Lands, Rights, Identities : Artworks of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022-23
A journey through a collection of artworks that explore the themes of Soil and Indigeneity at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022-23
Of Men and Gods and Mud -Ali Cherri
There are seemingly irreconcilable temporalities being navigated in Ali Cherri’s "Of Men and Gods and Mud." The Lebanese artist’s work often invokes material traces as well as ghostly ephemera that histories of violence fail to bury.
Of Men and Gods and Mud by Ali CherriKochi-Muziris Biennale
The film is set on the shores of the Nile, where construction work on Africa’s largest hydropower project the Merowe Dam was completed in 2009. Following the toil of workers at a traditional brickyard, the film looks at mud as the materiality of myth and creation.
Of Men and Gods and Mud by Ali CherriKochi-Muziris Biennale
Three terracotta sculptures – part human, part animal – recall Assyrian protective deities and stand as sentinels in the exhibition space, conceivably to shield us from the vagaries of capitalist modernity.
The Drawings of Idea by Alper AydinKochi-Muziris Biennale
The Drawings of Idea- Alper Aydin
Alper Aydin’s artistic sensibility is shaped by the geography he inhabited during his formative years. He attempts to dissect the relationship between humans and nature through the archaeological infrastructures that shape and determine cultural memory.
The Drawings of Idea by Alper AydinKochi-Muziris Biennale
The collection draws from the artist’s anticipatory imagination, and an insight into an intricate process of conceptual framing and visual realisation, making form out of the unrealised, and holding the potential for future shaping.
The Drawings of Idea are blueprints for large-scale work. Here, Aydin’s drawings are accompanied by textual explications, plans for execution, and reflections on what kind of artistic outcome would be best suited for each work.
The Song of the World by Alper AydinKochi-Muziris Biennale
The Song of the World
Photographic documentation of 208 rocks on 37 km of coastline running from Turkey to Georgia, under threat due to extractivist environmental policies. The artist measured each rock's weight, height, and circumference and used temporary paint to mark the resulting data.
The Politics of Skin and Movement by Amol K Patil
The lives and legacy, as well as his family archives, contribute to Patil’s work, which questions conditions of labour and casteism, the body and access and movement for his community across time and history
The politics of skin and movement by Amol K PatilKochi-Muziris Biennale
With the casteist wall, he brings to conversation segregation that is not merely limited to access and land but has now seeped into the recesses of the mind. Skin and clothes become the first marker of visibility and, thereby, differentiation.
The politics of skin and movement by Amol K PatilKochi-Muziris Biennale
The politics of skin and movement by Amol K PatilKochi-Muziris Biennale
In this work, drawers become chambers to collect the dust or the ‘ash of hope.’ These movements are possibly made by the souls fighting for their rights, who are trapped in paperwork and bureaucratic documents and at the mercy of custodian.
Refugee Heritage- Decolonizing Architecture Art Research
Decolonizing Architecture Art Research (DAAR) is a collective that develops spatial interventions, pedagogical platforms and conceptual speculations at the intersection of art, architecture and politics.
Refugee Heritage by DaarKochi-Muziris Biennale
Refugee Heritage is a research project that proposes heritage as a form and tool of resistance. It draws on DAAR’s nomination for the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem in Palestine to be registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Refugee Heritage by DaarKochi-Muziris Biennale
The installation features, nighttime photographs of the camp, offering atmospheric, almost romantic, portraits of the streets. Upon DAAR’s invitation, the images were taken by photographer- Luca Capuano. The photographs are juxtaposed with a series of photographic books.
Refugee Heritage by DaarKochi-Muziris Biennale
Refugee Heritage enables viewers to make the journey from the camp to the villages of origin, one denied to the refugees themselves, and proposes the ‘heritage of a culture of exile’ as a new political imagination for restitution and repair.
Forensic Architecture
Forensic Architecture is a research agency investigating human rights violations including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries and corporations. Since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil, there was an increase in violence and illegal gold mining.
I.85: Gold Mining and Violence in the Amazon Rainforest by Forensic ArchitectureKochi-Muziris Biennale
In partnership with the Climate Litigation Accelerator (CLX), Forensic Architecture investigated the timeline and patterns of destruction and threats on Yanomami territory along the Uraricoera River due to gold mining.
