unchanged. When you hauled in the bell to Fort Kochi all the way from Coimbatore, how did you as an artist confront labour? Or rather, how did labour confront art? The original idea was to fabricate the bell in Kerala itself and so I approached the bell makers of Mannar in southern Kerala, where they follow the traditional mode of casting. I wanted to have the bell cast. I had, however, only four months in hand to have it built and

installed ahead of the opening. Time was short, so I was advised to have the bell built in sheet metal but I knew it would be difﬁcult to have the work done in Kerala. So that was how I landed in Coimbatore and that was where the ‘labour’ began its journey. The bell, which weighed 2.5 tonnes, had to be fabricated in three pieces so that it could be transported to Kochi on a 40-ft trailer truck along with its holding structure. The site at the historic Pepper House that stood at the edge of the backwater had to be reinforced to be able to hold the structure in place. Getting it in was also rather tortuous — loaded on to smaller trucks and driven to the dock in Fort Kochi and then let in through the Customs wharf. Then, inevitably, a hostile labour force demanded considerable sums of money to haul it onshore. They later became friendly and settled for a sum of Rs, 20,000! How much did you spend on the installation? Everything put together about Rs. 25 lakh. What does the city, its culture, its civilisation do to the Biennale? There are many ways of understanding it. One is too see how you are connected with local artists and their networks and how they respond to any art event that comes to their city or country. The other is how these local artists beneﬁt because of the identity of the biennale, which also means they get to showcase their works in other cities or parts of the world. What is also important is how many interesting artists participate in the biennale, or how each biennale is organised or conceptualised. Then there are critics of the biennale who question what they call an adaptation of our aesthetics to a western construct, or mass commoditisation. However, there will always be a critique and a counter critique and I don't think we can settle the matter either way. Art is obviously political. The personal is political too. It’s more like a melting pot — you can look at it in your own way. The biennale can stay free if we can overcome the personal or the ideological. CB

Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

TRIANGULATION .. ..............

Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

..IDEAS ....

uko Hasegawa is Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2006–present) and is also a Professor at Tama Art University, Tokyo, where she teaches curatorial and art theory. She was Chief Curator and Founding Artistic Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (1999−2006). One of the most formidable ﬁgures on the international art scene, Hasegawa has worked on many international biennales and has been Artistic Advisor of the 12th Venice Architectural Biennale (2010); CoCurator of the 29th Sao Paulo Biennale (2010); Co-Curator of the 4th Seoul International Media Art Biennale (2006); and Curator of the 2001 Istanbul Biennial. Most recently, Hasegawa was Curator of last year’s Sharjah Biennale. Hasegawa, who toured the KochiMuziris Biennale 2014 with a keen eye, was in conversation with Editor-inChief K.G. Sreenivas at Aspinwall House, the main venue of the KochiMuziris Biennale in Fort Kochi.

“REDRAWING ART SPACES

“The Kochi-Muziris Biennale takes the idea of conceptualism to a different level. It talks about the future — so it's like jumping from one space to another and from one time to another. This kind of spatial imagination is enormous. And this happens in India in this region and it works so well. Such an idea may not work in New York because it embraces such imaginary fantastic ideas where the curator taps into the power of the venues... So you are creating a very strong magnetic ﬁeld of ideas and imagination here,” says Yuko Hasegawa, one of the world's foremost contemporary curators.

(EXCERPTS) What have been your impressions thus far? This has been my second visit to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and I am impressed, especially because of its environment and its history, not to forget its organisation and the bunch of young people and artists who have come together to put this show together. Importantly, this is not a typically topdown biennale; this is truly a bottoms-up biennale... Has there been a change in curatorial practices around the world — you spoke about a bottomsup approach rather than a top-down one... Yes, because there are several biennales today being organised by private foundations and young people and artists. I was at this very interesting project at Georgia where a bunch of young people came together to organise a triennale as part of their education — it was a small initiative but one with a lot of energy. So that’s one example. Another

one is the Sao Paulo Biennale which has had a long history; it was stopped sometime ago and now has been restarted with strong support from local people and from those who support art. This looks like a very authentic biennale having risen on account of a demand from the bottom. So one is a small biennale and the other a big initiative — Georgia and Sao Paulo. In 2010, you spoke about what you called “soft conceptualism”. Could you shed a little more light on what you meant by soft conceptualism? It's a new type of conceptualism because the so-called conceptual art was already established by the 60-70s in the western context. But at once, non-western people have very different ideas as regards what constitute the private, the public, the individual, and indeed creativity, which means if we were to bring in ‘conceptual’ art purely within the context of the western regime, it won’t be enough. Again I am not talking of strong theoretical conceptual ideas, but more along the lines of people coming together to share a platform of ideas. That to me is soft conceptualism. So creating such a biennale with an open infrastructure unlike that of a museum is also soft conceptualism. Also this is a platform where artists without referring to social and political ideas directly make people think about their essential condition. So in my deﬁnition of soft conceptualism I include all of these essentially creative activities. Do you see that sort of a conceptual approach at the Kochi Biennale? Yes, because the theme of this biennale is not directly social or political issues. This biennale talks about the history of t h i s c i t y, t h e c o l o n i a l h i s t o r y, contemporary history, and the history of local cosmology... So this biennale takes the idea to a different level. It also talks about the future — so it’s like jumping from one space to another and from one time to another. This kind of spatial imagination is enormous. And this happens in India in this region and it works so well. Such an idea may not work

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Curators do not have any dictatorship and art does not embrace any hierarchy, because in art everything happens or results out of interaction with people. Collaboration is of the essence. Audiences grow artists and audiences grow institutions — this is a mutual, organic relationship...

Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

..IDEAS ....

“REDRAWING ART SPACES

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Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

in New York because it embraces such imaginary fantastic ideas where the curator taps into the power of the venues... So you are creating a very strong magnetic field of ideas and imagination here. Could you tell us something about the show titled “Encounters of the 21st Century Polyphony” you had curated at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art? Please tell us about two things: One, about the “encounters of the 21st century”, and two, your founding reflections on the museum. I was thinking about what should be my curatorial statement at the beginning of the 21st century because I was thinking of those key words that would sum up the 20th century and those were man, money, materialism. These characterised the great success of the 20th century but equally posed a great deal of problems at once. So while we accept the great successes of modernism, we also need to survive the 21st century. So instead of the three 'M's, I coined three 'C's — Coexistence, Creative Intelligence, and Consciousness. These three Cs could hold the key to surviving together — so these were my basic curatorial ideas. So when I was seeking to create a new institution — 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art — it was based on thisz three Cs idea. Curators do not have any dictatorship and art does not embrace any hierarchy, because in art everything happens or results out of interaction with people. Collaboration is of the essence. Audiences grow artists and audiences grow institutions — this is a mutual, organic relationship. Besides, art, architecture, design, craftsmanship, even cookery, we all come under the creative category. So this was another founding idea of the Museum. Each of these may have different elements, but bringing those together results in what is called 'polyphony'... This would be like singing in many different voices but eventually resulting in harmony... You say in an interview that there is a need to “redefine the conceptual frameworks of a gallery, art space, or a biennale, both on an emotional level and an institutional level”. Could you talk about what you meant by the emotional and

Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

institutional aspects? A very good question! The institutional level is about infrastructure, security, climate control, light, acoustics and so on in a gallery, but the emotional aspect is equally important because the emotional experience inside an art space is critical to the success of a show. If the art viewer were to feel very cold or very isolated, it wouldn't work, because an art space should be able to inspire new ideas. So it's important to be able to help the viewer establish a connection or a conversation with a piece/s of artwork. That is the moment of transformation. Therefore, the emotional dimension of art spaces is very very important. And so I am also talking about perception, cognition, and sensation that need to work together in an art space. Do you think a curator needs to be an artist herself? Who do you think makes a curator? We are curators... or we are animal trainers... or we are shepherds... or perhaps we are walking like stray sheep... No one knows however where does the road lead to (laughs)... we perhaps wander, we perhaps lose our way, or we could stay together with the sheep like the artists and their audience who need to be together. A curator could be a navigator too... This is my metaphor for a curator, someone who can come up with his or her own map based on which people can then make their own maps... So this is a curator. But a curator can also be a kind of a producer, a poet, a cook, a good researcher... a curator can be everything but who can see what is culture, what is our cultural life... he or she needs to be able to excavate culture. There are many types of curators, but this is an important role a curator needs to play. A curator also needs to touch upon people's emotions and sensations... You have published a book titled 'Modern Women Artists of the Museum of Modern Art' in 2010. Why women alone... MoMA had invited me to do a research on their collection of Japanese artists. It was an interesting line-up. My attempt was to contextualise women artists of Japan and build a sort of alternate history because Japan is also quite male

dominated. Women artists are like appendages to male artists in Japan. So my founding premise was along those lines... However, it was not feminist or gender action. For me it was quite natural. There are some amazing and interesting women artists in Japan and I wanted to bring about awareness about those artists. We need to, therefore, contextualise their work... Do you think as a curator you seek to redeﬁne masculinities in the art space in the context of Japan? Most of Japan's art spaces or museums have a typical style — they are big but with no space for people. People are really excluded... They install restaurants, cafes and so on and make money out of it. There are no free or open spaces for people. The 21st Century Museum is a big success, because though it is small, there is a lot of public space making it attractive for people to come and appreciate art. It calls for a certain feminity or feminine imagination to be able to build such accommodative spaces... This is the new kind of gentle relationship-building, sensationinducing spaces in art spaces we need. This is what I call anti-masculine space making ideas... CB

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It's important to be able to help the viewer establish a connection or a conversation with a piece/s of artwork. That is the moment of transformation. Therefore, the emotional dimension of art spaces is very very important. And so I am also talking about perception, cognition, and sensation that need to work together in an art space...

Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

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REALMS .. ......

AESTHETICS OF POLITICS “The biennale is a political activity and I don’t think it’s an innocent activity. But the politics is also very different from that of the West,” says internationally acclaimed filmmaker and artist Madhusudhanan whose work ‘Logic of Disappearance’, a collection of 90 charcoal drawings, at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014 drew the attention of the visiting Curator of the Venice Biennale Okwui Enwezor. Madhusudhanan has since been selected to showcase his work at the Venice Biennale.

rtist Madhusudanan’s artistic practice seamlessly straddles various mediums in art and cinema, including the genre of video art and narrative feature cinema. He examines India’s cinema history, colonialism, and the contemporary politics of war. Marxism and Buddhism have profoundly inﬂuenced Madhusudhanan’s art. Madhusudanan was among the key founders of the Radical Painters’ and Sculptors’ Association in the 1980s and also wrote the body’s manifesto, which sought to make art accessible to the common man. However, following the suicide of the movement’s leader K. P. Krishnakumar, Madhusudhanan switched to cinema. His 2008 Malayalam ﬁlm ‘Bioscope’ won several awards and won international acclaim. Madhusudanan spoke to Creative Brands at Pepper House in Fort Kochi. (EXCERPTS) So you have been selected to the Venice Biennale 2015… It will be a wonderful experience, because some great artists will be there. Exhibiting alongside with them would be a great opportunity — a once in a life-time chance. Some of them I’ll be meeting again, some of them I don't know, so I would get to see their work and talk about it. In the larger ecology of art today how do you locate or position the Kochi-Muziris Biennale? I think it is a very unique thing, especially because it’s happening in India, a developing country. The work Indian artists produce is

very very different from their European or American counterparts. So this biennale is also different. The venue of the Kochi Biennale is also strikingly different when compared to any other biennale outside. It is a beautiful place; it has a very different history and politics behind it. The biennale is a political activity and I don’t think it’s an innocent activity. So the politics is also very different from that of the West. In terms of European art or shall we say European sensibilities, what are the departures that you have found in the art works produced at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale? Consider for example my work. I think it is a very different kind of subject — I am not sure if anyone else has tried it out with Marxism as a subject in painting. Other artists too have worked in the area, but mine has been a long process, a big series, in a sense multi-track… I have been tackling this subject for many years. Long ago, I had made a film a seven-minute film too on the subject. I had stopped for a while and resumed a little later. My sensibilities and my experiences are reflected in this body of work and it is, therefore, different from what appears in the West. I was born and brought up in Alappuzha where I studied and worked among people involved with Left-wing politics in Kerala. That is another reason I was so interested in Marxism. In fact, the Marxism they practise outside is so different from our idea of the ‘party’ or a Communist leader. I think that shows in my work, it is a political work. And if you go very deep into it, you can see it is ‘Indian’. It (Marxism) is an idea born in the

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There was a Goya exhibition in Delhi a few years ago at the Spanish embassy of the same series alongside some contemporary war photographs. The composition — that of the soldiers and victims and all of that is the same in essence… The machinery or technology is different today but the cruelty is just the same…

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in my drawings. The main image I use is that of the pig — the pig appears in latterday Buddhism far from Buddha’s time — which is a symbol of greed. So I use that a lot in my work. The fish skeleton is taken from Pieter Bruegel’s work. Bruegel, as you know, was a 16th century Dutch Renaissance painter and printmaker. Bruegel portrayed it as a big fish eating a small fish — it is a Biblical imagery and big fish do eat small fish. That is also what is happening in the real world. In Marxism, too, what they are trying to describe is that big men eat up small men. But I did not use it the same way Bruegel did it, so I changed it into a kind of fish skeleton… in postcolonial semiotics we could read it as our very condition…

West, but the way it is practised here is somehow personal or social — all within our landscape. Your work (here) is marked by great starkness of imagery, detailing, and sensuality... You have an image of a shrouded bust with a microphone in front of it, which, to my mind, felt like the silencing of a formerly powerful autocrat. What were your reﬂections when you put together the microphone shrouded before the bust? Not only the microphones, there are many other objects too, such as the pig. It is sort of a recurrent theme and these are all associated with our life and the microphone is largely associated with politics. I am very interested in the works of Spanish artist Francisco De Goya (1746–1828). When I started working on this series, I studied his works extensively, in particular, the last series of images he had made. One is called ‘The Disasters of War’ (Spanish: Los Desastres de la Guerra), a series of 82 prints he made between 1810 and 1820. It was in protest against the bloodshed of the 1808 Dos de Mayo Uprising, the subsequent Peninsular

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War of 1808–14, and the political regression following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814 in Spain. During the g reat wars between Napoleon’s French Empire and Spain, Goya was the ﬁrst court painter to the Spanish crown and produced portraits of the Spanish and French rulers. Goya was, however, deeply affected by the war but kept to himself his thoughts about it. And when he started work on these prints he was almost deaf and had turned 62. Such was the power of those prints that they were not put out until 1863, a good 35 years after his death! And I was looking at his works and their imagery — you have trees, witches, skeletons and so on. Whatever he saw in his lifetime about war it is there in his art. There was a Goya exhibition in Delhi a few years ago at the Spanish embassy of the same series alongside some contemporar y war photographs. The composition — that of the soldiers and victims and all of that is the same in essence… The machinery or technology is different today but the cruelty is just the same!

There is another work that struck me in particular — that of Marx’s head being split vertically. Did it perhaps represent the falling apart or splitting of ideology? I don’t use anything very literally, I don’t want to describe what it is, it is a picture… it’s very difficult to say exactly what it is, else it can’t be a work of art. Everyone can see it differently. To me it is about light and Marx’s life. When I was reading his early works — it’s all about economics — it calls for a certain intellect to comprehend his thoughts therein. I couldn’t entirely follow what he was saying but I really got involved in his work and I thought I saw light… That's what I have attempted to portray in this particular work of mine — a certain ideological illumination if you will… There is another of your drawings that struck me — the transmogrification of a man and a giant fish, where the man carrying the skeletal remains of the fish and its head substitutes his head for the fish's head. What was the symbology or the substructural meaning behind this artwork? I am very much interested in Buddhism; there are a lot of elements that you can see

When you put together this entire body of work, did you have something like a binding, cohesive, political principle? I am not sure we can approach a work of art in literally this manner… What I have portrayed here entirely out of my personal experience — the inspiration from different artists and how I see it. There are a lot of images I have taken from films, especially those of Sergei Eisenstein. For instance, there is an image of a procession coming towards Stalin’s head and that imagery I borrowed from his film ‘Ivan the Terrible’, which was produced in three parts. In the story, Ivan, who has lost all hope, goes away from Moscow while people from Moscow are coming towards him to take him back… It is often described as a great example of mise-enscène. So that is the scene, where Ivan stands there facing the crowd… In my work, instead of Ivan I use Stalin. Eisenstein got into trouble because Stalin didn’t agree with his portrayal of the Tsar in the film. Eisenstein destroyed the negative of ‘Ivan the Terrible’ – Part III. Perhaps it was because of the great emotional and mental strain that he died soon too — he was only 50. That is the story… you can perhaps read it in this manner too. As far as the movie is concer ned, it is a carefully made composition and I think it is one of the greatest ever compositions in film history.

And why charcoal? I have used charcoal from my childhood. Later I studied print making in Baroda and I used to use lithographic crayon. Soon after I began making ﬁlms and with that my working medium had changed. I stopped painting for some time but I always use to draw. I never stopped drawing. I had stopped showing my work though. This series, which I have rendered in charcoal, I have taken very seriously because in Buddhism charcoal represents the essential human condition and is a philosophical thing. So you have lent several ideas to your work, you have engaged several realms of thoughts: Marxism, contemporary politics and so on. So what next after this? At the Venice Biennale what do you propose to show? After this I was doing a series of work, based on the Malabar uprising of 1921. That year a strange incident happened in North Malabar and they called it the Wagon Tragedy. But it was not a tragedy, it was a conscious and organised killing. The British put 100 prisoners in a railway cabin and sent them to Pothanur from Thirur.

At Pothanur was the central prison. Inside the wagon the hapless prisoners could not even stand! Besides, there was no air source. And 57 of them died during the journey and 13 of them in the hospitals. It was a calculated mass murder and I couldn’t help compare it with Franz Kafka’s ‘The Penal Colony’ (1914), which was about a killing machine that inﬂicts 12 hours of torture before death. In this case it was a railway wagon, so I made a series of drawings and a video. In fact, I sent this to Okwui Enwezor, the Curator of Venice Biennale, and when he was here (Kochi Biennale) he asked for me and about my work. I had titled my work ‘The Penal Colony’ too. Another interesting part in my project was about a toy that Tipu Sultan had designed — it is now in the British Museum. The toy shows a tiger attacking an Englishman — Tipu’s royal symbol was a tiger — implying that he was himself attacking the English. Inside the toy there is a musical instrument that makes the killing ‘interesting’. I put these three together — there is an intrinsic connection among the three — and came up with this project. CB

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..CONSTELLATION ..............

