The Chronicle of a Shore Foretold by Gigi Scaria
Centuries ago, a giant bell sent from Rome to a church in central Kerala went down after the ship carrying it capsized in the choppy waters of the Arabian Sea. Today, every year when the church in Kuruvilangadu celebrates the birth of its patron saint Virgin Mary, the bell rises from under the sea and chimes on the surface. The myth of the church bell forms the backdrop of Gigi Scaria’s work, The Chronicle of a Shore Foretold, one of the highlights at the second Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The Delhi-based Scaria used a 2.5-tonne steel bell as high as 21 ft to talk about myths and labour, while, in his own words, “puncturing the time to erase history”.
Mary Wants to Read a Book by Navjot Altaf
The biggest public library in Kochi welcomed Mumbai-based artist Navjot Altaf to its vast collection, allowing her to use its 1,350 titles to be photographed for projecting in her mammoth bookshelf installation called Mary Wants to Read a Book. The artist added another 3,700 books made of newspapers, the colour of each book cover denoting temperatures recorded in all the seven continents in the past 30 years, to combine climate change with communism, Christianity, literacy and the library movement. “The early missionaries in Kerala spread literacy so that the parishioners could read the Holy Scripture, but it went far beyond that,” says the Meerut-born Altaf. A Left-leaning artist who has worked with the Bastar tribals in advocating the virtues of indigenous knowledge, Altaf is hoping an educated world will soon do something about the rising temperatures before it is too late.
Earth by Prashant Pandey
Rajasthani artist Prashant Pandey went to Pattanam where excavations are going on to trace the early history of Kerala and the mysterious port city of Muziris that disappeared seven centuries ago. “I found a diamond in Pattanam,” says Pandey. The diamond forms the shape of his installation titled Earth and denotes all the digging that happened in Pattanam. The artist has also given his take on the bloody violence that goes on in present times. His artwork is a never-ending collection of discarded blood-smeared slides, which rest on the floor of the Aspinwall House in a chilling reminder of the state of the world. The Jaipur-based artist, who works with material waste, has added his own blood to the slides for good measure.
Descension by Anish Kapoor
At the central London factory of fabricated product manufacturer MDM Props, British workers built a massive cylindrical steel container for the Mumbai-born Anish Kapoor, one of their many celebrity clients. The company, which also works for Damien Hirst and Elton John, tested the new artwork of the London-based sculptor before airlifting it to Kochi. The work came in several pieces along with MDM engineers, who assembled them. Local workers then descended the structure into a massive hole built at the Aspinwall House spot, which had last year served Indian artist Sheila Gowda. The container was tested in Brixton, pumping 14,000 litres of water using fire hydrants. The work features a monster motor pump propelling a fan kept in the water, creating a vortex. The Turner Prize-winning artist, who made the ArcelorMittal Orbit for the 2012 London Olympic Park and the Chicago Cloudgate, has called his work Descension. The water installation is the latest work of the Doon School-educated Kapoor, who has created it exclusively for an Indian show, which is a first.
Balancing Act and Gama and Gandhi by Gulammohammed Sheikh
The most senior artist from India has two outdoor sculptural installations, one Balancing Act, a life-size work from a Rajasthani miniature painting in an active public square, the Vasco da Gama Square, in Fort Kochi. A mix of narrative and conceptual propositions, it gives ideas to a viewer for an intellectual engagement, as well as a sensorial experience. In this work, Sheikh goes for a three-dimensional miniature painting. In his second work called Gama and Gandhi, at the Durbar Hall venue of the biennale, the 15th-century Portuguese explorer meets Mahatma Gandhi.
