‘Blend with Nature’ is over-arching message of Kolleri’s biennale work

People’s ‘caged mind’ prompts Malayali artist to announce: ‘Think Reverse’

Kochi, Dec 21: Amid a whirlpool of artistic ideas that find shape at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), Valsan Koorma Kolleri has virtually churned out a quiet island of creative space that has retained the site’s rustic greenery, tacitly asking the new-age visitor to return to nature.

Valsan Koorma Kolleri

The only KMB’14 artist who figured in its 2012 debut edition as well, Kolleri has rearranged certain elements and objects found in the foliage-rich rectangular plot he got at the eight-venue festival. Even so, the Malayali’s multi-spot work across Fort Kochi’s Cabral Yard has a focal sculpture noticed for curious dimensions it has acquired vertically and horizontally.

Designed to project shadows onto an inclined plane calibrated to the local latitude, the sculpture completed chiefly in laterite stones enjoys a clear degree of centrality. So much so, the whole work is named ‘How Goes the Enemy’. The “enemy” is time, claims the 61-year-old sculptor at his KMB’14 venue, where he has raised an ‘anthill theatre’ for small cultural get-togethers that punctuate his series of art workshops down this biennale ending March 29 next year.

A tall and tapering pillar-like structure close to the entry gate accommodates next to it a sculpture of a legs-up man with his head touching a largely oval platform. “Think reverse,” announces the artist, effectively protesting against “a straitjacketed mindset we have, courtesy the caged way we are all brought up”.

Valsan Koorma Kolleri at work

One side of the base features a pyramid dug downward, which the artist says “we will fill with water”. Otherwise, the plane follows the same principle as the sundial, adds Kolleri. The slight upward slant his sculpture’s base takes measures 10 degrees, which is roughly the longitude running along Kochi. “The structure is not a clock, but a device to simulate time’s movements,” he notes, pointing out that its diameter is 24 feet—the number representing the time earth takes to complete one rotation of the sun.

“We had said ‘hello’ to each piece of stone when I and my team paved them here,” recalls Kolleri about his work that took three months to complete along with masons of Shilpapaddiam art school he has established in native Pattiam of North Malabar besides ‘Clayclub’, which is a collective of young architects based out of Ahmedabad in western India’s Gujarat where he had done one of his fine arts courses (at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda).

“Mosquitoes were otherwise our constant companions in this locale,” he part-jokes, recounting the run-up to the artwork which chose not to fill up a couple of large pits dug up for another artist’s installation in the same venue in KMB’12. A mock-excavation project by Amanullah Mojadidi and also Sudarshan Shetty’s works featured in this space that Kolleri has reimagined.

“Usually, I take space that none wants—and work in it,” adds Kolleri, who was born in upstate Pattiam off Kannur and did his studies also at ENSBA in Paris and Government College of Fine Arts, Chennai.

A low-lying stretch in the middle of lush-green Cabral Yard has now been converted into a modest open-air gallery of sorts. There, Kolleri and his team have moulded a three-set circular flight of steps leading to a rounded dais below.

“Please don’t pluck those creepers; they are ‘chittamruthu’—every effective against cancer,” he asks warmly a set of boys who stand atop the cow-dung-smeared seats and reach out for some vines. “Children today don’t the value of plants and herbs; it’s not their fault. We seldom give them that kind of an exposure.”

‘How Goes the Enemy’, Kolleri says, is also “part of an art war” meant to liberate present-day humanity from the clutches of “imposed” ideas. “In India, for instance, we have been fed with all the ideas of colonial invaders over the years. This, when our own ancient knowledge power is vast and deep,” he adds.

The artist points out that his KMB’14 sculpture employs “very little cement as nothing more than binding material”. Instead of “architorture”, as he dubs the modern ways of building structures, there is a profusion of laterite stones brought from his native north Malabar.

Interestingly, Kolleri is keen to see Kochi’s salty air and Kerala’s frequent rains erode his laterite and mud surfaces at Carbal Yard. “That will add to the beauty of the installation,” he says with a smirk.