arvathi Nayar’s work explores the narratives of spatial relationships — between the body and the world, between the intimate spaces within and without through the prism of science. Her works often presents the world as a constellation of images that we navigate in the real world. Her solos include ‘The Ambiguity of Landscapes’ (2014, Chennai), ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ (2008, Mumbai), 'Win Lose Draw’ (2007, Singapore), while her work ‘A Story of Flight’ is part of the Jai He art programme at the new T2 Terminal at the Mumbai International Airport. Chennai-based Parvathi secured a Master’s in Fine Art from Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design, London, on a Chevening scholarship. Her works have been collected by institutions, such as the Singapore Art Museum, The Sotheby’s Art Institute, and Deutsche Bank, among others. Parvathi is also a writer and poet, and often writes on cinema, literature, and modern dance. (EXCERPTS) The ‘Fluidity of Horizons’ seeks to complicate and interpret history, more speciﬁcally, the history of Malabar. What inspired the Fluidity of Horizons? There are things which have speciﬁc beginnings. At one level, the beginning was when I came here for a site visit. But then there are many other beginnings... I come from Kerala, so there is this very ancient sense of being rooted in this soil. But the exact coming together was when I came here and I responded to the site of Aspinwall House, which I thought was full of history. The space that I eventually found for my work was a set of rooms, in a way shell-shaped. I walked around it and I came out of it and looked at the sea in my horizon and I knew

SEA-NCES, HISTORIES, EMANATIONS “For me the vast multiplicity of people who came here brought something with them and took away something with them... I was looking at it from both the poetic and philosophical points of view saying that this is a human project. We go down messy bylanes, lanes that sometimes result in good things, sometimes not. But that whole process of travel is the human project,” says artist PARVATHI NAYAR of her work the 15 ft long and 6 ft high 'Fluidity of Horizons' she had mounted at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale at Aspinwall House at Fort Kochi. K.G. SREENIVAS

something magical or mystical can happen here. So that was the sort of beginning. But before and after that I had read a lot about Kochi — I tracked down my ancestors in Kochi, I come from a tharavaadu called ‘Thottekkaat’ here in Kochi. The Biennale Foundation was very kind in taking me to sites imbued with history... I talked to people about Muziris and the great wave that decimated it and how the Kochi port came into being. So water and its ﬂuidity played a role in all of it. And the more I read about it — you know how the traders who came in search of black gold and went away — I found parallels in the idea of artists coming here as the new traders and peddling ideas and looking at the space and being inspired by it! So, my work was a result of multiple journeys — coming here, looking back, looking forward, looking inside...

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..CONSTELLATION .............. Kochi is almost like a promontory that overlooks vast expanses of history, both told and untold. From your vantage point here, how do you interpret history? I guess there is that sense of how geographies shaped histories and in that way I think the geography in Kerala and where it is situated has in a large sense been responsible for the traders and sailors coming here because it was a natural and organic point for people to come. So when I was looking at the work, for me the vast multiplicity of people who came here brought something with them and took away something with them. You know that whole capitalist concern was for me the centre of my investigations. In fact, there is a work in my installation — Fluidity of Horizons — a tiny instrument called astrolabe, which you hold in your hand. It went from the Arabs to the Europeans and they used it to hold it against the horizon to navigate their way back to India. So I blew up this tiny instrument hundreds of times its size and I intervened in that with images of maps and images of blood clots and platelets, because ‘discovery’ is not benign. There is a lot of great violence and injury that happens in a cultural clash. But in the end, something good comes out of it. So in this way, there are many such interventions suggestive of that process of trade and travel and discovery and at the centre of it there is a tiny Dutch coin which says that behind all this journey and discovery there is that little element of money and capitalism that drives it all. So I guess I was looking at it from both the poetic and philosophical points of view saying that this is a human project... We go down messy bylanes, lanes that sometimes result in good things, sometimes not. But that whole process of travel is the human project. I was also looking at it from a pragmatic perspective as to why did these people travel... It wasn’t always in search of high philosophy, it was driven by commerce and gold and silver and black gold. However, something interesting and greater than that results from it. So these were some of the ideas that were ﬂoating

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around in my brain as I was thinking and composing my work. How long did you take to put it all together? I got the invitation in April and then it took me all the way down to December... It was just immersion in the project... I am curious about (the process) immersion and creation as it were. What do you go through as an artist when you draw or paint or sketch or imagine or reimagine... I think there is always that anonymous moment of creativity — you are afraid to look too hard it lest it go away — but for that moment to happen you have to feed that part of the brain... at least that’s how it works for me. It’s never literal. You know I would read about traders and travellers and then you know I would ask myself how did they come in. Then I would start looking up mechanical things, sextons, and compasses... What could they have used? Meanwhile, I would go off and read up about what the coats looked like those days and then something completely unrelated about, say, moon travels. So I think that process of immersion to me is to have that multiciplicity of viewpoints coming in and then they accumulate and create a certain anxiety — in the sense that how many balls can you really juggle in the air without dropping any! It’s quite chaotic. But then it settles down to some sort of a pattern. You then hone away at that pattern. And then sometimes it isn’t good, there are often many dead-ends and blind alleys. Through that process of thinking, reﬁning, being adventurous, going on a journey, things emerge and then I suppose the skill of the artist comes in and says ‘that could work’. At one level, it is a lot of hard work — it is not some mysterious something that suddenly you wake up to and are inspired by. Yes, along with that, I believe there is a mysterious moment that catalyses the process, a chemical moment, as it were, that brings it all together! Let’s complicate it a little further. I was speaking to Yuko Hasegawa, who, as you know is one of the world’s foremost curators and is currently

Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. She referred to an exhibition she had curated in Tokyo that involved interpretations of the female body and feminity. Conflict is central to history and a lot of this history is written by men. As a woman artist, does it disturb you that history perhaps has been predominantly built and constructed through the male gaze? It is a complicated question. It is not only the history of the world or the history of Kerala but also the history of art that has been written and built through the male gaze. It has taken a lot of effort to rewrite those histories and there wasn’t enough archival material to really round up that history. That fleshing out has been very important and it is necessary it continues. So in today’s context we need both platforms. It is important to have the platform of gender to examine these issues and make a tournament, if you like, for these very incomplete histories we have. But, at another level, I don't necessarily want to be limited by gender. I am an artist, I completely embrace the fact that I a woman artist, that I am an artist from Kerala, from Asia and so on. I am not in dispute with any of these labels. But I think they are all complicit in the larger act of being an artist. I think one has to be wary of constantly being reductive. So when I say she is an artist from Kerala, there is another set of expectations of her, I don’t deny it, I don’t want to deny it either, but I want to say as an artist, I am a woman, and I come from Kerala and a matrilineal society. But then I also carry with me the knowledge that a lot of brave women have worked very hard for these rights to be available easily. So I think we need to pay attention t o t h e f a c t t h a t n e i t h e r d o we oversimplify nor do we forget. What to your mind is the state of art in the sense? Do you think Indian art has strong elements or influences of Anglo-American art, or is there a moving away from that idiom? What are those disruptions/ruptures in the Indian art scene today? I suppose to speak about artists from India as opposed to Indian artists — where it becomes a notion of geography

A view of Parvathi Nayar’s ‘The Fluidity of Horizons’ (2014), an installation of drawings on wooden panels and mediated by sound.

rather than style and I think it is important just as much — the trend has been to be local but act global. I think you can also be global and act local. So some of my concerns, for example, deal with some very fundamental questions such as what is the universe made of, why are we here, what is the human project, what does it mean... I have always felt that these were questions that were once asked in the cultural sphere, but now we have ceded them completely over to science and philosophy. So for me, part of me tries to bring these questions into the visual sphere, into the cotemporary sphere, into the world of art and ask about them. I see them as hot-button topics and their answers will change. At some stage they were answered by invoking magic, at some other stage by invoking religion, and at another stage by invoking science. So I would like to ask these questions of society. So in that way the question about what is Indian about art is that at a deep-rooted level we have

asked in India this question many times. And I am choosing to answer it in this specific way through the prism of science and through the prism of looking beneath the layers of the world. My work is not really about science — it just uses it as a language. And in that way I think it is an interesting stream, it is an interesting element to bring into this interesting potpourri of what is art in India — there are so many confluences and that I think characterises many aspects of contemporary art in India. My place therein is of someone who is bringing together art and science and philosophy and also playing in this playfield. What is the role of the biennale? It is a tremendous achievement that this biennale happened here in this place as an organic outgrowth of what this place means. And I think it is a biennale very much for India. You know I too felt like Yuko that it’s the soil that is receptive to

ideas — it has been that way historically. So how nice it is to see India’s ﬁrst biennale coming out of these soils with an organic life of its own! Many of the artists that you saw here were not what we could call biennale artists — many people have this image of only the spectacular, whereas, here, it is real, very real! In this edition, for example, Jitish's Curatorial Note is a very sincere and intense investigation into the world of art and ideas... All of them — Bose, Riyas, Jitish — have been very handson... and all of us have worked very hard towards ownership of the soil. The only deﬁnition of contemporary art is about what is being done only now and that deals with things of importance now, but to a lot of people it’s a ‘frightening’ space like for example when people react to the idea of exhibitions in a gallery that is seen as an elitist space! The biennale is far from that. It is here to stay! CB

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A view of Parvathi Nayar’s ‘The Fluidity of Horizons’ (2014), an installation of drawings on wooden panels and mediated by sound.

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.INTIMATIONS .............

