Biennale 3.0 beckons with 50 shades of art

Kochi: A mizzle of flowers fell on a cheering crowd as curator Sudarshan Shetty unfurled the festival pennant at Aspinwall House on Monday to mark the opening of Kochi Muziris Biennale-2016.

Since the opening, the 10 Biennale locations at Fort Kochi and Mattanchery began witnessing flow of art lovers from around the world.

“One of the most remarkable things that we can see here is that among die-hard art-lovers, we see many locals. Its been just one half of a day, but I saw many eagerly inquiring about the concepts and ideas behind the installations,” said Suman Jacob, a volunteer at the KMB.

The volunteers who themselves are just getting the hang of all the art surrounding them, said that the artists are ever so eager to communicate with the visitors despite language barriers.

Slovenian artist Aleš Šteger’s ‘The Pyramid of Exiled Poets’ that is installed on the foreground of Aspinwall at Fort Kochi, the primary venue of KMB-2016, was the focal point of the day with many losing themselves in the immersive experience inside the sepulchural space.

The structure references the pyramid in Khufu in Giza, Egypt. Inside, the installation plays recordings of poems of 9 poets from the world over who had been exiled or disappeared from republics and nations for centuries.

Performing art, some of them incorporating installations, have also been given a place providing a new experience for spectators. Anamika Haksar’s ‘Composition on Water’ is one such new experience for the observers.

“The work is an improvisational theatre and installation work that engages with memories of oppression. Using texts by dalit writers, actors will experiment with audience interaction during the performance in the first week of the Biennale, emphasizing on a speculative rather than resolved outcome,” Haksar said.

Namrita Shah, an art student from Hyderabad, feels that such works have the potential to interact more with the audience.

“Paintings and sculptures necessarily doesn’t communicate with all of the audience. But when humans and their expressions are introduced, the mood changes, the barriers of language and knowledge disappear. That is one new milestone that KMB has touched, and a handsome one at that,” said Namrita.


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