Interview with Kochi-Muziris Biennale Artistic Director Jitish Kallat

The second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, “Whorled Explorations,” is an exceptional show that provides new pathways into the world of ideas, art and curatorship. Presented within extraordinary circumstances and uncertainties, it encourages original ways of looking at the key themes of the 21st century.

In December 2014, a week after its opening, New Delhi desk editor Deeksha Nath sat down with the Biennale’s artistic director and curator Jitish Kallat to discuss the art festival.

Could you walk us through “Whorled Explorations”? The term “whorled” could be understood as a spiral, or the act of churning, but also as a play on the word “world.”

It began from something that captured me one year ago. Last November or December [in 2013], I was a month into thinking of the process [for the Biennale]. As strange as it may sound, it began on my early morning walks through the streets trying to experience something—and that “something,” for me, was the recent past. And by “recent past” I mean the last 500 years, because [that is a past that] is still residually present. It is, in a way, a symbolic pointer to an embryonic form of the world that we have inherited.

For me, this moment, roughly between the 14th and 17th century—which is often called the Age of Discovery—[is a time when] the shores of Kochi was the protagonist. This is when maritime journeys, driven by the magnetism of spices, were reorienting the known geography of the planet. As the maps changed, you also saw sharp turns in history. The fabric of power was being reorganized—the tapestry of power was being rewoven.

At the same time, what is interesting—and this is probably because of my own idiosyncratic interest in the skies—is that I was also drawn to the fact that, in this region [Kerala], at the time, there was a great flurry of intellectual activity around astronomy and mathematics. Our scholars, including Madhava of Sangamagrama, were making fundamental breakthroughs in our location in the cosmos.

So, it became very interesting to me that there are ways in which history can trigger certain terrestrial narratives that influence the affairs conducted by human beings on this planet. [I was also interested in] contextualizing each of these experiences in a vast dimension and to consider how small we are, and so unaware that all our gestures could be stemming from a place of uncertainty. In a world of certitude, where we seem to “know” everything, there is no terra incognita anymore. This is why Charles and Ray Eames’s legendary video Powers of Ten (1977) reorients our axis of viewing; it begins by discussing time, then pans out into outer space and zooms back in to enter the human body, [closing in on a microscopic level] to a view that seems completely separate from the axis of our existence.

A lot of the works [in the Biennale] point to very basic realities that we live with. For example, right now the ground under our feet is traveling faster than the sound coming from me to you—a concept explored in Peter Rosel’s 458.42 m/sec (2014) that is completely unfathomable to us. In acknowledging our perceptual limitations, we can rewrite the way we narrate our stories.

In a place like Kerala, where there is dense political action, it was also important for me to shift the rhetoric away from the placard; because what is politics other than a flux of ideological positions trying to assert themselves over the other? Perhaps if we can shift the narrative away from one’s ideological positions to the limitations of our own perceptions, the tensity with which these ideologies clash, and the force with which they confront one another, can also be altered.

This questioning of held perceptions seems to be present throughout the Biennale. For instance, American artist Michael Stevens’s seven videos ask us to extend the boundaries of our mind and allow for an entire new scope of imagination and experience.

Stevens is a “thought” station, [as opposed to one centered on]  experience. For instance, there is “experience” in Sissel Tolaas’s performance project Fear (2014) [which focuses on people’s physical reactions to their phobias, by featuring the sweat that is produced when they are nervous]. There is also Chen Chieh-jen’s multichannel film installation Realm of Reverberations (2014), which focuses on an abandoned asylum in Taiwan that once housed a leper colony. Shown in the center of the work is a very dense narrative, where a person’s skin affected by Hansen disease is projected; on the opposite end you can see a birds-eye view image of the abandoned site. The two scenes are face to face, both of them a certain kind of abstraction, one through distance and one through closeness. Both are two ends of the same narrative.

There are multiple narratives in the show. There is a lot to read and hear, so in that sense it is not purely a visual experience. There are also the interconnected experiences of the textual and visual, and the informative and experiential. You are situated in a unique site of borders—between the past and present, and the fluid and solid. How have these notions permeated the Biennale?

One running thread throughout the Biennale is sometimes a playful—and other times philosophical or political—deployment of statistics. For instance, you might see in Marie Velardi’s Atlas des iles perdues, Edition 2107 (2007) that statistics, about the pending disappearance of some Pacific islands, is used as a way of mapping the world. On the other hand, in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pan-anthem (2014), you might find information on the per capita expenditure of the military in various countries, which is as yet another way of mapping the entire world. Or perhaps, in Sunoj D.’s Zero to the Right (2014), you’ll see the artist has converted his production budget into three different currencies [and reading aloud the different numbers]—a statistic that is in some way a mapping of global labor and value. Also, in the case of Mark Formanek’s film Standard Time (2007), time is a unit that is reset over and over, by men putting up and changing wooden scaffolding [that are in the shape of numbers on a digital clock display], constantly updating the structure. There are many more works in the exhibition, where a focus on a certain unit creates other meanings [for it].