Her oeuvre blends the sensuality of memory, faith, and disembodied erasure… For BENITHA PERCIYAL, art is the practice of faith itself. “We don't follow image, we do not worship the image, it's about the words he (Christ) spoke. So it's about Christ asking people to share food, helping somebody. That is what the scripture says. That is what the practice is. At the end of day I see that as my practice,” says Perciyal while talking about her installation 'Fires of Faith' at Pepper House in Fort Kochi. K.G. SREENIVAS

enitha is among the few contemporary artists who exults in celebrating the sensuality of memory, erasure, trace. Her work consistently remains an ode to the ephemerality of the experience of a fierce fecundity. The delicacy of concerns here is as profound as wanting to materialize and register the feel of the wind touching you and caressing your face. For the past several years she has explored her attachment and response to organic, found material like seeds, shells, crustacean fossils, flotsam, driftwood and detritus — material that may be temporary, non-lasting, evanescent or merely that which mutates and metamorphoses into something quite it's other in time. (EXCERPTS) How did you conceive of the Fires of Faith? For me it did not begin with the invitation to the present biennale, because this spark came about in my visit to the first biennale

when I was walking around in Mattanchery looking at antique shops. I began looking at it all as this very beautiful craftwork of artisans or artists. Later, it occurred to me these antique objects of worship came from places of worship and now that they were damaged had ended up in these shops! I wanted to use this idea as a satire. You have never seen Christ nor have I, but we believe… we follow him… we pray to him. So it’s about that as well. It's sort of a confused state for me — whenever I see these broken idols I just want to take them home. At an earlier exhibition titled ‘How Come You are H e r e ’ i n C h e n n a i ( i n Fe b r u a r y ) showcasing a Pieta and Mary, where Mary was cast in an incense exhibition and where I wanted to talk about the idea of a mother, I used a transverse material, the same material that I have used here. And I wanted to talk about the smells when you walk down the streets of Mattanchery while passing by all those spice shops… So everything came together.

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As I walked up to this shop I saw two Christs together, without an arm each. For me it became a big thing. That is what Christ is talking about. That became a subject for me to speak… So that didn't come to me from anywhere, I saw it in a shop. That's what Christ was saying, both the lost hands became holding hands for each other…

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.INTIMATIONS .............

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Mary, like any mother, has smell… A mother has her own smell and she will disappear into nature with a sweet smell… she won't leave any mark behind but you will have memories of your mother through her fragrance. I did not use the Christ ﬁgure in the literal sense because I just wanted to show the mother's pain and emptiness. In fact, you don't need to show the dead Christ literally, but you show the Mother's emptiness as she holds a 33 year old son in her hands.

Are you a believer? Yes, I do believe… What do you believe? I believe what I was taught… the word ‘believe’ is a word we ‘practise. It’s not like the scriptures — the source of your ‘belief’. It’s not like you follow the tradition of Christianity but what Christ said, and what you practice is belief. That’s who I call a believer. The sculptures we have here are fascinating from the perspective of how you have sought to represent. You have Christ disembodied, his arms cut off... Was that aesthetic a difficult choice to make? There is one Cross and I put two Christs, cast in tree resin, together. You cannot cast it really. For me each time I processed it, it became a feature or practice, taken to another level, especially when you work with a material you don t understand! I was not trained as a sculptor; I was trained as a painter. But I wanted to work with my hands. So I chose sculpting to express… But I needed to find another medium to express myself… I made a mould and cast resin but I found it difficult to separate it. I struggled with that and material became teacher… Material speaks to you in another sense. It will speak to you in another sense, not literally. I found this amber; it is fragile and if you light it a little faster they crackle.

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That itself became a subject for me. This mould (in amber) has lots of cracks and still holds together. And to come to your question: as I walked up to this shop I saw two Christs together, without an arm each. For me it became a big thing. That is what Christ is talking about. That became a subject for me to speak… So that didn’t come to me from anywhere, I saw it in a shop. That’s what Christ was saying, both the lost hands became holding hands for each other. When you crafted Christ in that image, spiritually was it a difﬁcult thing to do? We don’t follow image, we do not worship the image… it’s about the words he spoke. So it s about Christ asking you to share food, helping somebody. That is what the scripture says. If you see somebody in need, you should not leave him. That is what the practice is. At the end of day I see this as practice and I call myself a believer. When you began putting together this installation, what research did you do to go back to that era — when St Thomas arrived — and recreate that atmosphere? I didn’t do any sketching or background study in the beginning. In fact, I decided to choose a Christian subject as I am a Christian. When I walked through the streets of Mattanchery, I saw all these religious ﬁgures but I didn't know

speak about transformation.I began with Christ, testing various materials. I did not give many sketches to Jitesh Kallat (Curator). But I told him it was going to be a Christian subject. I was fascinated by the local Portuguese and Dutch aspects of craftsmanship. Some works are very very raw in terms of how they fashioned their idols. At the same time I did not want to show a very western image. So I took recourse to my own people's imagery.

any of their backgrounds… and I just can t take them merely as visual images… They need to talk to me. So I chose Christ as a subject (with cruciﬁxion) alongside these small images and Mother Mary. So all these small Mary’s which are inside this small room were all trial versions to let me understand the craft and material and work on a larger scale. It took months to understand the material itself. Mary, like any mother, has smell… A mother has her own smell and she will disappear into nature with a sweet smell… she won’t leave any mark behind but you will have memories of your mother through her fragrance. I did not use the Christ ﬁgure in the literal sense because I just wanted to show the mother's pain and emptiness. In fact, you don't need to show the dead Christ literally, but you show the Mother’s emptiness as she holds a 33 year old son in her hands. Now the material I have used in stucco method will respond to its environment over time and transform itself… (I have used lime, jig g er y, bark powder, frankincense, myrrh, dried herbs and spices.) That’s what I call it ‘Mother’. That’s why I chose incense material, which is used for every occasion, be it birth or death. It was incense and gold that was offered to Christ as well. It is sacred and it gives off a fragrance even as the ash disappears. That became a subject itself to

You did not want to follow western imagery and wanted to situate Christ in local imagery. Did you face any ambivalence, when you cast Christ? Some of the people reacted very aggressively… one of the visitors said they were seeing Christ in a “different sense”. For example, my Christ does not have a beard. I trained in western portraiture and that follows a certain learning path. There is obviously no Indianness. Is your work waiting to disintegrate? For me work should disappear and should not stand out... When you keep it on a pedestal it becomes stagnant. Luckily I found this aged wood in Chennai — in fact, the entire body of wood was sourced from the Vishakhapatnam harbour where they were demolishing a building. When I was looking at the wood I really liked one large piece of wood — the one on which Christ is now lying. The wood is supposed to have come out of a 300 year old building. I want to show the process of ageing itself. There was no need to make them look old... You used those little bottles, perfumes, incense, and where did you source them? Generally I collect them and I have been collecting these bottles for a while. For me they embody a lot of connections. It's about travel and locked-up memories... I have bottles from over a hundred years ago. They harbor old secrets, which we don’t know about… These bottles inhabited your trunks, your purses, your memories…

Where do these exhibits go from here…? In 2008, in one of my exhibitions, I gave away my exhibits to viewers as mementoes… so they would remember the exhibition by its incense. That’s how I began working with incense. In 2012, in an exhibition at Chennai, I did a large tree which I burnt. So a lot of my previous works were all burnt. But this is the form of the Mother and I don’t want it to burn it… I want to see how she transforms herself over a period of time… slowly she is losing her surface on the layer. So every time I see her in a different form. Last time, I saw Christ has fewer cracks, but now it has a lot of cracks… I think intensely at a very personal artistic level, you have created Christ? Do you feel a certain attachment to what you have created? These are kinds of things that will transform over a period. That is a kind of learning for me. I know what is going to happen. I am not destroying the work directly. Works are disappearing and the memories and the images and I know what level and what surfaces I worked on, it’s there in the mind, it does not go away it stays with you. The physical sense will go away. The memories won’t change.

‘Mother Mary’ in the artist’s likeness

By the end of your work, did you sort of redeﬁne your relationship with Christ? At the end of day, we don’t worship the image. We worship the scriptures. We try to practise what has laid down by the scriptures. When I go to church I like how people just leave everything behind and sit… The church or a temple is a place where you come in and be yourself. You surrender yourself in some sense… When I see that kind of transfor mation happening, I just sit and watch other people. But you don’t know what is happening in their minds. It’s a kind of meditative kind of surrender. At the same time I have a question, what happens when they go out or they face another situation… CB

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‘Mother Mary’ in the artist’s likeness

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kanath Padmanabhan Unny or E.P Unny, as he is known widely, is one of India’s top cartoonists and is Chief Political Cartoonist of The Indian Express. Author of the widely read Spices and Souls — A Doodler’s Journey through Kerala, Unny was at the KochiMuziris Biennale to talk about his work and the world of political cartoons. With him was fellow Palakkadan (from Palakkad in northern Kerala) and Sydney-based writer and cartoon researcher Sundar Ramanathaiyer, who along with Nancy Hudson-Rodd, edited the seminal Tragic Idiom O.V. Vijayan’s Cartoons and Notes on India (DC Books). Sundar, who studies development through cartoons, is also co-author with Stewart Macpherson of Social Development in Kerala: Illusion or Reality? (King’s SOAS Studies in Development Geography). Editor-in-Chief K.G. Sreenivas caught up with the duo for a quick conversation on cartoons and cartooning.

TELLING

STROKES “In an atmosphere of conflict if a cartoonist talks about an implied conflict between Christianity and Islam, or a cartoon on the Prophet or Quran, it is in this atmosphere that the cartoonist is seen as a provocateur! Actually the issue is not even religion — it is probably the mobilisation of politics through religion which is coming into conflict with cartooning. Not religion per se. I have not seen any religious person who has been anti-cartoon per se,” says political cartoonist E.P UNNY in conversation with CREATIVE BRANDS.

