Art Attack

If you haven’t made a trip down south to walk through the fourth Kochi-Muziris Biennale – the most exciting edition, yet, if you ask us – here are a few compelling reasons to book a flight out, pronto.

- Shikha Sethi

At the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, little Yasser Arafat heads bloom out of a bright yellow flower native to the Middle East, while Jimmy Carter grins at you from a mauve autumn grape hyacinth. An imagined metropolis built with over a thousand handmade objects crafted in ceramic – including a Zippo lighter and Coca-Cola bottle – rises from a long table. There’s even an artwork that sets itself up as a shrine to mosquitoes. This is just some of the art on display at the 108-day Biennale – curated for the first time by a woman, artist Anita Dube.

Titled “Possibilities For A Non-alienated Life”, the 60-year-old curator has orchestrated a multimedia exhibition merging painting, photography, textiles, printmaking, video, installation and performance art, into an aesthetic and thought-provoking whole. In another first for the country’s largest and most important art event, more than half the artists featured are women, with representation for tribal, Dalit and queer artists whose works sit along that of more well-known artists such as Jitish Kallat and the anonymous feminist collective, The Guerrilla Girls. “Apart from William Kentridge, who had a small work in a previous edition, and KP Krishnakumar, all the other artists are being shown here for the first time,” said Dube, as she rolled a cigarette at a dinner hosted by BMW India the night before the Biennale opened last December.