Aspinwall House B / Bungalow

Also presented is a triptych that carries echoes of a time when the lure of spices led voyagers from across the world to the coast of Kerala.

The attractions the coast held and the contact and confrontation that ensued are captured here by the figure of a giant pepper corn looming over the Arabian Sea, an object simultaneously of danger and intrigue.

Janine Antoni’s works are marked by her desire to make visible the intimacy of the artistic process and the journey of the self entwined within the material progress of an art work. Sensuous, soft but visceral in their effect, her works transcend the distinctions between conceptual art, sculpture and performance art.

'Touch' (2002) explores the idea of a horizon and what it represents to the human being. The horizon — an imaginary line where sky meets the earth — is a line pregnant with possibilities but impossible to touch: an illusion which moves away as you move close. In 'Touch', the artist is filmed as she walks a tightrope positioned against a seascape opposite her childhood home in the Bahamas, a group of Caribbean islands where Christopher Columbus alighted in 1492 at the end of his own journey towards an unknown horizon, having set out on a miscalculated quest to find a short sea route to the riches of Asia.

In 'Touch', Antoni positions the camera in such a way that in one magical moment, as she walks precariously across the frame, the tightrope dips with her weight and the artist ‘touches’ the line of the horizon – symbolically disembarking on a point that seafarers across history have striven towards.

Mark Formanek’s 'Standard Time' (2007) is a 24-hour performance video that shows a group of labourers racing against time to manually create a ‘digital’ time display. The performance designed by Formanek and realised by Datenstrudel involved 70 workers who, over 24 hours, continuously reassembled a wooden scaffolding to keep up with a digital time display, making 1,611 changes in the process. The performance was captured in a looped video that, when adjusted to the local time in Kochi, works like a digital clock.

As the workers in the video struggle to keep up with time with less than a minute to complete each change, the audience is forced to share their anxiety. What at first might seem like the recording of a futile exercise soon begins to embody the tyrannous grasp time has on our lives. Formanek points to time as we experience it, domesticated within the confines of a clock. Here, in a dramatic reversal, it is the timekeepers who are imprisoned within its endless march.

Embedded in the performance is a subtle comment on labour, an entity largely rendered invisible and disposable in the age of sweatshops and financial markets. In 'Standard Time', labour is made immensely visible in the form of a troop of quasi-mythical workers keeping time on behalf of us all.

Lavanya Mani works predominantly with textiles and the various ‘traditions’ and techniques associated with textile painting, printing and embroidery in India. She is interested in correspondences between the worlds of textiles and text — manifest in expressions such as ‘to spin a yarn’, ‘to weave a tale’ or ‘to fabricate’ — and their link to the construction of history, especially orientalist narratives about the East.

Mani’s exhibits at the Biennale are part of an ongoing series of paintings on cotton cloth called 'Travellers Tales – Blueprints' (2014). The paintings evoke the sails of a ship and carry images through which the artist seeks to map the complex role that dyed and printed textiles played in the history of colonialism in India. They simultaneously draw our attention to historical processes that led to the emergence of ‘high art’ and ‘craft’ as categories defined in opposition to each other.

In creating the imagery these paintings carry, Mani used ‘Kalamkari’, a centuries-old textile painting technique from India that uses natural dyes. As the artist points out, the popularity of ‘Kalamkari’ (chintz) textiles in 17th-century Europe was such that French and English governments outlawed it to protect local mills.

Inserted into the paintings are the texts of letters written by travellers to India that attempt to decode ‘Kalamkari’ and other techniques in order to replicate them back in Europe.

Ahmed’s portraits of these vessels show them sitting on mud banks like beached whales, stilled and ready to be dismantled. All around stretches a desolate landscape marked only by barbed wire fences and the bare figures of labourers whose hazardous job it is to rip apart and salvage what they can from the discarded ships. Metal Graves is thus a portrait of the flipside of exuberant narratives of growth and mobility in a globalised world.

Viewed through the artist’s bleached frames, everything in the landscape stands still, moments frozen in some distant past. To Ahmed, these vessels are relics of the globalised world they helped create; their empty hulls lined up against the Bay of Bengal like grave stones that mark events in history that go beyond the stories of individual ships.

Ahmed photographed the ship-breaking yard using small film-based cameras in 2009, having gained access with difficulty into an area where cameras are regarded with grave suspicion.

In the resultant series of prints, he has carefully preserved the processes involved in their production, juxtaposing in rows successive photographs in the same order as they were captured on the roll and leaving intact on individual frames the scratches and other damage sustained by the film.

Sudhir Patwardhan is one of India’s foremost artists. His exhibit at the Biennale is composed of the triptych 'Building a Home; Exploring the World' (2014) and a set of lithographs titled 'Encounters in Time' (2014) that together explore twin human impulses towards migration and settlement.

Migration by will and under duress is central to the story of civilisation, from the emergence of the first band of humans out of Africa to the species’ gradual conquest of the Earth and beyond.

Straddling the two is the central image, depicting 'The Tower of Babel' by Pieter Bruegel and 'Monument to the Third International' by Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin rising from a coastal landscape modeled on Kochi. The two iconic (even if ultimately unrealised) constructions are, to the artist, symbols both of man’s mastery over nature and his aspiration towards an ideal unified society. In inserting the legend of Babel, Patwardhan refers to the centrality of language in human history; as the basis not just of our definitions of home and oneness but also of our ability to interpret and perceive the universe.

Overlaid on the triptych are quotes from sources ranging from the Bible to the science fiction novels of Stanislaw Lem.

Scottish artist Katie Peterson’s works are steeped in poetry, play and mysticism. She is fascinated by nature and natural sciences, especially astronomy, and often translates laboriously accumulated scientific knowledge into works of subtle humour that act as wormholes where the cosmic meets the everyday banal.

Also displayed is a work from a series by Paterson called 'Ideas', composed of short haiku-like sentences that, according to the artist, turn “some of her unrealisable ideas into impossible statements of intent”.

In Wave II, Tanveer powerfully captures that which can not be contained– the ocean, a formidable presence in the life of an artist who grew up in a port town.

The installation consists of a rectangular transparent container filled with water that is positioned behind an opening in a wall. Within this frame, waves move vigorously, constantly altering the surface of the water and the light that filters through it. According to the artist, it is the duality of elements such as light and water, their existence “both as objective entities in thought and constantly shifting phenomena in the world” that interests her.

The drawings create on the walls the illusion of land and water. Soon, the prison is turned inside out.

The walls seem to disappear into the drawings, giving the Black Pearl a chance to escape his prison.