(EXCERPTS) What are the convergences between cartooning and art? The word cartoon originally meant a piece of offhand work, a sketch of a more serious work, of a more serious artistic painting. In that sense cartooning is a more spontaneous expression of art at its basic level. It was seamless in the early decades of cartooning — if you look at the work of William Hogarth, widely regarded as the father of the modern cartoon, who was also a great artist. The cartoon became a more popular kind of art with the advent of printing and newspapers. Earlier cartoons appeared in posters as part of political propaganda and soon it became street art. When printing became possible, cartooning became part of journalism. However, we see cartooning only as a journalistic expression. In fact, cartooning is part of the broader spectrum of art. Does cartooning continue to be a ‘powerful’ tool? The cartoon has always been a powerful tool and the cartoon has to try and cut across to the reader. As a “powerful tool” we are not talking about a social and literary tool, we are talking about what’s called the news or political cartoon. In which case, it is at its best when it is an editorial art. If it has to be powerful, the newspaper has to

be powerful. The newspaper should then have people who are free, frank, and bold enough to write what they want to write. It requires a certain journalistic environment, only then a powerful cartoon can emerge and that kind of cartoon will necessarily cut across to the public. Do you see a change in this ‘editorial art’ in the wake of the changes that have swept across mainline media during the past decade and a half in terms of ownership patterns, ownership ideologies, market forces...? The market is not an issue at all. Look at the history of cartooning, comics for instance, the George Luks story was a product of serious newspaper rivalry between two newspaper titans — between Joseph Pulitzer of New York World and William Randolph Hearst of New York Journal. So, it’s very much part of the product in that sense, a creative product which was put to great use and grew in an atmosphere of market competition. So cartooning can’t be that form of high art far removed from the market place. We can handle that. But as an art it has transcended, at various stages, the pressures of the market — it has beneﬁted from the pressures of the market. That's been the beauty of the history of cartooning. Now the issue is something else. The issue is there are other visual expressions — the moving images on television, your ability to access any kind of image on your computer or mobile. So, today the cartoon has to compete with all of them for attention. Also in our country, cartooning has almost grown like a wild plant, completely untended with no institutional support. Generation after generation of very good cartoonists have come, and strangely enough, with no institutional support... it was almost magical! What about the West... It’s more institutionalised, they have better archives, better learning, better awareness, and better cartoon programmes. Even in a place like Singapore, which is hardly a practising democracy, you ﬁnd a lot of cartoon appreciation programmes in schools. Cartoons are used as pedagogical, learning tools in many places. Here we have removed cartoons from textbooks. Why, even archival cartoons are removed from textbooks! You look at lesser democracies such as Malaysia and Singapore who use the

K.G. SREENIVAS

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TELLING

K.G. SREENIVAS

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E P UNNI

cartoon as a teaching aid — which is a major contradiction in terms! How do you explain that? This is what I say we have just survived... when we have a good editor and a good editorial team in a newspaper among a few newspapers then there is an adversarial atmosphere of journalism, campaign journalism, then cartooning, along with good comment, can survive. When this becomes lax, cartooning will also fade. What has happened in India is when one generation of cartoonists fade, another one has come up whenever there has been a couple of good editors. But it is purely random! Like an accidental prime minister, all our car toonists are accidental cartoonists! Sundar, before we began this conversation, we spoke about development knowledge that is embedded in cartoons... Development studies as far as the so-

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Photo credit: mathrubhuminews.in

called the Third World or the Fourth World is concerned, is a serious area of study. Some of the issues, for example, poverty, pollution, unemployment, or disparity are all part of development studies. If you look closely at Indian cartoons, or for that matter other countries tagged as ‘developing’, we would be seeing a lot of issues that are critical to society as far as development paradigms are concerned. So cartoonists draw or comment upon the state of the nation — poverty levels, budgets and so on. This c o m e s u n d e r t h i s f r a m e wo r k o f development studies. So if you look at the promises made by our politicians from 1947 onwards and how they have broken them and if you classify it under ‘rhetoric’ or ‘slogan’, it has all been in the name of development. Look at these slogans and how these slogans have been made fun of — serious analysis, that is. Mind you cartooning is an extremely serious art. A cartoonist spends time understanding the

grammar and syntax of this media. A cartoon represents the disparity between the ideal and the reality. If you look at Indian cartoons, you will ﬁnd several Mahatma Gandhi cartoons. Unny was saying the other day that the more Mahatma appears in cartoons, it means something is wrong with the country! Gandhi is a unique Indian metaphor. So, it's not just a visual metaphor, but an ideological metaphor. It represents something that we have been yearning to have... a certain value system. So when a cartoonist responds to this value erosion, be it in development, be it in day-to-day politics, the cartoonist comes out with classic work... Unny, the cartoonist has become a rather fraught creature lately. Is faith taboo? Why is he so endangered? There are two things. One is when you look at one religion or one faith. The problem comes because there is a conﬂict

between faiths. It is unsaid but it is in an atmosphere of conflict between faiths that a cartoonist takes a shot not at the faith really, but at the way the faith probably gets played out in society or politics. When Hindutva was used to mobilise a registered political party such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), cartoonists and editorial writers criticised it. The public, too, criticised it. Even god-fearing faithful Hindus also criticised it that you can’t meddle with religion and that you can’t inject religion into politics. The same thing can happen to Islam too. But in an atmosphere of conflict if a cartoonist does something like say talk about an implied conflict between Christianity and Islam, or a cartoon on the Prophet or the Quran, it is in this atmosphere that the cartoonist is seen as a provocateur! So what does one do? If you ask me, a truly religious person would ignore this and move on. How would it matter to a truly religious person? It shouldn’t certainly become a provocation for anger. I don't think there is any religion that professes or approves of organised anger or organised violence, at least for Abrahamic religions (of the book) where everything is textually drawn out in detail unlike Hinduism or Jainism. So if you look at the textual documents of such religions or the books they swear by there is nothing in those that approves of organised violence. So it is not justified. Sundar, are we losing our sense of humour? No, of course not! Certain things happen or have happened. It is not for want of a sense of humour. It is because of something else — something beyond the realm of cartooning and its readership... Unny: It is surrogate, it is not just that you are drawing a cartoon on the Prophet and the religion and then some activists come and hit you. It is not that simple. A cartoon is drawn in an atmosphere of implied conflict or actual conflict. So you believe that these guys belong to another camp propagating the cause of a rival camp — that is what is happening. Actually the

issue is not even religion — it is probably the mobilisation of politics through religion which is coming into conflict with cartooning. Not religion per se. I have not seen any religious person who has been anti-cartoon per se! I have not seen any religious person who has been anti-music! It is that basic. When you see a child, the first sign of normality is when the child smiles or is laughing, or has a comical toothless smile. There is a basic comicality from the moment you are born. It is the same thing when you see a child listening to music and developing a sense of rhythm. My point is the comical is as basic as rudimentary music. So which religion can have anything against it? Religion ultimately strives for a childlike simplicity. Sundar: And cartooning too... Sundar, how much of the Social Sciences as it exists today in our universities respond to cartooning as a tool of political response to leading issues of the day? I come from Australia (I have dual identity), so I am familiar with cartooning in Australia as well. There are four people who did their doctorates on a single cartoon of Michael Leunig, a doyen of Australian cartooning. In fact, around the time the first Mohammad cartoon appeared, there was so much of material on this issue. Everybody from political science to development studies to literature wrote about it. If you were to visit an academic’s room in Australia you would find at least one cartoon posted either on his/her wall, or a book on cartoons! It is part of their daily living and culture. Every year there are calendars of cartoons. However, in India there isn’t any institutionalised support for cartooning and cartoon studies... We need museums, we need archives, and we need access to car toons, both contemporar y and historical. We should bring back cartoons into our textbooks and stop this nonsense of banning predated cartoons with retrospective effect! And when somebody condemns a cartoonist like Shankar, that’s the pits! Shankar is the patriarch of Indian cartooning.

Unny: A well-known ﬁlmmaker and wellknown poet, both Leftists, condemned the great Shankar! They did not think twice before condemning this man outright. They probably never knew him or his work and went on to judge him on the basis of a cartoon he did 56 years ago. Literary guys, who think cartoonists are somehow inferior to them, are supposed to be the Brahmins in Kerala. Then the guy who makes a ﬁlm is supposed to be a Kshatriya and then the guy who sings is a Shudra or a Vaishya or whatever!!! The greatest cartoonist was perhaps lower — David Lowe! Sorry for the bad pun! CB

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There are two things. One is when you look at one religion or one faith. The problem comes because there is a conﬂict between faiths. It is unsaid but it is in an atmosphere of conﬂict between faiths that a cartoonist takes a shot not at the faith really, but at the way the faith probably gets played out in society or politics. When Hindutva was used to mobilise a registered political party such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), cartoonists and editorial writers criticised it.

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E P UNNI

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Photo credit: mathrubhuminews.in

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PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

MANISHA GERA BASWANI is essentially a painter. Today she paints with her camera, photographing artists at work. Where does painting and photography converge? “Convergence for me is more of a convergence of the self. I am not sure if it appears visually in my painting, but what you are translates into what you do. You become cleaner, you become less judgmental, and take people for what they are. And you know we artists are an egoistic lot, sometimes rightfully so, because we believe in what we do... You become more giving to people around you,” says Manisha in a conversation with CREATIVE BRANDS.

K.G. SREENIVAS

anisha Gera Baswani is a Delhi-based painter and photographer. She mounted 450 of her photographic works at Kashi Art Gallery in Fort Kochi as part of a Collateral Project supported by the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. A master’s from Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi, Baswani trained under a number of eminent contemporary Indian artists, including the reclusive legend, artist A. Ramachandran, who she regards as her guru. (EXCERPTS) You have been photographing some of the great contemporary artists of our time. How did you begin this journey of photographing creative people? I am a student of painting and my guru is A. Ramachandran. He is somebody I continue to learn from. I follow him closely... So I began carrying a dictaphone, a still camera, and a movie camera. It was a time when it was all very expensive to document. But I wanted to document this man, who was a complete recluse... I wanted to embrace and document everything that he embodied. I hope in time to write about it too. He rarely moves out of his studio and I did not want his ideas to die within the conﬁnes of a studio. It’s different that he went on to write four books on his body of work, and when I do write it will be a series of thoughts about me as a student and how I learnt from him. This process was 30 years ago. I would carry my equipment to document him. In times to come the camera became like a Siamese twin to me. If I look back I was not thinking of a project. I was just passionate about carrying the camera. I was just driven by the idea of capturing moments. The fact that I was a painter and a friend of the most of the people I have photographed helped a great deal, for I have been privy to moments that have been very very fragile... So you spend a whole day with a friend a peer or a senior and you are with them when they are doing their daily chores.

