'Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life'
Still young, only four editions old and India’s first biennale, Kochi-Muziris emerged when the conventions of the biennale format were already well established. Exhibitions developed in this format tend to gain singular identities primarily from their location, but it has also been a point of difference of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale to select an artist to curate each edition, and it was from the lived politics of curator Anita Dube that ‘Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life’ drew its strength.
Dube’s reference to Karl Marx’s theory of alienation in her title was fitting in Kerala, a southern state that has been largely ruled by communist governments since the partition of India. Currents of communisms past, present and future ran through the exhibition, from which voices historically marginalised by capitalism, colonialism, casteism, and patriarchy rang strong and clear. At Aspinwall House, the Biennale’s main venue on the Fort Kochi waterfront, a large photographic collage on canvas by Goshka Macuga brought Marx’s tomb to the backwaters of Kerala, where it was joined by feminist figures significant to the history of communism in the region.
An influential figure in Keralan contemporary art, KP Krisnakumar’s significance as an artist and leader of the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association in the 1980s was recognised in a posthumous presentation of work with Mrinalini Mukherjee and Chittaprosad at Durbar Hall. The Radical Group, as it was known, emerged from anti-caste and anti-establishment movements and had ties to local communist organisations. Since she joined the group as an art historian in 1987, Dube’s work as an artist has owed much to the Radical Group’s ethos of art as a social practice. She acknowledges this debt in her curatorial note... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Goshka Macuga, 2018. Installation view, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018. Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation.
Shambhavi, Maati Maa (Earth Mother), 2018. Installation views, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018. Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation.