What I am interested in is for the sensory and conceptual, and the textual and experiential, to all be in free play. For instance, in Sissel Tolaas’s Fear, the eerie, uncanny experience of human smell, [chemically materialized as sweat molecules,  were then “painted”] onto ballast stones [taken from sailing ships that had once ported at Kochi]. [Back in time], these stones would have been at Kochi roughly around the same time that the 17th-century letters by Johan Maurits van Nassau, featured in Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s video installation, Maurits Script (2006), were written. The Dutch East India Company could have quite possibly dropped off these ballast stones in Cochin [Kochi], at the very time when Maurits, as a governor under the Dutch West India Company, was sending his letters from Brazil. So, they are overlapping histories: one is a sensory way of grappling with the revisiting of a turbulent past; the other is a parallel moment in the past, which is also in correspondence with the present.  

You are a well-respected artist. Since you’ve been busy with curating the Biennale I can only assume you have not had much time to make your own work or spend time in your studio. Have you missed not working as an artist this past year and a half?

I’m not terribly missing it, because an artist is thinking about art all the time. One is always thinking about it spatially, conceptually, textually and relationally, for a wide number of works.

When I work as a curator I am always hesitant to guide the artist’s creative process beyond providing him or her with the ideas that I am working around, and where and how I see their work fitting into them. This is because I am not an artist, and I wish to be careful to not overstep artistic boundaries. How did that work for you?

I had a pool of ideas I was thinking about and, from time to time, without altering the course of things, I would share them with some of the artists. But these had nothing to do with the exhibition’s concept. For instance, I sent links about Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s narrative on Vasco da Gama to Gulammohammed Sheikh, Bharti Kher and Pushpamala N., and some other artists. There was no way I was saying “That this is the direction to take,” but I had hoped that some of these intuitions would permeate the Biennale. I would then be watchful of overlapping references, and hope that the Biennale forms from such transactions of intuitions rather than from a goal-oriented, curatorial journey.

I wanted the Biennale to be in a consistent and playful state of flux, in which many people [come together as a] cluster—like the rice grains being pecked by hens in Yang Zhenzhong’s video Rice Corns (2000), or the ants rushing all over an image of the world map in Rivane Neuenschwander’s Contingent (2008). Or the postage stamps in Kader Attia’s Independence Disillusionment (2014)—made by decolonized African and Middle Eastern nations and depicting utopian visions of space exploration—which are shown alongside Naeem Mohaiemen’s installation Kazi in Nomansland (2009), [where stamps featuring the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam explore the history of how India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have each tried to claim the famed literary figure as their own].

I was expecting to see some pieces by other artists in the Biennale that would visually link to your own personal work, but I noticed that there is a lack of that.

The exhibition is almost like a bio-field that has its own rhythm. I initially invited a few artists in January 2014, and that nucleus created a circumstance for the next body of work to build a collective insight, or to see if an insight can emerge from a collective project. For me it was just about following what emerged from that project. While there was a lot of activity, [it was important] to remain in a calm space of reflection, in order to see that the Biennale can self-evolve out of a bright array of interactions, forms, metaphors, signs, artistic practices, scales and of our own experience of our senses.

I wanted as much as possible for [the Biennale] to be an entirely self-generated project. The other thing I was clear about was that I did not want to begin with a mission or a very defined result in mind. I began on the basis that I want the Biennale to produce themes rather than re-produce themes. The Biennale itself became an optical device rather than an object to be viewed. While you are seeing the Biennale, I want your thought to shift a bit, so that you are actually viewing the world through the lens of the Biennale.

I think of the Biennale as an observation deck, but I also consider how can it serve as a toolbox for self-reflection. Our actions in the world, and our reflections of ourselves, are essentially the same thing, but we tend to believe that they are two different things.

You have presented an extraordinary Biennale, especially considering the financial struggle you’ve had. I was wondering how sustainable a model you think this is, especially if, in the future, the state government continues to not release the funds that they promise to the Biennale, or give them in a timely fashion, as what happened this year? Conversely, you have also experienced extreme generosity in  people who have come forward to support you. But can it function in this manner every two years?

No it can’t—especially since I only realized the gravity of the situation in early November (2014), and until then I hadn’t know the extent of the crisis. There were two days in early November where, if there wasn’t the kind of spirited action [among the art community] that ultimately saved the event, I felt the Biennale could not have happened.

Thereafter, I reached out to many friends, who got us past the hump of the next 21 days until the Biennale’s opening, but the situation is still extremely difficult. We installed [the exhibition] with minimum human resource, and yet opened with 92% of the art projects in place. So if the state had fulfilled its promise, this would have been a cakewalk. But I am still optimistic, and I believe there is an x-factor that will [help us] see this through.

And finally, what events are planned for the duration of the Biennale?

Lots of programs and conversations will be emerging as the Biennale progresses. There will be an inter-biennale seminar in early February, which will be co-convened by Johnson Chang, Hammad Nasar, Gao Shiming and an array of scholars. Then we have artists visiting, including Mona Hatoum, sometime at the end of January or early February.

If there is any more funding towards the end [of the Biennale], I would like to convene [another] conference that rethinks some of the ideas the Biennale brings into focus.

The second Kochi-Muziris Biennale, “Whorled Explorations,” is on view until March 29, 2015.