Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014: Pepper House

N S Harsha is known for paintings, installations and sculptures that are passages to highly detailed microcosms — what he likes to call "bird’s eye views" — of life. An enigmatic sculpture by Harsha, 'Matter' (2014) depicts a monkey holding close a roundular object with one of its hands while pointing towards the sky with the other.

This is not the first time that monkeys have appeared in the artist’s work. His 2013 public sculptural installation at Berlin’s Auguststrasse 10, 'Tamasha', showed a group of langurs that had taken possession of the building. In a scene reminiscent of several cities in India with a ‘monkey menace’, the animals perched on the building or hung from rails, their endlessly long tails forming a net over its façade. Drawing from local German myths about ‘rat kings’ —rats with conjoined tails that are said to be omens of impending plagues — Harsha depicted some members of this monkey mob with their tails joined together, rendering these foreign presences, harbingers of chaos, simultaneously exotic and unsettling. All members of the invading monkey mob had their fingers pointed towards the sky as if in warning.

If Tamasha depicted a collective with all its inherent entanglements, Matter condenses the same imagery to its bare minimum – a lone, sage-like monkey who is perhaps pointing us towards the mysteries of universe. According to Harsha, “This work formed from the depths of speechlessness.”

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.

The slide projectors beam photographs of a working washing machine and a mixer grinder. By photographing these two everyday home appliances going through the daily grind, Potnis hopes to create a polemical conversation on repetition and consumption.

The single channel video was shot inside the sterile, temperature-controlled cavity of a refrigerator. An oversized cauliflower within the refrigerator emulates a frozen explosion, alluding simultaneously to the mushroom cloud and the fear of a nuclear war and to a more immediate danger – a genetically-modified vegetable.

Composed of a series of suspended objects Kher calls "single points of contact" — triangles inside each of which swings a pendulum, seemingly unstable but never collapsing — the installation is: “A mobile that seeks to undervalue everything that is not abstruse. It is a point that marks the place and time and coordinates of where the world can stand still for a second of a minute of a degree. By both confronting and accepting gravitational forces, all objects can find their perfect equilibrium, poise and meaning.”

In her research, Kher was drawn to several references: The Penrose triangle as a visually fulfilled object that can never be resolved in three dimensions, astronomical charts by the medieval scholar Al-Biruni (973-1052 CE) and the 1400-year-old quest to determine the true shape of the earth which in the 19th century returned to India in the form of the triangulation survey of the meridian arc that runs from South India to Nepal and East to the Western Ghats.

Navin Thomas describes his works as explorations of “electro-acoustic ecology, the system of things and how you and I coexist within it”. According to Thomas, what is classified as architecture — an intrusion on nature with its connotations of purity and fragility — is a vital aspect of the idea of ecology, coexisting with such things as trees and meadows.

A chronicler of what he calls the ‘private life of electronic appliances’, he is an avid collector of electronic junk. It is out of them that Thomas fashions installations and sculptures that act as intersections where the energy fields of things — the electro-acoustic ecologies — interact with and alter biological circuits. One such work is 'My love is an icy cold fever' (2011), an installation composed of a steel frame fitted with ultraviolet lights which, when lit up at night, sets off the frenzied behaviour of insects and other nocturnal animals. In these and other works, the artist engages with the ways in which biological systems respond to the data-rich, technology-saturated ‘sonic-magnetic environments' they inhabit.

Thomas’s installation at Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014, long live the new flesh (2014), is composed of two archery targets connected by an invisible, reverberating wave of sound. According to the artist, the installation is modelled on the idea of two lighthouses communicating with each other.

It creates an abstract symphony made of the sound of arrows being shot which, when echoed by the walls of the gallery, creates a sonic architecture of combat that forces viewers into an arena of invisible crossfire and conflicting energies.

Turning away from it, they enter a 70 feet-long maze made of hanging paper scrolls that align from one angle to form the elusive manuscript page. These scrolls feature paintings, delicate collages and projected animations that bring to life a range of narratives: The cosmology of Surya Siddhanta, a Sanskrit treatise on astronomy dated to as far back as 4 CE; illustrations from the Hortus Malabaricus, a 17th century Dutch East India Company-initiated compendium on Kerala’s flora; and the mythology surrounding Vasco da Gama’s arrival in Calicut, poetically represented here by a star map of the sky as it appeared on the night he disembarked.

At the other end of the gallery, a second projection ties together these fragments of history through yet another aligned view of the illusion where viewers find themselves reflected back as a part of the image, transformed into one of the characters in the pastiche manuscript.