Celebrating Art that Rejects an Existence in the Service of Capital

While departing, our imperial rulers left behind an armful of bequests for us. Amongst them were plenty of new gifts that we could touch and admire, such as pompous real estate for our new rulers, tea gardens, harbours, docks and railways. Then there were gifts with subtle qualities and spins that possessed us as if they had always been our own – they were not just confined to re-written histories, laws, constitutions and boarding schools but also included many dream catchers to help keep our aspirations in line with their espousal of Atlanticism.

Among those aspirations were two that concern us here – to become socialists and to produce modern art. Both exquisite dreams, fragile, intertwined and abandoned on our shores along with other bequests, to come true as best as they could.

The Fourth Kochi-Muziris Biennale (December 12, 2018-March 29, 2019) certainly gave one a rare opportunity to see just how much closer we are to making those intertwined dreams and aspirations come true. It is true that some 70 years after independence we have been able to cut a path to our very own Biennale and be amongst the 200-odd such events that occur around the world. As we walk around the streets and parks of Fort Kochi to visit the various venues, we also see the other dream – bright red, hammer and sickle flags festooning ancient trees – still struggling.

There is no mistaking the main venue. Anita Dube’s curatorial manifesto on the walls of Aspinwall House shines a light for us to step inside and see the ‘Possibilities For A Non-Alienated Life’. As we walk around and get our bearings, we begin to sense her intent to create a neutral space for art that “rejects an existence in the service of capital.” Hers is an appeal to experience the show as a space “where pleasure and pedagogy could sit together and share a drink, and where we could dance and sing and celebrate a dream together”; that “place of embrace where we can enjoy our intelligence and beauty with others” by inhabiting the venues where non-alienation can prosper. She resurrects, after many decades, the possibility of intertwining those two dreams by delineating a space for Indian modern art   in the global context and its socio-political and cultural overtones.

The vast spread of the Biennale, reputed to be the largest in Asia,  includes ten main venues, student biennales, residency shows and collateral projects spread across some 27 buildings along the edge of the Kochi Fort promontory. A map with symbols helps us negotiate the sprawling Biennale site, guiding us to the various venues showing the work of more than 80 artists from around the world. The main ones naturally attract our attention. We begin at the Aspinwall estate, as most do, since it houses four separate exhibition venues, and that is also where the estimated seven lakh visitors will buy their entrance tickets this year.

As a heritage venue, the Aspinwall estate evokes an age which gave rise to a new breed of rich traders in Kochi like John Aspinwall, who built elaborate exporting facilities for shipping spices to London once the East India Company’s monopoly ended in 1813. A century-and-a-half later, not much has changed within the storehouses except perhaps the conversations – now they are about the  fleeting memories accruing from each successive Biennale. However, there is no infrastructure to sustain those memories. The Biennale must remain transient like so many melas. Dube seems well aware of this transience and offers a pavilion where “…there would be no hierarchies of who could speak and what could be said and in which language…”

The activities in that transient discursive space – indeed across the whole Biennale – become a compendium of multiple tales, each stepping away from the dominant narrative and hierarchies of the global order of art. For that is where progressions get defined and pecking orders in modern art inscribed. It is auctions and gallery sales that determine both the price and value of modern art.

As we walk from one room to the other, our curiosity is secured with introductory texts about the artist and work on display. In one room, the wall surface has been refreshed to receive Gond murals painted by Durgabhai and Subash Vyam, both of whom have been spurred by Dube’s encouragement to break new ground. Durgabai recalls elsewhere how “Madam wanted us to try and explore new things. That’s when we suggested to her that we would paint on marine plywood. She loved the idea.”

One looks eagerly at the works, reading the introductory texts and searching for traces of socio-political-cultural influences within the non-alienated life that defines them. At times this can be difficult, for multiple mechanical and digital technologies and their constantly upgraded versions have now become integral to the techniques of modern art practice. Sometimes it is easier as in the case of Tania Bruguera, one of Cuba’s most significant artists. Arrested several times for protesting against the country’s new Decree 349, under which artists in Cuba are prohibited from operating in public or private spaces without prior approval, she decided to forgo her visit to Kochi in order to keep up the protest against the new draconian regulation. The text of her letter to the Biennale director in this regard has been put up on the wall of a room which has been left empty.

For someone unfamiliar with the names and works of most of the artists on display, the phone and internet come in handy. Someone messages, “go and see William Kentridge upstairs in the laboratory”, and we do so. Pushing the heavy curtain aside, one walks into a long darkened warehouse. Down its entire length are eight enormous concertina screens on which a looped narrative is projected, seamlessly flowing from screen to screen, across the  folds. The South African artist’s multimedia installation, titled ‘More Sweetly Play the Dance’ speaks with a gentle voice and yet it is spectacular and breathtaking.

The desolate landscape of South Africa forms the backdrop while, in the foreground, a procession of African silhouetted figures slowly moves across the screens to the poignant rhythm of a brass band – some are distributing pamphlets as others hysterically gesticulate from the podium; some are dancing and still others are bent double from the dead weight of the body bags they are dragging. It is difficult to pull oneself away, resist seeing that haunting procession go past once more.

Kentridge’s is a rare work that needs no explanation about its socio-political context. It simply emerges, like great art, from a universal reality which touches each one of us inside.

As we take leave of Kentridge’s screens, another phone message directs us to the location of the work of Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat, who lives in New York. We enter another darkened room, but starkly empty this time, with just two screens facing each other on opposite walls. Simultaneously projected narrations are seen and heard on the screens across an empty space, which is clearly also a gender divide. We are unable to see the moving images simultaneously.  