What were/are these fragile moments? One of my earliest memories is about Nilima Sheikh, a widely acclaimed painter, and whose work I completely respect. Her body of work is very similar to what I am showing at KochiMuziris Biennale. We are both inspired by the miniature and the Persian traditions. And I wanted to learn a technique from her, so I spent a day with her not to photograph her, but to learn this technique. And in between her canvases, she once just sat on her chair completely exhausted as if taking a deep breath and that’s when I decided to capture her. That was a very very tired Nilima in her studio, ﬁnishing part of her canvas! That was a priceless picture of Nilima's — in all her wondrous humanity! What is it that intrigues you when you watch an artist work? I think it’s more the frame of an artist. When I look back I realise that it was not just the act of painting, but the organic quality of the time that I spent with the person that really mattered. With artists, it is special because you are kind of immortalising a generation. For example, about four days ago Mrinalini Mukherjee passed away, and I got a call from a few dear friends of hers — Vivan Sundaram, S. Kalidas, NGMA Director Prof. Rajeev Lochan — asking for images of her, because there weren't any to do an obituary. It then hit me there will come a day when we would all be gone and all that would remain would be these images. Imagine there weren’t images of hers available to write something about her in the press! When you observe an artist at work, what sort of dynamic kicks in? Does the artist become conscious of you as a photographer? That’s where being a friend has helped. More often than not there hasn’t been any discomfort, but there has been some my friends have said “not today, please”. In which case I have taken the opportunity of photographing them when they are installing their shows, because the whole idea is to photograph them in their creative space... If they are at all uncomfortable with the act

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PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

K.G. SREENIVAS

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of mine being in their studios, those threefour days of angst and suffering and misery are all behind us, as I am there like a ﬂy on the wall quietly capturing those images. I must say that even those who were uncomfortable with the idea have opened up. What happens is artists are a very sensitive and loving lot, but when they see a fellow friend doing so much passionately — I have not taken a penny from anyone, it's self funded — they become readily willing to help someone like me. What is that sensibility that drives your work? People have asked me how a photography project has helped me as a painter; I have asked myself that question because my work as a painter is rather detailed and minute. I feel when you enter an artist’s studio, you are entering a very serene and clean place. We all have veils, right? But when you enter the studio of an artist — a painter or a sculptor — they are without their veils, now even if they pretend to have them on, the studio gives it away. So when you go to another place when the other person is non-judgmental, without screens, you also drop yours. I think that interaction helps you to be a less judgmental person. As an artist I have become less judgmental of friends. There have been friends whose work I did not

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connect with, but when you go to that space you ﬁnd it beautiful because you realise they are doing something they love! You might not like it but it has helped me become less judgmental. It has helped me open up to many mediums of art. Just to accept people as they are helps you grow as an individual. And that has been the change that has come over me...

but interestingly I am looking at video, which has also got to do with my photography as one of my mediums in my artistic practice. That was something I could not have thought ﬁve years ago. So images and ideas are colluding, there is that something else that is being added to my process, which I have not been able to conceptualise just yet.

As a painter and a photographer, what are those ﬁne convergences in your art and craft? Convergence for me is more of a convergence of the self. I am not sure if it appears visually in my painting, but what you are translates into what you do. You become cleaner, you become less judgmental, and take people for what they are. And you know we artists are an egoistic lot, sometimes rightfully so, because we believe in what we do. This project has helped me take everyone for what they are, and I think I have become a better mother as well. You become more giving to people around you.

Finally, what have been your impressions from the Biennale? I laud Bose (Krishnamachari) and Riyas (Komu) for what they have done... I think it's adding so much to our country. What the Jaipur Literature Festival has done to the world of literature, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale have done for the world of visual arts. I just wish as a nation we get back to having the discerning visual culture we had. And this can come about only with spaces such as this. Jitish (Kallat) made an interesting comment. He said, and I quote: ”I wish kids from Kochi said, ‘oh we are so many biennales old’.” You know how beautiful that was! If our kids and we can develop a visual culture we will be a happier people as a nation. I really wish and pray that this gets more support but for that we need to educate and the media needs to play a vital role. It needs to speak about it. CB

What is that you bring into photography from the craft of painting? I know it has been happening, but I didn't know what it is that has been happening. Sometimes you become so involved that you don’t realise, as my friends did. My work as I said is two-dimensional work,

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eetha Narayanan, the Founding Director of Srishti Institute of Art Design & Technology, Bangalore, is a distinguished educator with over four decades of experience in the area of multidisciplinary higher education. Dr. Narayanan has over the years sought out newer “paradigms of learning that integrate the mind, body, and consciousness” and has also “worked at creating collaborative pedagogical frameworks for the teaching of mathematics, science, and languages within the Indian educational system at the informal and formal levels of schooling”. She has been Principal Investigator of Project Vision; a Director’s Fellow at the Media Lab, MIT, USA; and a Visiting Faculty at the Future of Learning Institute at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

THE CONTINUUM

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K.G. SREENIVAS

"Art probes, art objects. Art sees. Art almost knows. Design takes this seeing and knowing and makes into something that is translatable and usable, and almost becomes part of the fabric of everyday life... What design does is to take it to people's homes. It makes something that you use on an everyday basis — be it your chair, your spoon, your toothbrush. And if one inﬂuences the other, then you have something that is far more powerful than just design as problem solving process," says Dr. GEETHA NARAYANAN in conversation with CREATIVE BRANDS at the sidelines of a Collateral Project of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, where Srishti School of Design, of which she is the Founding Director, was, along with London's St. Martin's and Tate Modern, co-curating a show by Srishti students and other artists at Fort Kochi's Artr*y Gallery.

Tell us something about this initiative. We have a contemporary art initiative which is part of our academic programme called Srishti Interim curated by Meena Vari. What we do is to allow Meena to bring in artists and collaborators from all over the world to work with the IInd and IIIrd year students either collaborating with other students or artists on works of contemporary art that these students would like to contribute to. This has two advantages. Art is always on the cutting edge, so if you look at work that Cathy Lane has done here (at Artr*y) it is about how digital technology can be used to show how sound becomes a paint brush or a canvas in new ways. So what this process at Srishti does is to allow curators such as Meena to work with very good contemporary artists and produce works along with our students which enables them to act or think like contemporary artists do without being taught. This exhibition is a moment of deep happiness for me, also because Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu decided this was going to be part of the Biennale. This was already shown at Bangalore and will be shown both in London’s St. Martin’s and Tate Modern. So the work, carried out and directed by students, has attained a standard. For a school to not put students in a classroom with paint and canvas and instead knock them into the real world of art is something that makes me very happy. How many of your students generally take to full-time art? At Srishti art is all-pervasive, so there’s nothing that we possibly could call full-time art, just as there is nothing called full-time design or full-time technology! The culture and the processes of each discipline — art has many multiple disciplines as has design — pervades and permeates each other’s modus. So very often you might think a student is going out to do a game design, but you see, they would have been profoundly influenced by this kind of work. On the other hand, you will find the non-linear game structures of gaming design coming into the work of an artistic exhibition. So today we find that the borders are fluid and that artists and designers

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It is said that Tipu invented the ﬁrst rockets that the French would use later. We have been good designers... But we don't like that thinking anymore. We want our thinking to become 'contemporary' in a way that is globalised... everybody's design has a common trend or pattern or a common way of seeing the world... So that kind of homogenisation of style is merely the veneer of design... I think we need to get back to that thinking that this was a country that was capable of great design, whether it was designing a university like Nalanda or buildings like the Taj Mahal or the Red Fort...

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THE CONTINUUM

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to go back and ﬁnd for ourselves those great instincts that we destroy in our young. And design education is often guilty of that. We have borrowed so much, so fast, from everywhere — it’s not just the West anymore — if it's done in Australia, let’s do it here, if it’s in Singapore, let’s bring it in here, if it’s China... and so on. Our kids are lost! They don’t know what the truth is anymore! Art allows you to ‘know’ the truth.

are no longer thinking of closeting themselves in silos. I think this gives students of Srishti a distinct outlook in their work practice. And, yes, we don't have placements; neither do we put them on the market. So they continue to be artists whether they are into design or into technology... they continue their practice.

street — it still has its own sacred space. What design does is to take it to people’s homes. It makes something that you use on an everyday basis — be it your chair, your spoon, your toothbrush. And if one inﬂuences the other, then you have something that is far more powerful than just design as problem solving process.

