FEATURE

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Indian Artists in Sydney Biennale 2008

Shivangi Ambani-Gandhi ventures into Sydney Biennale 2008 and impressed by the works done by Indian artists. Nalini Malani, Vivan Sundaram, Sharmila Samant, Ranbir Kaleka and Bari Kumar are the representatives of India at the Biennale. Shivangi discusses about their work briefly here in the piece.

A dome-shaped, deserted, military bunker on the very edges of the history imbued Cockatoo Island in Sydney, fills with shadows from Nalini Malani’s ‘The tables have turned’ A shadow play (2008). Transparent cylinders rotate slowly, projecting shadows of tigers and skulls and running children as they collide and disappear to create a narrative of epic proportions.

The new installation, which references Buddhist prayer wheels, is Malani’s interpretation of the theme for the Biennale of Sydney 2008—Revolutions – Forms that Turn. Guest curator for this year’s Biennale, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev says she wanted to locate Indian art within an international context and allow Indian artist to interact with other International artists as well as Australian history.

“Cockatoo Island was once a convict prison, then a ship yard and was later abandoned in the early 80s. Malani’s shadow and light installation is like a projection of the ghosts of the past and maybe the future,” says Christov-Bakargiev, also the chief curator at the Castello di Rivoli, Italy.

“There has been Indian representation in the Biennale before,” she says. “However, this Biennale showcases Indian art more than ever before, perhaps because of my own understanding of the meanings and long relationship with the Indian art community.”
 
Along with Malani, Vivan Sundaram, Sharmila Samant, Ranbir Kaleka and Bari Kumar are the Indian representatives this year. However, Christov-Bakargiev refuses to identify art by nationality.
 
“There have been some excellent international exhibitions that have showcased Indian contemporary art, like the Edge of Desire. Even the Venice Biennale hosted an Indian pavilion a few years ago—but it was not part of the Biennale itself,” she says. “It is necessary to break boundaries that are not necessarily productive and look beyond national identification. This is perhaps the second phase (of the recognition of Indian art in the international art world).”
 
Sharmila Samant’s three-part work for the Biennale, though local in its use of signifiers, addresses a global problem. Against the Grain, an installation of 1000 handcrafted cobras woven from grain and bamboo, made in collaboration with the Indigenous Devguniya community from Bolangir comments on the tragedy brought onto the farming community with the advent of genetically modified grain. Sounds of the Silenced is a sound-scape of the songs sung by women in the fields, created using seed-storage barrels collected from across India and refashioned into resonance chambers. As part of the final element of the work titled Gilt, the rice cobras will be auctioned, with proceeds going back to the farming community. “There is thus the notion of recycling art,” says Christov-Bakargiev. “The idea of recycling as an interpretation of the theme of revolutions for this Biennale is an important one.”

Vivan Sundaram too carries forward the theme of recycling—photographs from his new project, Trash, and the video Turning, document an urban landscape consisting of garbage that he created in his studio. The work comments on the social implications of waste and the frenzy of global consumption.
 
Bari Kumar’s, Army of Forgotten Souls (2005), a poetic celebration of the hand drawn rickshaw, is another take on the advent globalisation. Christov-Bakargiev’s thoughtful curatorial style places Kumar’s video right next to Marcel Duchamp’s monumental Bicycle Wheel (1913). “Duchamp’s wheel was a critique of the consumer culture on the rise at that time. I wanted to compare this work of the past with a work from the present, where Kumar comments on the death of the rickshaw with the advent of globalisation,” she says Christov-Bakargiev.
 
Yet, she reserves her highest praises for Ranbir Kaleka. “He is one of the greatest artists in the world, well known for his radical originality and innovation.”

Since the late 1990s, Kaleka has been overlaying video on painting. His new work for the Biennale pays homage to his first work created using this technique, Man Threading a Needle (1998-99). I am usually weary of new media video installations, but Kaleka’s He was a Good Man (2008) is a phantasmagorical narrative of a middle-aged man intensely focused on threading a needle. The projector flickers on and off, and the whole work twitches and shivers, but the needle never gets thread--the narrative doesn't even exist. Christov-Bakargiev explains, “Kaleka is interested in movement as a psychological emancipation.” and emotional emancipation is what viewers will get at this Biennale.