Untitled (ZVC) – History Is Made at Night (Kochi)

A recurring motif in the works of Daniel Boyd, an Australian artist of aboriginal ancestry, are resin dots that he lays over a painted image before painting the whole surface in black. This creates a constellation of ‘lenses’ revealing parts of the underlying image. According to Boyd, Gestaltism’s ‘Law of Closure’ about the human mind’s tendency to fill gaps in a given set of information to perceive a whole, and its central principle, “the whole is other than the sum of its parts,” are useful in reading his paintings.

In a suite of works titled History is Made at Night (Kochi) (2014) that he has created for the Biennale, Boyd refers to four images that trigger questions and connections that animate and undo dominant narratives surrounding the ‘Age of Discovery’. Untitled (ZVC) is based on the engraving of an 1898 Portuguese painting depicting Vasco da Gama’s meeting with the Zamorin of Calicut. The diptych made up of Untitled (KC) 1 and Untitled (KC) 2 shows 11th century gold coins of the Kilwa Sultanate in East Africa that were recovered along with coins of the Dutch East India Company from Marchinbar Islands in Northern Australia. As Boyd points out, Gama had extorted a tribute of gold coins from the King of Kilwa while en route to the Malabar Coast on his second voyage. The coins thus form a possible link that connects India’s Western Coast to the indigenous Yolngu people of Northern Australia through the transactional network of colonialism.

Untitled (SC) and Untitled (PSM) are linked by their celestial references. The latter shows a traditional Polynesian navigational star map while the former refers to a 1906 photograph by J W Beattie of the Anglican missionary vessel ‘Southern Cross’. The name Southern Cross has multiple associations, from a constellation to the Christian Crucifix and the Australian National flag.