On one screen the composer and vocalist Sussan Deyhim is shown singing pure mystical notes in a hall filled with empty seats – Neshat explains that it is her way of setting up an inquiry into the absence of Iranian women in musical performances. They are banned from taking part in such activity in an Iran where men are free to enjoy giving public performances and recordings.

On the opposite screen, a man is singing Rumi (Shoja Azari lip-synching the vocal by Sharam Nazeri). He faces the camera, his back turned on an audience full of appreciative men. The sounds and images from both screens take us deep into the gender divide in Iran. Neshat’s work turns that schism inside out. We turn our heads from one screen to the other in disbelief

Both Kentridge and Neshat draw us into their worlds by the sheer  complexity and deep engagement with their different worlds. Such poetic expressions need no explanations from the artists.

To hold on to those deeper stirrings within, we drive to Ernakulam to see the work of the late Mrinalini Mukherjee, displayed in the Durbar Hall. Her woven rope sculptures have always had an extraordinary place of their own in Indian modern art and one never tires of looking at them.

But there was also a surprise awaiting us at this distant venue. A gallery above shows the archived works of Chittaprosad. Like Sunil Janah, whose rare photographs are on view in the Coir Godown, Chittaprosad too was a protégé of P.C. Joshi from the days before the Communist Party became insecure and distracted by its search for enemies. Indeed, both Chittaprosad and Janah’s work recall the days when the intertwined dreams of socialism and art collectively identified with the social unrest and protests against the tragedy of the Great Bengal Famine of 1943.

Chittaprosad used wood and lino cuts, pen, brush and Indian ink to represent a world inhabited not by a mass of victims from among the working class but by individual portraits of peasants and workers in whose eyes one could sense the horror of the man-made famine. His work was for a mass audience which could identify with it in exhibitions and illustrations in party publications. It seems to come closest to what Dube terms “liberation and comradeship”.

After spending three days at the Kochi Biennale, we come away with a feeling that there are few possibilities left for critics to search for and identify a central or dominant narrative of Indian modern art. Moreover, any such linear history of Indian modern art would not be worth reading. Such narratives would have to be drummed up through catalogues of large museums and permanent collections supported by a host of alumni from institutions such as Courtauld and SOAS, to name a few, to put together a history modelled on the typologies of European modern art history. Much of European modern art history has been built on assumptions about their superiority and acquisitions.

The Biennale, on the other hand, creates an entirely different kind of narrative. There is no hierarchy  amongst the participants who have been selected for the show. The absence of centrality has freed the participants from the burdens of placing their work in some historical context. It’s a freedom that contributes to the formation of a wide network of divergent dreams and aspirations which are unique to each artist.

There was a time, almost a century ago, when a P.C. Joshi tried to achieve convergence by brilliantly initiating artists, musicians, actors and film directors to entwine their creative work with political struggle, best seen in the Indian People’s Theatre Association. That time is past. Today, the assortment of temporary venues and divergence of intent that is to be seen at the Biennale speaks of another kind of liberation, one that is free from the corporate claims of art which drive hierarchies to help investors in their search for new artworks as commodities.  

Dube has selected a wide range of creative artists who seem to be working together towards a shared dream of “pleasure and pedagogy” while resisting the commodification of art. But that struggle is difficult to sustain for the reason that artists develop their work within their own silos, and it is usually the gallery that dips into each one of them, offering them the possibility of shows and good prices.

As we reflect on the entire Kochi Biennale experience, we are reminded of how difficult it is for Indian modern art to conjoin with its socialist twin in any way except ephemerally. The Biennale provides space for that short-lived romance in a pavilion where Dube intends for everybody to be a curator and where “there would be no hierarchies”, reminiscent of that larger socialist aspiration.  

However, Dube’s pavilion is up against the pavilions of entrenched annual art fairs bedecked with sponsorships, cocktail evenings for buyers and a stable of gallery artists arranged in a pecking order at those events. Galleries invest in the artist rather than in any sort of underpinning of a lasting framework for Indian modern art.

So it is left to the state to shoulder the financial burden for erecting such a framework. It’s not likely to be a priority for any government that is face to face with an urban population of over 400 million people mostly living in million-plus cities. Currently, Indian modern art has, in its service, one National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi and a branch in Mumbai and Bengaluru.

What then is one’s take-away from the Fourth Kochi Biennale? Undoubtedly, what stood out in the midst of plenty were the unforgettable works of Kentridge, Neshat, Chittaprosad, Heri Dono’s ‘Smiling Angels’ descending from the Indonesian sky and the photographs of Vicky Roy who rose from being a ragpicker to become an internationally acclaimed photographer. Moving works, they stirred one’s emotions and critical thoughts.

At the same time, these works are not framed within an overarching, Left-leaning or utopian narrative, nor are the artists seen to be actively engaging with the idea of entwining their creative work with political struggle as a means of change. The sense of divergence between creative practice and political practice seems to be growing as both practices become alienated from each other.

Of course, this phenomenon is not restricted to modern art alone. The silos of knowledge bequeathed to us by our erstwhile imperial rulers – universities, parliament, rule of law, education or architecture – are beginning to crumble as the epic saga of modernism obscures its origins. We seem to be moving beyond the idea of any kind of reconciliation between creative and political practice. By curating this Biennale, perhaps, Dube’s nostalgia is asking us to create and energise some space for reconciliation.

Romi Khosla is an architect, planner and author.