Art From The Edges

The kochi-muziris biennale collapses the distance between art and poetry, bringing the marginal to the mainstream and elevating the everyday to the magical.

- Chinki Sinha

Anil Kasbe crosses the boundary between art and poetry, standing with his back arched in the Sea of Pain. Aylan Kurdi, the dead Kurdish toddler whose body washed up on the shores of Turkey, is no stranger to the 18-year-old Lavni dancer. In the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the idea is to look inwards, to imagine and to interact with art across 12 venues in this industrial town by the sea in Kerala.

Kasbe has stepped into a man-made sea, an installation by Chilean poet Raul Zurita in Aspinwall’s biggest warehouse, mimicking the journey of the Syrian refugees across the seas. Kasbe himself is a migrant, forced out of his village into a brutal city. The dancer interprets the poet’s work, but he is unable to read the simple poem on the wall. But Zurita, the first artist to be announced by the biennale team, has found his response. A young boy, who has been through a similar journey, and who understands what unbelonging means. He belongs neither to the city nor to his gender.