The Fires of Faith

Benitha Perciyal’s installation The Fires of Faith (2014), is an invitation to travel back in time to a seminal period in the cultural history of Malabar– the fabled arrival of the apostle St Thomas to Kodungalloor in Kerala, a site speculated to be related to the ancient sea port of Muziris. The saint brought Christ’s message to this distant coast in 52 CE, only a few decades after crucifixion.

Thomas, whose arrival is considered to have inaugurated Christianity’s spread in the Indian subcontinent, established the first churches in India in Kerala before travelling to other regions, including Mylapore near Chennai where he died. Simultaneously, other apostles were on similar quests elsewhere in the world– travelling by land and sea to fulfill the mission they had been entrusted with. Perciyal explores this history by addressing the rich image culture Christianity spawned in Kerala, starting with the image of Mary that Thomas is said to have brought with him to a profusion of hybrid icons that emerged as a new group of followers made the faith its own.

Arranged as if they were in a studio or an ancient merchant’s warehouse, Perciyal’s fragrant sculptures are cast in incense that she makes by mixing several natural ingredients such as bark powder, Gum Arabic, aromatic herbs and spices. The fragility of incense and its capacity for constant change and rebirth turns the act of creating sculptures into a simultaneous act of mending and restoring, as if the artist was merely piecing together what had always existed. Time leaves a visible imprint on these sculptures– cracks form and the fragrance fades. Laid bare in the humid sea front of Kochi, the figures will imbibe the salty air of the coast, undergoing a slow period of transformation during the three months of the biennale.