To probe a little deeper into what you just said about the borders between disciplines being ﬂuid in an increasingly inter-disciplinary world, what to your mind is the consequence of art in design? Art probes, art objects. Art sees. Art almost knows. Design takes this seeing and knowing and makes into something that is translatable and usable, and almost becomes part of the fabric of everyday life. So art occupies a special place — it could be the street or it could be the gallery. To me the artist has adopted the

To your mind, do we have a strong culture of design in our country? I think we do, but either we don't like it or acknowledge it while at the same time we wanted to look different. I think that intuitively in our homes, in our villages, people are very good designers. Our mothers and grandmothers practised it and our fathers and grandfathers worked hard at solving a lot of problems — they were very good designers. Tipu Sultan would not have had the rockets that he

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had. It is said that Tipu invented the ﬁrst rockets that the French would use later. We have been good designers... But we don’t like that thinking anymore. We want our thinking to become ‘contemporary’ in a way that is globalised... everybody’s design has a common trend or pattern or a common way of seeing the world. Restaurants today have become such boring places! So that kind of homogenisation of style is merely the veneer of design... I think we need to get back to that thinking that this was a country that was capable of great design, whether it was designing a university like Nalanda or buildings like the Taj Mahal or the Red Fort, or the best gardens of the world, or artefacts... we had them all, we have them all. It is the mindset then. I don’t think we need those objects to perpetuate it. What we really need to do is

If not a policy intervention, what do you do at the curriculum level so that your young learners know that copying is not design? I think we allow everybody at Srishti to become a practitioner and not just remain an academic. I think academics become stale and tend to repeat themselves, and that's why kids think they cannot be curious... So when you have people at the edge, then you have to push the institution towards the edge to bring the edge into the institution. Yes, when you do that there is tension... So the artists may be practising at the edge and the kids are being pushed out to them. When you allow for space for that interactivity or that kind of tension, you need mediating people — people who can initiate and mediate conversations. You cannot mandate it. I think Srishti is a place where there are great conversations between students and artists and designers and faculty... And there is no absolutely no way that we can become a one-size-ﬁts-all. I just wrote a piece for Forbes where I described Srishti as “future wise” borrowing from David Perkins of Harvard Graduate School of Education. I think we are future-wise because we want to prepare people for a world of action, for a world of insight, and big understandings that would be part of being wise in the future and not remain yesterday’s student. The other thing is we are very very personcentred, so we allow navigation, we allow choice on an unprecedented scale. Design as a public instrument obviously needs a policy environment... If you look at public

institutions there's a lot to be desired. How do you think the state can be prevailed upon to foster a design consciousness while marrying art and design? Let me break my answer... it’s a rather complex question. I think the government wants quick-fixes. They look at design as a quick-fix to innovation, to entrepreneurship, and to grabbing markets that they don’t know exist. If they adopt quick-fixes, quick-fixes boomerang, quick-fixes in a system has a vicious feedback loop and cannot be nurturing or supportive of the kind of mindset that the government is looking to promote! So I think to foster the design consciousness that you are talking about cannot happen in the current way the government is mandating policy. The second thing that is barring this from happening — also related to policy — is the fact that they say ‘let’s be open about everybody’s designs’ and ‘give us your ideas and we will put them together’ under the mantra of openness. What actually happens is, it really hits institutions like Srishti very hard because we go out and believe in it! We give whatever it is and then all of that is given to centrally funded institutes. That is not developing design consciousness; it’s only about saying ‘let’s give the best’ and then give it back! So industry has liberalised, but education has not. The Ministry of HR and the UGC continue to support and endorse the Design Policy at centrally managed institutions, such as the IITs. They take ideas from private schools such as Srishti and give it to them. They don't mandate that we should get anything in return. It’s completely contrary to what happens in Europe, where there is such mobility, such freedom for faculty to move, for students to move. And so we can't get design consciousness if we tell all our students to stay in one college like a ghetto. People will have to have mobility. These are things that will continue to block any attempt to either develop a policy or design consciousness. CB

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The culture and the processes of each discipline — art has many multiple disciplines as has design — pervades and permeates each other's modus. So today we ﬁnd that the borders are ﬂuid and that artists and designers are no longer thinking of closeting themselves in silos. I think this gives students of Srishti a distinct outlook in their work practice. So they continue to be artists whether they are into design or into technology...

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..OUEVRE ......

r. Cathy Lane was part of a show titled ‘Dialogic Assemblages’ at Artr*y Galler y in For t Kochi, a show supported by Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Tate Modern of London, and Srishti School of Design of Bangalore. “My works at the moment are intense sonic explorations or sonic investigations of place or a particular theme. So for example I have recently released aa CD which was a long time investigation of the Hebrides, which are a series of remote islands of the west coast of Scotland. I have been there many many times over the last ten years, making recordings, talking to people, doing archive research, and the resulting compositions investigate different aspects of the island through sound,” Lane says of her work. (EXTRACTS) Could we say that through your work, you go to a metaphysical plane of awareness of the surroundings or your environment? I think it’s much more on a sensory level, than a metaphysical level. I do a lot of background research, and with that I conduct ear-lead exploration of the things that I read about or researched, and look for sonic evidence, there is of that. So it's very sensory, and once I am in a place or a situation it’s all about hearing, which is more sensory rather than metaphysical.

How do you conceive of your installation here at Fort Kochi? Well, it was one of the ideas that I had at the back of my mind for a long time. We often see the UK as an Island, and the sea is all around us, there are many many lighthouses around the UK. I have long wanted to do something investigating those. And then when I was invited to work on this project, I proposed doing something around the lighthouses of the Kerala coast, particularly around the port of Cochin. Actually as it happens we discovered quickly lighthouses in India have a different cultural significance, from the way they have it in the UK. What isn't different is the way maritime traffic communicates with the land. So that was our starting point really. The communications of any sea-going activity is conducted through the five lighthouses on the either side of Cochin. And from that, we started investigating all maritime life and industry around Cochin and its harbour. And the interesting aspect was the fact that 90 percent of everything that goes around the world, goes by sea. It’s a totally, totally hidden world for most of us, it’s generally conducted in places that most people don’t go or know anything about. It is a world with its own languages, its own communication systems, and infrastructure involving in getting something from A to B. The port and harbour of Cochin is a microcosm of that.

SOUNDS,

RESONANCES

Dr CATHY LANE explores the world of sound, sounds of/from our past, our histories, our culture, and our environment. In her core practice, she uses materials, or as she calls them “found materials, a lot of archive materials, and a lot of ﬁeld recordings” — the last being environmental recordings. Lane uses a lot of the spoken word. “Recorded spoken word is my compositional material,” she says in a conversation with CREATIVE BRANDS. K.G. SREENIVAS

Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

..OUEVRE ......

SOUNDS,

RESONANCES

Creative Brands | MAY-JUNE 2015

Cathy Lane is Professor of Sound Arts at University of the Arts London. She established the Department of Sound Arts and Design at London College of Communication and is presently co-director of Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP). She earned her doctorate in electroacoustic music composition from City University, London. Her books include Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice (RGAP, 2008) and, with Angus Carlyle, In the Field (Uniformbooks, 2013), a collection of interviews with 18 sound artists who use ﬁeld recording in their work and On Listening (2013) a collection of essays about some of the ways in which listening as a device is used in areas, including bioacoustics, community activism, anthropology, conﬂict resolution, faith studies, music, and ethnomusicology.

You spoke about the senses, about sounds voices, and people’s voices. Are we in some way privileging the oral sense over what we see? Yes! We certainly are. As a people our visual sense has been very dominant, and most of our sensory needs and most of perceptions are processed through the visual dimension. I belong actually to a research group in London and one of things we are researching is what different kinds of knowledge would we have If we actually gained that knowledge from hearing rather than seeing. In fact, the active part of hearing is listening, so it’s more what kind of knowledge do we get from listening, and we can’t ever stop hearing in the way we can stop seeing. We can shut our eyes, but we can’t actually shut our ears. As a result we hear all the time, but we don’t neccasarily listen. So the work that I am interested in is what different information you get if you listen.

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One of the strategies is to bring the listening that I and other people do outside into a gallery space, where it could be examined in a different way In a way these sounds contain unheard of histories, unlisted conversations? They contain relations between people, power relations, can be heard of if you know what you are listening for. You talk about the colonial and the post-colonial present collapsing into sound images… It's really interesting. In Cochin, there are the visual vestiges of the ports and aspects of the spice trade are still visible around us. What I am interested is whose voices you hear now? Who is telling what to do? Who is talking for themselves? Who is talked for? In Cochin, you can’t escape the colonial actually. The British built Willingdon Island. You can’t imagine that

anybody could do that and also why? It just seems so strange. But it’s all mixed up in the enmeshed activates that happen there — tied up really with the waves, the sea going traffic, and the sounds that come from that in some metaphysical way. Maybe that’s where it g ets a bit metaphysical! What is sound? That is a difficult question! It’s something that lot of people have been trying to describe with words. That is incredibly difficult. I would say, it’s communication, it’s a way of knowing, it’s something very very intangible that somehow pervades everything and pervades us and helps us to know all sorts of things and maybe things that we don’t want to know in ways that we have no idea how it works. CB

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INTERSECTIONS .. .............

ART OF CO-CREATION “The exciting thing is that design, in particular, is the intersection between the art and corporate worlds, over the engineering world, where design takes the processes of the artist and begins to use them to create innovations, and where it basically becomes a disciplined exploration… that's where we get the two worlds to come together,” says WARREN GREVING, Director, Srishti Labs, Srishti School of Design, Bangalore.

arren Greving has been involved with hi-tech product research and development for the last three decades. He lends his expertise to corporate clients in the area of challenges that international R&D organisations face in developed and developing markets. Greving, whose focus has been on the US, India, China, and Russia, left his last corporate job at HP in 2009 to start S.Labs or Srishti Labs, where he seeks to bring his corporate R&D experience into a noncorporate organization. With degrees in crosscultural communications, computer science, mathematics, and American secondar y education, Greving says this in his bio on the Srishti website: “The proof is in the product. We are about making more people successful at making great products for India.”

It’s the kind of the out-of-the-box experience that they all want to talk about, they all want to have that out-of-the-box ideas and so on. I can perhaps take them out of the box, but when these ideas get there, they are mystiﬁed by the processes, approaches, and the importance of expression. That is the whole reason why the art world exists, it seeks expression of meaning, which is completely kind of divorced from the way the corporate world thinks of meaning. The interaction between these two worlds is what my lab is trying to capture. We do a lot of work with the corporate world, part of what we are offering them is that intersection with creativity and innovation, in a way that is accessible to them. But then we sit inside this dangerous art world, where everything is open and free form!

