Works on sea, ships & voyage add to biennale’s ‘Kochi spirit’

Kochi, March 26: In his work at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), Shumon Ahmed comes up with an ode to a graveyard for ships. The landscape portrayed is desolate, for it is from a defunct harbour at Chittagong in his native Bangladesh.

Bangladeshi artist Shumon Ahmed’s ‘Metal Graves’ at Aspinwall House

The story that 37-year-old Ahmed narrates is evidently gloomy, totally contrasting with Kochi which boasts of a thriving harbour and bustling water transportation. Yet, the poignant visuals in ‘Metal Graves’ at KMB’14 main venue Aspinwall House relate eminently to the general ethos of the biennale city with its port, shipyard, jetties and sprawling water all around.

In fact, KMB’14 has a quite a few main exhibits that feature images of sea-waves, ships and harbour—coming in contexts that are contemporary or historical. The plots may or may not be directly related to Kochi, but they are dense with sights and sound that typical of this city whose evolution in the past seven centuries owes a lot to its maritime engagements.

Interestingly, this relation has worked the other way round as well. KMB’14, for instance, has an overseas artist for whom the oceans surfaces by their motherland is “indistinguishably similar” to the sights around Kochi. Says Sri Lankan Muhanned Cader, whose Aspinwall work is titled ‘Galle Fort; Fort Kochi’: “The Arabian Sea I saw in Kochi merged in my mind with familiar landscapes such as that of the historic Galle Fort area of my country.”

In short, it is this “ambivalence” that has prompted Cader, 49, to “free identity from notions of fixity linked to land”.

Farther from the tropical waters, America-born Neha Choksi is seen rowing a boat made of ice—until it melts, releasing her into the water’s womb. Named ‘Iceboat’, the 2012 video, also on a loop at Aspinwall, essays Choksi “embracing my surrender”, going by the words of the artist, now 42 and settled in Mumbai.

KMB’14 artistic director Jitish Kallat notes that the nearly 14-minute film, when viewed in Kochi, has the local sea breeze adding another layer to it. “It exhumes narratives of doomed voyages of the past, the many sunken expeditions that define a coast as much as the one that made it,” notes the curator, who is an internationally-reputed artist, also living in the western Indian metropolis.

Giji Scaria's ‘Chronicle of the Shores Foretold’at Pepper House

The “doom stories” associated with voyages find depiction at the hands of a Malayali in a venue not far from Fort Kochi’s Aspinwall. At Pepper House, Travancore-born Gigi Scaria’s metallic installation refers to a medieval-era legend of an east-bound European ship sinking midway while bringing a large bell for a church in Kerala.

Today, Delhi-settled Scaria’s KMB’14 work titled ‘Chronicle of the Shores Foretold’ is seen against the backdrop of massive vessels and small boats plying aside the new-age Vallarpadom Container Terminal, thus serving as a reminder of fascinatingly changing times.

The region’s traditional architecture, including that making boats, finds representation in the biennale work of another Keralite, this time a nonagenarian. K M Vasudevan namboodiri’s sketches along a corridor of Aspinwall teem with colonial-era relics such as inland waterways and country rafts.

Even Aji V N, a Netherlands-settled Malayali, has one of his KMB’14 charcoal-on-paper works portraying a frothy sea. As if lending movement to this dark image is a part of the biennale work by US-born Andrew Ananda Voogel, whose ‘Kalapani: The Jahajis’ Middle Passage’ has a brooding video showing an abstract, dream-like vision of waves crashing a coastline, lending it “an intensely meditative, almost therapeutic atmosphere”, according to Kallat.

Historically relevant to Kochi is N Pushpala’s KMB’14 work that recreates an 1898 painting by Portugese Jose Veloso Salgado. Depicting invader-sailor Vasco da Gama’s first meeting with the Zamorin of Calicut, the archival inkjet print has in its backdrop the Portugese fleet of ships, which also come in standalone focus as well.

At David Hall, another KMB’14 venue in Fort Kochi, Guido van der Werve 10-minute film shows the Dutch artist in a gulf near Finland walking towards the viewer on ice-sheets, covering the water while a massive ice-breaking ship follows his trail.

Mattacherry’s CSI Bungalow has a video showing three workers erecting a scaffold on a beachfront. Titled ‘Construction Site’, the 93-minute film by Londoner American Mark Wallinger is “a painting in motion, wind and an odd ship that slides across the ocean at a distance”, notes the curator.

Netherlands-based Malayali artist Aji V N work Untitled-II at Aspinwall House

The vessel on the sea, again, comes into special focus at Aspinwall, where Vietnamese Dinh Q Le shows uses a broken fishing boat in his work that draws from own story—to evoke the trauma of numerous people from across history who had to embark on treacherous voyages while fleeing violence.

Jerusalem-born Khalil Rabah’s ‘Biproduct’ displays a print that shows an aircraft carrier in the shape of Gaza Strip conceptualised by the 54-year-old artist who lives in Palestine’s Ramallah.

Albanian Adrian Paci’s Aspinwall work films an intercontinental expedition where a group of Chinese carvers use their boat as a workshop. “This,” notes Kallat, “evokes a vision of the earth itself journeying through space on its own voyage around the sun.”