Youngest biennale artist’s brick-wall work speaks fascinating folktales

C Unnikrishnan’s untitled installation is set for Sharjah biennale starting next month

Kochi, Feb 20: He raised an artwork by piling up self-painted bricks but least stonewalled the essential aesthetics or intended messages in the off-beat process.

If anything, C Unnikrishnan’s work at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) has only dismantled the conventional idea that the fired clay-block is a frustratingly uncommunicative object. The fledgling artist’s—actually he is the youngest at the ongoing KMB’14—wall of little pictures tells stories which viewers say they can relate to and enjoy at different layers.

Artist C Unnikrishnan's  

Amid the warm reception in Indian art circuit, there is more good news for the 23-year-old: his installation has now been selected for the 12th Sharjah Biennale. Eungie Joo, the curator of the three-month exhibition at the Gulf emirate starting on March 25, was thoroughly impressed with it after she paid a visit to its Kochi counterpart recently.

Unnikrishnan was a student at the Thrissur College of Fine Arts last year when Kochi Biennale Foundation president Bose Krishnamachari and KMB’14 curator Jitish Kallat saw his work. And it took just a few days for them to inform him that he had been selected for the 108-day KMB that to begin on December 12.

“Even so, I did not realise that I would be showing at the main biennale,” says Unnikrishnan, a native of semi-hilly Pezhumpara village in Palakkad district of central Kerala. “I was overwhelmed about exhibiting with artists of international renown.”

Kallat recalls that Unnikrishnan’s work at the graduation exhibition at his college was a hand-painted brick wall in the middle of the gallery space. “It stood as if an image memoir had interwoven with masonry. Each unit carried an image, as if each brick were a viewfinder to a different world. This on-campus encounter led me to invite Unnikrishnan to participate in the biennale,” he adds, expressing “thrill” at Unnikrishnan being chosen for the Sharjah Biennale. “I am writing a short essay on Unnikrishnan for the Sharjah Biennale Catalogue.”

Unnikrishnan says his biennale work at CSI Bungalow in Fort Kochi is a continuation of what he did as a college student. Technically, it is a freestanding wall of more than 300 bricks—each one featuring a canvas that has a very personal take on life around him. So there is a string of jasmine buds, pots and pans, a real skeleton of a lizard, fish, coconuts drying, women in purdah, ants dragging along a dead fly; every picture tells such a story that the viewer forgets each one is contained within the space of a rectangular terracotta cube.

Artist C Unnikrishnan's  art installation on bricks at CSI Bungalow,Fort Kochi

“It is a diary of local history and folklore,” says Unnikrishnan, who used oils and acrylics for his unique work. “I used to walk around the area and speak to the people here. Some of the work displayed here is based on the stories I heard here. A canvas feels like a large space; the brick feels closer and I like the roughness and texture of bricks.” He also tried his hand at something new for KMB’14 and did some carving on the bricks.

Unnikrishnan first started creating the work in his room at home, completing a painting a day, as if making entries in a visual diary. His parents, who are daily-wage workers, had anyway no clue of his kind of art; in fact they always wanted him to learn something that would fetch him a job which would also support them financially. So to placate them, he gave tuition classes for young children.

Even so, Unnikrishnan’s teachers kept pushing him into art. Soon, he got his first group show in Chennai after a teacher goaded him about not doing anything to further a career in the field he liked. The video he created of his bricks also had conversations of his family—mainly his mother and sister—in the backdrop.

“My background and a personal element are very strong in my work,” says the artist, recalling the rich rusticity of his native land near Nenmara. His KMB’14 work, thus, teems with tales bearing local ethos.

“My aunt is an oracle, so her stories and songs, and myth and beliefs have always crept into my work,” he adds. “I started doing this at home, when I felt that I had no one to talk to. It was my escape to produce a diary of my thoughts on my wall at home.”

Krishnamachari says he, as an artist, found Unnikrishnan’s use of material “very interesting”. The “creative spark” that the young artist shows in finding a new material for art-making and the narrative he constructs every day, on life around him and rituals from his village “make his work stand out”, he adds.