What were the impressions you gathered at the Biennale? I am a director at Srishti, but my connection with Srishti is from the industrial side, having worked for many years in the IT industry, before I became a part of Srishti. So my experience at the biennale is much the same way I have experienced Srishti — swimming in this art world which is in a sense an out-of-the-box experience for someone like me who has come from a corporate technology background. What is amazing about the biennale are the breathtaking exhibits and the powerful sense of time that binds the central theme. That’s what is most impressive to me. And, of course, the variety of expressions of the art that’s around them, very technical and almost educational in nature, all the way out to very experimental street art forms, and lots of interesting forms in between… And then packaging all of them in these historical buildings, with the buildings and the art competing with each other for your attention... So it's been a great experience.

You think art sort of subverts what you call 'corporate' thinking? Absolutely, the corporate world is deﬁned by business equations, investments, and return on investments. These equations mean nothing in the art world, and then there are people talking at 90 degrees when they talk of why they do what they do! The exciting thing is that design, in particular, is the intersection between the art and corporate worlds, over the engineering world, where design takes the processes of the artist and begins to use them to create innovations and where it basically becomes a disciplined exploration. That's where we get the two worlds to come together.

What are the intersections between innovation and art? The interaction is really strong; it’s actually one of the reasons why I am at Srishti. In fact, the corporate and the industrial worlds are really jealous of that creative spirit! They come and visit the art world to try and sample and experience that, but then it is such a foreign world for someone from the corporate world.

In the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama projected the theory of end of history and that what would follow would be merely incremental change or incremental innovation. Obviously things did not turn out as he sought to predict. What to your mind is state of innovation? I would say that it’s always incremental, until someone ushers in the next paradigm shift, until they discover it isn’t incremental anymore and we were just waiting for the next paradigm shift. Those paradigm shifts are there because they capture the ideas of people with vision…

For instance, space travel and space exploration — the ability to move from one place to another in unprecedented time frames — require paradigm shifts. We can’t really think about them right now… Everything is incremental until there is a massive paradigm shift. If you go back to the population limits of the 60s and so on, it’s almost inconceivable to think of a billion people living in the same amount of space! Six billion people on this planet? Did they think it was possible? All of those have got some massive shifts to make that possible. How could we engender an innovation culture? Innovation by deﬁnition drives existence. It's what drives people to lead better lives. If you go back thousands of years, you can see the changes that have swept over mankind. Innovation is central or intrinsic to human existence from my point of view. I think you probably go through waves of creation, and some of those very innovative and creative things were also very disruptive. In my lifetime, the rise of computational power and networks and digital capturing of information have made a huge difference to people’s lives. I would say we are headed for 50 years of digesting what that means, the possibility of each one of us to connect into a network of information, which expanded the globe is unthinkable. We have it now; most people don’t know what to do with it. You have it in the smallest village in India; you have it in the biggest metropolis in China. Everybody has access to it now. The biennale to some extent is an expression of that… because it is so exciting to bring all of this art into a single location… And the excitement of bringing all those different points of views is central to the biennale as this distance between what we know and what we don’t know is harder to connect even as we grapple with the fact that we don’t know so much! There is this great exhibit over there when you look at what Indians knew about navigational travel, which was then co-opted by Europeans who then claimed it as their own. CB

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That is the whole reason why the art world exists, it seeks expression of meaning, which is completely kind of divorced from the way the corporate world thinks of meaning. The interaction between these two worlds is what my lab is trying to capture. We do a lot of work with the corporate world, part of what we are offering them is that intersection with creativity and innovation, in a way that is accessible to them…

CREATIVE BRANDS

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INTERSECTIONS .. .............

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CREATIVE BRANDS

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SYMBOLOGY .. ..........

anohar Chiluveru, who has recently returned from Venice after showcasing his work at Milano Expo 2015, focuses on the conflict that surrounds man’s interaction with his/her environment. At the heart of his paintings and sculptures lie this essential human conflict that produces a parallel state of ‘questioning’ as it were of the human impulses that in the first place lead to such conflicts.

METAPHOR AS REALITY

For artist MANOHAR CHILUVERU, art asks fundamental questions of the time we inhabit. “My work is all about questioning myself and discovering myself, and because it is art you need to share it with the public,” says the artist. Manohar was exhibiting his work at the Collateral Project of the second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale at Fort Kochi.

Prithvi Yadama

(EXCERPTS) You talk about ignorance as sort of a nuclear explosion, could you elaborate on that? I ﬁrst thought of this nuclear mushroom cloud image, when I began thinking about my body of work. I had just met the founder of BML University Brij Mohan Lall Munjal in Delhi and he invited me for some artwork. During our discussion, he asked me, “what is knowledge”? That got me thinking about the kind of work I should be submitting. In that process I looked back into my work, my childhood, and T. S Eliot’s “Choruses from the Rock” came to mind and it triggered so many other images from history. When we come across the word ‘terror’, we pay attention immediately. The scientists probably did not want the nuclear explosion, but the politicians decided to go ahead with it. In science, invention is all about knowledge and information, but the way they are consumed, speaks volumes about our ignorance. If you are ignorant about the effects, a single ignorant decision can usher in untold damage. This applies to any sphere of our everyday life. My project seeks to address these issues. Let us talk about your installation here at the collateral biennale. Your artwork is encompassed by art paper laden with images of E-waste and disposed of electronic stuff… They say necessity is the mother of all invention. My entry here at the biennale was late for a couple of reasons, there were funding issues as well, and when it comes to

an art installation like this one, the size of the installation matters. The idea demands a particular size, because at the end of day you want to create a visual impact. For me what matters is that solid ‘visual’ I have been able to give the audience. And without audience participation any art work is incomplete. I derived the idea for this work from a childhood game called ‘Lemon and Spoon’ we are all familiar with. In school we played this game as a sport, for fun, but it taught you a lesson that everyone was in a race to be successful or influential. Everyone had their own goals. But the game was essentially about keeping your balance while reaching your goal. You needed to win but you also got to see that you did not drop the lemon. So, in effect, it’s no longer just child’s play! To help convey the message or lesson I needed a big installation, so when I came here, I was not able to ship the work I produced back in Hyderabad. I started looking at materials here in Kochi. I looked around for old workshops and found the materials I needed. I wanted to use electronic items, because we have a lot of association with those images in day to day life. There is also reference to knowledge and invention, and at the same time I wanted to focus on Ewaste. You look at any junkyard in India, they are filled with E-waste. I used flex to protect the installation against rain.

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You have talked a lot about social cohesion? I came here not with activism on my agenda. I am not an activist. I am an artist and I am a common man. I was not good in my studies and as a commoner I wasn’t much exposed to the world in terms of knowledge or literature. There are a lot of questions in my mind which I don’t have the answers to. So I am always curious and I am looking for answers. It has a spontaneous impact on my thinking process when I do art. The government bans plastic and cigarette. My question is then why can’t you then stop their production! It’s like a bullet in a gun, once you hit the trigger it will have its impact. You say it’s banned and on the other hand

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SYMBOLOGY .. ..........

METAPHOR AS REALITY

Prithvi Yadama

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you are producing it… in effect, whatever you are going to produce we are going to consume anyway. These are the questions a common man has. So what you are saying is your art is your way of sharing your questions with the people? Fundamentally, my work is all about questioning myself and discovering myself, and because it is art you need to share it with the public. So the purpose of my work is finding myself and questioning myself, and whatever I produce in this process, I wish to share with the public. What about social interaction in this digital age — artist with artist and artist with people? How do you think that has shaped art or artist? I think everyone is an artist, but only few choose to be a professional artist! I think the digital age is an amazing age — you have a greater opportunity of sharing your art with the world. Besides, the dynamics of the art world is changing rapidly. For example, something that I find interesting is that if you have a movie script but no one is interested in it you can still produce it if you have the resources. Yes, you may have difficulties in releasing it, but at the end of day the audience will decide whether it was good cinema or not. On the other hand, in the art world, I find there is a lot of manipulation. Of course, we need committees and there is a selection process. But sometimes it works like a mafia. There are a lot of mysterious things happening in the art world — it’s not as transparent as the movie world! You mean to say there are closed doors? Absolutely! Sometime I feel it’s a matter of money. People are frustrated and fight for an opportunity, and whoever are eliminated might fight for it and be emotional about it. If you are not selected it does not mean you are not a good artist, and vice versa. You also talk about individualism or individuality and committees. Is there a loss of self for the artist in this process? What I mean is when you form a committee you need to be careful whether the said committee is capable of taking the right decision. For example, for an international meet in Hyderabad, authorities allocated huge funds to beautify the city. They appointed a committee that had no idea about art. How and what would they choose? Any project will have its own limitations, be it that of budgets or of time, but it will have a theme or concept. The system needs checks and balances and transparency to help fulfill the mandate of the project. You have also been trained as a painter? But most of your art is through forms and sculptures… From the beginning I never believed in style or medium. Academically I have been trained in sculpting, but I have been painting since childhood. Painting has always there been in my practice.

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Do you find a sort of limitation in the two dimensions or the lack of that limitation while sculpting exciting? I always find that both of them are very different experiences actually. I am more excited about exploring opportunities in new mediums or themes. So sculpture has its own limitations and painting is another game altogether. I also prefer to work without preconceived notions and let spontaneity guide me in my work. That’s the reason I keep changing my media and styles. When we talk about the state of Andhra Pradesh or its bifurcation into Andhra and Telengana, do you think there has been a lapse of cultural cohesion between the people of the ‘two states’? My project is a statement for that as well, because at end of day even if we are divided into two states or three states it does not matter, we are a part of India. But the question is, are we dividing the state into smaller parts to facilitate better administration, or are we doing it because we are unhappy about inequalities. If people are unhappy because of inequity — because politicians have completely ignored a certain section of the people — then they will fight for separation. In Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are expressions of that discontent. CB

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