I.85: Gold Mining and Violence in the Amazon Rainforest by Forensic ArchitectureKochi-Muziris Biennale
The film displayed shows the timeline and analysis of the investigation, clearly suggesting that the government’s policies correspond in timing to the rapid increase in environmental destruction and violence against Indigenous people across the Amazon.
'Bassi várri - Sacred Mountain'- Hilde Skancke Pedersen
Hilde Skancke Pedersen is from the Sápmi region of Norway and has long campaigned for the rights of the Sámi, an Indigenous people whose culture and spiritual values are moulded to the extreme climate and vegetation of the northern-most parts of Europe.
Bassi várri - Sacred Mountain by Hilde Skancke PedersenKochi-Muziris Biennale
To make Sacred Mountain, Pedersen worked with secondhand and found t-shirts, all in various shades of grey, to create a textile collage depicting mountains. These imaginary mountains represent the mountains of the world, and her plea is that we protect them all.
Eana - Land by Hilde Skancke PedersenKochi-Muziris Biennale
Eana - Land
The video Eana evokes the artist's Sámi childhood by blending scenes of the landscape with the terrains of her own body, it also indicates that we never stop being part of nature and that all distinctions between the human and non-human have been falsely erected.
Bassi várri - Sacred Mountain by Hilde Skancke PedersenKochi-Muziris Biennale
Through both Sacred Mountain and Eana, Pedersen calls for a change in the way elements of nature are rendered dispensable under a capitalist lens.
'A Peal of Spring Thunder' - Ishan Tankha
Photographer Ishan Tankha tries to show the extraordinary range of issues that beset a country as large and complex as India, from separatist movements in marginalised states to protests in the heart of the capital and the effects of climate change on remote villages.
A Peal of Spring Thunder by Ishan TankhaKochi-Muziris Biennale
The project focuses on life and the environment in the state of Chhattisgarh, set against a backdrop of violent conflict between the state and armed guerillas.
A Peal of Spring Thunder by Ishan TankhaKochi-Muziris Biennale
A Peal of Spring Thunder by Ishan TankhaKochi-Muziris Biennale
Today, the guerrillas appear as a premonition of our collective future, in which extreme climatic events result in a new form of communal nomadism that is divided between evacuation camps, relief shelters and endless wanderings through unforgiving landscapes.
'Wild Relatives'- Jumana Manna
The Palestinian artists' films and sculptural works attend to the complex interweaving of nature, war, settler colonialism, and our planetary condition. 'Wild Relatives' begins when ICARDA is temporarily relocated to eastern Lebanon, from Syria, due to military conflicts.
Wild Relatives by Jumana MannaKochi-Muziris Biennale
Manna’s film journeys between Svalbard and the Beqaa Valley, tracing a transnational process of seed preservation and traversing discrete and often invisible geographical spaces.
Wild Relatives by Jumana MannaKochi-Muziris Biennale
Lending a voice to rural rituals and displaced communities, Wild Relatives critically examines the political economy of catastrophism and peace-making.
Myriam Omar Awadi
Myriam Omar Awadi is interested in women singing and associated traditions that emerged between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century.
For these ‘possessed women’ (as the artist refers to them), song and poetry signify a political and personal liberation of the voice. Awadi notes the need for feminism to reach a state of transness, in which gender is constantly questioned, the body is deemed sacred, and voices become multiple or transgress.
Fires that your last breaths kindle? (2022) Penis also crying, lullaby to the patriarchy (2010) Becoming Liquid (2022) Herstorytelling: The choir of Debe’singers women (2022) The Blowers (2022) by Myriam Omar AwadiKochi-Muziris Biennale
Awadi's multi-part installation is titled Fires that your last breaths Kindle? and Herstorytelling, which concentrates on the ritual Debe, performed by a community of women in Grande Comore.
Awadi learned about this community, which chose to leave Grande Comore for Zanzibar when Sultan Saïd Ali was forced to give the island to the French. The Debe began when this diaspora returned to Comoros.
In the mid-nineteenth century, women gathered in moonlit public places while the local colonial and religious authorities slept and sang about love and their lives and danced. This practice disappeared in the 1950s, owing to the internalisation of the imaginaries of the French colonial empire.
When Awadi visited Moroni, she was unable to find witnesses or participants of this tradition. She decided to redo the walk the women did, wandering at night and initiating a dialogue in order to summon and gather diverse voices
