Making the intangible tangible: Curator Sudarshan Shetty on this year’s Kochi Muziris Biennale

During a conversation with his comrade Carl Jung, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud once exuberantly said, “I must always have an object to love.”

In response to whether he is partial to any particular object, Mumbai-based sculptor and installation artist Sudarshan Shetty is part-wry, part-perceptive: “I am concerned largely with the intangible; it is like poetry and philosophy. I then work towards making it [the intangible] tangible.”

The idea resonates well with the overarching concern of the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, of which Shetty is the curator. Titled forming in the pupil of an eye, the 108-day-long Biennale’s cornerstone is to straddle the idea of the “performative”. The focal point will allow the Biennale, starting in December, to embrace several practices: poetry, architecture, dance, music and drama, to create a Biennale of multiplicities, yet inclusive in its sum and substance.

The rather poetic title – envisioned by Shetty along with author Sharmistha Mohanty, who is also participating at the Biennale – is drawn from the Vedic idea of a sage opening his eyes to the world, and absorbing several multiplicities.

“Collecting objects around us is a representation of our own mortality,” said Shetty. “The idea is to give meaning to [the process of] making something. There is still a vacuum that is making things meaningless.”

Unfolding chapters

The curatorial statement is multi-layered – the influence drawn from India as a “land of seven rivers” – and intends to chart a course for the Biennale well after it wraps up. Shetty believes that the Biennale will be a work in progress.

“Ideas are always made and ideas will always disappear,” he said. “Some things will be a part of erasure, creating space for things to emerge or unfold at their own accord in order to construct discourses, only to spill over later.”

Shetty’s role as curator has involved months of travel, studio visits, conversations, discussions and deliberations, all of which, he confesses, have been part of a learning process for him.

“People look at art in diverse ways,” he elaborated. “My work is to make sure these ways are incorporated into the Biennale. Ideas flow in many streams; they may meet at times, or might flow into tributaries. A river that is hidden exists only in people’s imagination. Thus, my role, as a facilitator of knowledge, is to allow the coming together of these ideas with the imaginations and experiences of people in an organic way; to trace trajectories instead of imposing them.”

Fifty-five-year-old Shetty’s capacious stance can be attributed to the inspiration he draws from the Nirgun poetry of Bhakti saints Kabir and Gorakhnath, and their devotion to an amorphous form, as well as the work of the late Hindustani classical musician Pandit Kumar Gandharva.

With regard to practitioners of the traditional arts, the question revolves around the role played by history in the understanding of our contemporary realities.

“Is there a way of looking forward instead of looking backwards?” asked Shetty. “Tradition is such a generic word, yet, it implies a way of looking back and forward. How does one negotiate expostulations?”

A mixed bag

The site of the Biennale, which will span 11 venues this time, is currently a populous powerhouse of busy workers, amplifying both scale and spectacle.

“The process of selecting artists to participate in the Biennale began with conversations with people seemingly outside of the Biennale space, creating a dialogue on what it means to be contemporary,” Shetty said. “This opened up doors to look at practices beyond just the art world.”

The Biennale will include theatre director and filmmaker Anamika Haksar, who has never worked in a biennale space before, as well as Raúl Zurita, a poet from Chile who also works with the visual arts. A recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize, Zurita is known for having 15 of his verses “written” by five aeroplanes over the New York skyline. While this spectacle was fashioned back in 1982, one only has to wait and watch how the poet decides to enchant visitors at the Biennale.

The roster of the participating artists at Kochi is compellingly varied this year.

Scottish artist Charles Avery’s continuously evolving project tells the tell of a fictional island through drawings, sculpture and words, and moves on to place this imagined island within Kochi, the existing architecture and social fabric of which acts as a stage for the enactment of this fictional narrative. While Swiss sculptor and installation artist Bob Gramsma is toying with the idea of excavating a chunk of the earth and filling it up with concrete at Aspinwall House, Kerala-based muralist PK Sadanandan is painting a series of walls in the city.

An infrastructure for learning

The state of Kerala has always had a rich history of literature and cinema, and an affinity towards the arts.

“Location comes with its own history, how one navigates between these spaces is the question,” said Shetty. “The turnout during the last edition [of the Biennale] was overwhelming, and local participation as well as voluntary help is always on the upswing.”

The Kochi-Muziris Biennale is popularly known as a “people’s biennale”, and is largely participatory in nature.

“An audience for the Biennale already exists; one need not worry about ‘creating’ an audience,” he said. “It is an audience that lives between the inside and the outside, how do you make it more transparent is what’s vital.”

A number of pedagogical and outreach activities have unfolded over the last few months as a prelude. This includes initiatives such as the Biennale Summer Camp, a 10-day workshop, to initiate children to art appreciation, and “Let’s Talk”, a series of engaging public conversations which allowed an exchange of ideas that go well beyond the prism of art.

Residency programmes, pop-up studios with sculptors and potters, and talks with practitioners to understand their creative processes have been equally well-received. Furthermore, philosopher Sundar Sarukkai will be anchoring workshops with 100 students for a week in early December, giving them access to the making and the inner workings of a biennale.

From artist to curator

Shetty’s relationship with the Biennale can possibly be traced to its first edition in 2012, where I Know Nothing of the End, his installation and mixed media work, was part of the programme curated by Riyas Komu and Bose Krishnamachari.

“The curatorship of the Biennale is an extension of my artistic practice,” Shetty said. “Studio visits have been very exciting, they open up several more spaces in one’s mind.’’

Shetty says that his role as curator has been largely open-ended, having to recoup and reinvent at various stages.

“Having started with, so to say, a clean slate as a curator, to look outside the concerns within my own practice as an artist, has been somewhat like completing a full circle. I see that there are many convergences and departures that refer to my own work as an artist. It has been of a great learning as I see both, my work as an artist and [the process of] curating, as being on the same path.”

When asked whether he would allude to Okwui Enwezor’s concept of the biennale as a “space of encounter” for the upcoming edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, he replied, “I am not sure if I am comfortable with the term encounter. I am interested in a kind of dissemination of the various practices that is inclusive to the audience – that an audience, in some way, becomes a part of the making of the event.”