Art in motion: Performing artists take over the Kochi Biennale

This week, artist Abhishek Hazra will tell some white lies at the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale which opened on December 12. Among them, is the fib that an artwork by a French video artist at Aspinwall House – one of the key venues of the event – is missing a component.

“Of course, it’s not really true.” Hazra said over the phone from Kochi. “The work is complete, and beautifully installed.”

The fib is part of Hazra’s “mobile lecture” performance piece, called Submergent Topologies, which involves him taking visitors on a “guided tour” of the works at the event.

The idea, according to Hazra, is to “open up the works in different ways”.

Hazra’s tour promises to be the opposite of a straightforward walk-through of the works on display. The tour and everything he says during the walk will be refracted through his own artistic practice. It will also carry forward his months-long interest in the format of the guided tour – a one-sided conversation, where the guide talks and the visitors listen.

“The aspect of multiple interpretations, the co-existence of multiple/alternative realities that frames Submergent Topologies also speaks closely to the curatorial concerns of this biennale,” Hazra said.

Much has been said about the performance component of this edition of the biennale. More than a tenth of the artists participating this year are theatre people, poets, authors, dancers – people who aren’t usually seen within the realm of the visual arts. Sudarshan Shetty, curator of the 2016 biennale, had signalled this inclusion of arts other than the purely visual arts from the get-go. Chilean poet Raul Zurita’s was the first name announced, among participating artists.

Performance pieces are, of course, not new to art events in India or abroad. At the Kochi biennale, the performances will manifest in different ways. The US-based Argentinian writer, Sergio Chejfac, for example, will compose a work at 50-60 locations during the biennale. Zurita’s poems are printed on the walls of Aspinwall House. On December 14, Zurita along with five other writers participated in an evening of poetry. The same writers and poets will also have a discussion on language on December 15. All through this week, contemporary dancer Padmini Chettur and a group of five dancers will perform a Bharatanatyam-inspired piece at David Hall for three hours each day.

Chennai-based Chettur said she was not surprised at all when she received the invitation to participate in the 2016 edition of Kochi-Muziris. “I have performed in museums before,” she said on phone. She explained that there is, however, a difference in how she approaches performance art vis-a-vis dance. “I don’t see it as a dance performance any more,” said Chettur. “I see it as some kind of installation, a three hour performance into which the audience has the possibility to enter (and leave) at any point.”

For her project at the biennale, Chettur is reinterpreting the Varnam in Bharatanatyam, with six dancers (including her) sitting on chairs in a passage that leads to the cafeteria. After the first week, Chettur will show a video installation based on this piece that she has already made.

There is one thing Chettur was surprised about, though. “Having invited me, the space doesn’t seem very prepared,” she said, against a background score of drilling and hammering loud enough to be heard over the phone.

To be sure, the biennale is a huge exercise, spread over three months, with nearly 100 artists, each of whom can have different requirements for making and installing their art.

“Biennales as an exhibition format are experimental, open to chance and contingency... the idea is to incubate endangered artistic ideas before they go extinct.” said artist Jitish Kallat, who curated the 2014 edition of the Kochi Biennale. “This is inscribed in the format, because of a large number of works-in-progress.”

This edition of the biennale is not the first to face logistical challenges either. For example, Kallat said, the 2014 biennale ran out of money with more than a month to go before it was to end. The biennale foundation had to “plunge into a month-long fundraiser”, he said. “It was as bad as an airbag inflating just in time to avert fatality in a car accident.”

On the phone from Kochi, Shetty explained that his interest in the performance arts hadn’t been born of a vacuum. He grew up with music at his home, his father Vasu was a Yakshagana theatre artist. His own artistic practice is influenced by poetry and music. Yet, bringing performances into an art event has brought some new challenges.

“This exercise allowed me to find some solutions for logistical problems, like how do you stretch someone who sings for two hours, to perform over 108 days?” he said.

The biennale this year has many interesting experiments within the scope of the visual arts, too. For instance, there are the “documentary sculptures” of Israeli artist Yael Riva Efrati, who uses Terrazzo cement mix to tell the story of playing Rummikub, a tile-based game, with her grandparents in Eye of The Sea. In addition, Shetty has placed a set by photographer Dia Mehta Bhupal, as well as four pictures by her, at the biennale. The set is made up of sheets torn out of magazines, which are rolled up and stuck together to depict public spaces like washrooms and waiting areas. Then, there is the video work of Latvian artist Katrina Neiburga, which will be housed within an architectural sculpture by her husband, Andris Eglitis.

So does the inclusion of performing arts alongside a healthy dose of visual and fine arts mean that the biennale is bigger this year, in terms of scope or scale? It’s a tough call.

“Scale should be different in nature – not bigger or smaller,” said Shetty.

It’s a sentiment echoed by Riyas Komu, secretary of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foundation and co-curator of the first edition of the biennale in 2012. “We dreamt big from the first year.” he said. “We wanted the biennale to evolve organically and become a site of knowledge production. What Sudarshan has done is made it a biennale in progress, even more than the curators who came before him… There are many projects that will only be over on March 29, when the biennale closes.”