‘It’s like writing a verse when the alphabets are still shifting shape’

Jitish Kallat talks about his curatorial voyage and the discoveries he made therein.

April 19, 2015 03:57 pm | Updated 07:16 pm IST

The second edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale, one of Indian art world’s big-ticket event held in Kochi, ended on March 29. The cosmological inquiry launched by Jitish Kallat, the Biennale’s artistic director and curator, was responded to, by 94 artists from 30 countries. Five lakh people, who reportedly visited and revisited to engage with the “observation deck” hoisted in Kochi.

In an e-mail interview, Kallat, one of our leading contemporary artists, who turned curator to helm the artistic affairs of the show, ruminates on the Biennale’s journey and his latest set of works exhibited at Art Dubai.

Now that the Biennale is over, how do you feel? Are you happy with how everything came together or there were things that could have been worked upon?

With the biennale now over it is interesting for me to retreat and reflect on the year-long curatorial process; to think of how the intuitions and ideas with which I began my curatorial journey have infiltrated and manifested in the final project. I was keen to let this circulation of ideas develop a self-organising principle through which to structure the show as it emerges. About 65-70 per cent of the Biennale were new commissions, so the exhibition structure had to evolve correspondingly alongside the evolution of art works. It’s like writing a verse when the alphabets are still shifting shape.

It has been rewarding that the wide audience, both local and from across the world, have responded wonderfully to the structure and choreography of “Whorled Explorations”.

What are the after-effects of Biennale’s second edition?

Half a million people attended the Biennale and a large proportion of this audience were children. It is only in the years to come that we can actually compute the real after-effects of the Biennale. The Biennale has become a valuable temporary shift in the daily life of Kochi and Kerala, where contemporary art has become a point of discussion like never before. In the absence of a contemporary art museum, the Biennale has also presented the idea of art as a potent tool with which we can rethink our world. Unlike so many other places, a lot of the local audiences in Kerala are citizens engaged in cultural, social and political processes. They have committed time and attention to the project; some have re-visited the Biennale several times and have participated in reading the many interrelated themes and metaphors that circle and recur within this large exhibition.

How did the second biennale take the story forward?

“Whorled Explorations” in a way proposed a shift in optics. It was conceived as an observation deck hoisted in Kochi to re-think the world we live in. This historic site catalyzed the ideas within the project and hence it was ‘site-responsive’, but I would not use the word ‘site-specific’. Kochi in the second edition of the biennale was a viewing device and not the vista.

How was the shift from being an artist to a curator?

Curating art and making art could be seen as differentiated versions of the same intention. The main shift from making art to curating was perhaps the shift in ambience from the solitary reflections in one’s studio, to a space of dialogue with numerous artist colleagues, to also carry the ideas of the project to a wide public. I was keen that my curatorial process remained closely aligned to the processes of art making; so that the biennale emerged from a circulation of intuitions from me to the artist colleagues and from them to me. I have often said that the shift to curating was for me a shift in toolbox, to apply a new device to continue one’s deepest inquiries.

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