Kochi-Muziris Biennale: a subjective walkthrough

From the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022-23, narratives of displacement, the passage of time, and the female gaze

- Shrabonti Bagchi

You walk into a darkened room not knowing what to expect and suddenly, in front of you, is a cascading waterfall of mist, or it could be smoke. Cutting through it is a curtain of more solid mist, and you realise there is some text projected on to this curtain. Slowly, this rolls down, and then you can see it on the dark floor of the cool, high-ceilinged room you are standing in. You scurry away, not wanting to stop this flow of words, but undeterred, the letter-because that's what it is; a letter written by Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler in 1939, almost on the eve of World War II-carries on unfurling its message, which is by turns strident and pleading. "We have found in non-violence a force which, if organized, can without doubt match itself against a combination of all the most violent forces in the world. In non-violent technique, as I have said, there is no such thing as defeat," wrote Gandhi from Wardha, Maharashtra, and, standing in a converted warehouse in Kochi, Kerala, in 2023, the haunting echo of his words comes to us through mist and mirrors.

The installation is Jitish Kallat's 2012 work Covering Letter, and in conjunction with a more recent show curated by him, Tangled Hierarchy 2, which also takes as its focal point Gandhi's written words, it forms a nucleus of meaning at the KochiMuziris Biennale (KMB) 2022-23.

So much art is concentrated into the few square kilometres of the picturesque neighbourhood of Fort Kochi that it can sometimes be an overwhelming emotional and intellectual voyage. Navigating the many venues across which the biennale is spread is not just a matter of logistics-will we find the ubiquitous widebodied autos that ferry us from one venue to the other? Where can we get coffee?but also about letting the eye and the mind assimilate and make sense of the impressions being made upon them constantly.

In all this chaos of beauty, Gandhi becomes an anchor.