Soils and Indigeneity: 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
'NON-ALIGNED / NON-ALIENATED' - Nathalie Muchamad
Working in the Comoros Islands, Nathalie Muchamad’s practice derives from her Javanese and New-Caledonian ancestry, and the experiences of colonial slavery and indentured labour in the Indian and Pacific oceans.
The Blowers by Myriam Omar AwadiKochi-Muziris Biennale
The Blowers
The Blowers is a collection of fresh clay
sculptures of 8 pairs of shoes with footprints.
The Blowers by Myriam Omar AwadiKochi-Muziris Biennale
The Blowers
The shoes represent the workers who have been migrated to French colonies in the Indian Ocean for slavery by the western colonisers.
'Day Zero'- Pranay Dutta
Pranay Dutta’s practice deconstructs and reassembles elements from reality to create dystopian mindscapes in signature black-and�white imagery. Through computer-generated panoramas and architectural structures, the artist creates chilling visions.
Day Zero (2022) by Pranay DuttaKochi-Muziris Biennale
Dutta builds a cinematic narrative that begins with a drying riverbed. Slick, black, oil-like water ripples around monumental structures and monolithic silos. The video ends with an endlessly rippling digital mass.
Neti (2022) by Pranay DuttaKochi-Muziris Biennale
Water is the only suggestion of life in these dark, barren, desolate landscapes and industrial holdings. The movement and pace slowdown in Neti, yet the intensity of foreboding increases, with shots of drowning huts and abandoned houseboats conveying a sense of movement.
Day Zero (2022) by Pranay DuttaKochi-Muziris Biennale
Dutta’s acrylic-on-photograph works act as documentation of these sterile worlds. Plumes of mushroom smoke and a lack of humans and animals imply that this is the after, and that the world continues even when dead.
'Embassy'- Richard Bell
Richard Bell’s large-scale paintings often feature slogans that borrow from the language of protest posters and convey the full force of his political focus.
Bell uses his practice as a tool to speak out for social justice, land rights and Indigenous sovereignty in Australia. The impact of violent, European colonialism on millennia of culture continues to shape Aboriginal communities today. He works not only with painting, but also with video, installation and text. This diverse body of work often clearly critiques the legacies of European invasion.
'Alibi in North Sikkim'- Ruchika Negi and Amit Mahanti
Documentary filmmaker and educator Ruchika Negi works with filmmaker, cinematographer and editor Amit Mahanti to explore questions of ecological transformation, culture and politics.
Alibi in North Sikkim by Ruchika Negi and Amit MahantiKochi-Muziris Biennale
At the onset of their collaborative work in 2010, the state of Sikkim in Northeast India was witness to a spate of hydroelectric projects – 27 existing, ongoing and proposed works in the Teesta River basin.
In Chungthang, in the north of Sikkim, Teesta III, one of the largest hydroelectric projects in the area, was under construction. Alibi in North Sikkim summons the spectres of the past for a conversation with the present, moments recorded in images and confused words, in order to recall and reflect on the relationship between our internal and external landscapes and remind us of patterns that repeat ad-infinitum across time and contexts.
A decade later, the river is back in another shape and form. The mountains seem to have healed; the streets have gone quiet again. Vehicles full of tourists pass by, momentarily disrupting the silence. Everything seems just normal.
'All is water and to water we must return'- Sahil Naik
The work in Sahil Naik’s All is Water and to Water we Must Return emerges from his seven year-long engagement with the people of Curdi. It began with a forensic and spatial study of the landscape and architecture, the deterioration of which has accelerated this decade.
To commemorate Goa’s liberation from Portuguese rule in 1961, the first Chief Minister Dayanand Bandodkar commissioned a modernist dam. Despite concerns that the reservoir would submerge forests sacred to communities, mangroves, lush fields and bodies of water, along with 20 villages, including the historic villages of Curdi and Kurpem, the dam was built.
All is water and to water we must return by Sahil NaikKochi-Muziris Biennale
In the 1970s, the water levels started to rise, submerging the landscape bit by bit. Villagers began to slowly and hesitantly relocate, several of them staying until the waters finally entered their homes. Over 3000 families were displaced.
As the villagers left, people touched the waters that now envelops their homes, asking it to protect their lands. In the 1980s, a ‘miracle’ occurred. The waters of the reservoir receded in the summer, and when Curdi briefly resurfaced its former inhabitants returned home. Each summer since, as the waters recede, hundreds return. They clean the ruins and place vessels to symbolically occupy their homes. They sing to their lands and waters.
All is water and to water we must return by Sahil NaikKochi-Muziris Biennale
The people who knew Curdi as it once are is now at an advanced age. In the local language, there is a saying: ‘Histories may die with people, but a song, like hope, survives time’.
Stories collected by Naik have been transformed into songs that occupy old and new tunes, in order to prevent the loss of Curdi’s history. Naik’s sculptural installation invites us to temporarily occupy a section of the landscape, enveloped by these songs.
Saju Kunhan
Saju Kunhan’s works often trace his family’s ancestral history, existing only as oral histories, through evocative material, objects, museological imagery, and photography.
