Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014: Durbar Hall

With a gestural regularity reminiscent of the act of reading, the artist brushed every page of the nine-volume History of India by 19th century Indian civil servant and historian Romesh C Dutt (published in 1906) with clay.

She then fired the clay-coated books till all the paper burned off, leaving just the ceramic shell. Wan thus erases all traces of an oft-recited account of the past even as she records its demise in scorched earth.

'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.

'Silence and Its Reflections' (2014) is a series of six panels made of rice that mirror the undulating surface of an ocean. The waves within these ‘rice scapes’ carry miniscule fragments of text that have been handwritten on the grains. The panels are accompanied by magnifying glasses using which audiences can read these texts.

Each panel by Upadhyay contains 35 quotations that the artist has sourced from roadside signs, textbooks, newspapers or the boundary walls of churches and schools.

Meant for passers-by and often overly rhetorical in nature, these phrases acquire a certain solemnity when displaced on to the rice panels.

Combined with the powerful, wave-like gestural component — that of following the flow of texts on the panels through a looking glass — the work leads viewers into states of reflection.

As Mohaiemen writes in his essay 'Kazi in Nomansland', the poet, who had opposed plans to partition British India along communal lines, had by 1947 developed a condition that impaired his speech and memory and ultimately left him in a vegetative state.

After his family decided to stay on in India post-1947, he came to be celebrated in India as a mute testament to its secular credentials.

As the Bengali Nationalist movement gathered strength in what was then East Pakistan, the then Pakistani establishment sought to counter the dominance of the ‘Hindu poet’ Rabindranath Tagore by rebranding Kazi as a ‘Muslim poet’, even rewriting some of his poetry in the process.

In 1971, with the formation of Bangladesh, Indian government flew the ailing poet to Dhaka where he lived till his death in 1976 while under virtual house arrest by the military government headed by Ziaur Rahman.

Cartographic themes find expression in a large number of works by Mona Hatoum, a British artist of Palestinian descent. Born to exiled Palestinian parents in Beirut, Lebanon, Hatoum was in the UK when a civil war broke out in Lebanon, preventing her return. It is perhaps her experience as an exile that prompts Hatoum’s interest in the relationship between power and cartographic constructions of space.

In 1996, during a visit to Jerusalem, she made 'Present Tense' (1996) an installation made of locally produced soap bars on which Hatoum etched with red beads the fragmented map of Palestine drawn up under the Oslo accord. Maps recur in several of Hatoum’s works, such as 'Hot Spot' (2006), where she outlined continents on a steel globe using neon tubes that glowed like heated wires, or 'Projection' (2006), a deceptively simple map of the world made on off-white cotton that follows Peters Projection – a controversial representation of continental masses that rejects the traditional world map with its inflated Northern Hemisphere.

Exhibited at the Biennale, 'Routes AP' (2003) is a playful intervention on maps found in in-flight magazines.

For these drawings, Hatoum filled with colour the spaces that lie between lines denoting aircraft movement.

The resultant mesh resembles a complex climatic map that disrupts national boundaries and liberates the landscape.

Pen and ink on printed maps (five parts) \ Dimensions variable

One of India’s leading artists as well as a writer and pedagogue, Gulammohammed Sheikh is known for weaving into his works layers of references drawn from literature, art history, politics and autobiography.

'Gandhi and Gama' (2014) is a triptych that imagines a confrontation across centuries between two key protagonists in the story of colonialism in India.

In it, Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama, whose arrival in Malabar in the 15th century inaugurated the European scramble for India, looks across a mappa mundi (a medieval hand-drawn map of the world) at a young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi contemplating the demise of the British Raj in the 20th century.

Triptych \ Acrylic on canvas \ 113.5 X 113.5 in (central panel), 113.5 X 66 in (left and right panels each)