‘Back to the Soil’ (2023 by Saju KunhanKochi-Muziris Biennale
His concerns about history, migration, displacement, conquest & colonialism also implicate discourses of politics, power, and environmental degradation.
In ‘Back to the Soil’, Kunhan employs mud from the site of his ruined ancestral home, combined with portraits of his family members. Gaps, erasures, half-presences mark the portraits, which are sometime obscured and sometime opaque. The blank tiles in the work are also symbolic of the square idols of the deity Mahabali, often found outside homes in the region. The mud represents to return to the soil, of human mortality.
The photographs commemorate the escape of his ancestors from North Malabar to forests of central Kerala during Tipu Sultan’s battle march, and of a home that no longer exists, once created by the descendants of the exiles, situated in the nearby area of the first settlement. A strong personal resonance exists here, for the artist a significant part of his childhood was spent there. The objects in the installations are gathered from the site.
Santhi EN
Based in Irinjalakuda, a town in Thrissur district, Kerala, E.N. Santhi chronicles life as she knows it, as the town and landscape around her change.
Untitled by Santhi E NKochi-Muziris Biennale
Mostly produced at her kitchen table and then tucked away under her bed, her paintings are nostalgic, temporal documents that focus on her town and the intersecting lives of its inhabitants, offering a window onto ways of life, work and play.
Untitled by Santhi E NKochi-Muziris Biennale
Santhi depicts scenes of children playing games or reading. We see women at work, tending to cattle or working in fields, as well as forests, plants and trees.
Untitled by Santhi E NKochi-Muziris Biennale
As a child, she was forbidden from seeing, let alone visiting, these shrines, despite one being situated right behind her house. This ‘not seeing’ stoked her imagination and informed these paintings. What began as fear in childhood turned into curiosity as an adult.
In Santhi’s paintings, a sense of longing and anxiety emerge from the loss of the old and the encroachment of the new on her ancestral home, her childhood and the rituals and traditions she grew up around – sentiments that occupy these painted worlds.
Smitha GS
A self-taught artist from Kozhikode in Kerala, Smitha travels through a parallel timeline via the planes of memory, recreating her own life through colourful landscapes filled with chameleons, grasshoppers, micro-organisms and aquatic creatures.
Untitled by Smitha G.SKochi-Muziris Biennale
Smitha’s metaphysical paintings simultaneously reveal the enigma of tiny creatures and the enormity of hills and flowerbeds. At times the work is gloomy, reflecting melancholy and dread, while at other times it is dazzling, rich in embellishment and romance. T
Untitled by Smitha G.SKochi-Muziris Biennale
The murky world of microbes represents uncertainty, longing, motherhood and physical desire, while also enabling the artist to transcend time and space by touching on unseen inner realities.
Untitled by Smitha G.SKochi-Muziris Biennale
The depiction of grasshoppers in Smitha’s earlier compositions later metamorphoses into palm leaves, a form reminiscent of her childhood, suggesting a non-linear approach to art-making.
Smitha indicates that the limitations imposed on her by her childhood and rural life delayed her pursuit of art, something she has had to struggle for throughout her life. The critical process of recreating subjectivity goes hand in hand with the survival of her practice, and Smitha reclaims her own alter ego through her work. Smitha says that especially when painting landscapes, she re-creates herself on a level that she has never experienced before.
'MAWBRI DIARIES'- Treibor Mawlong
Treibor Mawlong records the ways of life in Mawbri, a remote village in the South West Khasi Hills of Meghalaya in India, close to the Bangladeshi border. The village of about 50 households tends to and works in plantations on the steep hill slopes.
MAWBRI DIARIES by Treibor MawlongKochi-Muziris Biennale
Residents plant bay leaves, long peppers, oranges, areca nuts and betel leaves, as well as other plants. Life here has its own rhythm, occasionally disturbed by the world outside. The closest town is three hours away.
MAWBRI DIARIES by Treibor MawlongKochi-Muziris Biennale
Mawlong’s practice incorporates drawings, woodcuts and watercolours, and documents the politics, social structures, occupations, methods, customs and traditions of the village. Using a language derived from comic books, his work sometimes includes little notes scribbled.
'Kho ki pa lü (Up Down and Sideways)'- U-ra-mi-li
Members of the Chennai-based performance collective Perch, Anushka Meenakshi and Iswar Srikumar started the project u-ra-mi-li (‘the song of our people’ in Chokri, a language spoken in Nagaland and Manipur in Northeast India) to draw connections between labour and music.
Kho ki pa lü (Up Down and Sideways), by U-ra-mi-liKochi-Muziris Biennale
They look at these connections through the media of sound, film and performance while travelling across different parts of India and exploring local traditions in music. The resulting films are thus created in transit.
The documentary captures this embodied vocabulary and the performative syntax. Made over five years of engagement with the local community, enacted through translated exchanges and fieldwork, the film explores the celebration of a music and community that has existed and thrived through the last several decades, despite influences, changes and crises.
