Tragedies, at times, bring out the extraordinary in us. Look at the Kashmir section in the Students’ Biennale and you will understand how. Fourteen students from the Institute of Music and Fine Arts, Srinagar, have let the devastating floods guide their creative pursuits and the result is a collaborative project at Mohammed Ali Warehouse in Mattancherry, as part of the Students' Biennale. It is a new element introduced at the second edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Whorled Explorations.
Photographs, a little girl’s shoe, a pencil box, art books, sketch books, a lamp and other everyday objects that they found in their surroundings post floods were gathered and made into an art work. “Their institute is a three floor building which remained submerged in water for 10 days,” says Aryakrishnan Ramakrishnan, curator of the Kashmir section at the Students’ Biennale.
As I write this, the 10 students accompanied by their teacher are undertaking a four-day journey to reach back home. Between 10 of them, they have just one phone, which most of the time remains unreachable.
It was with great difficulty that Ramakrishnan too made contact with the students initially. While other institutions responded promptly to the opportunity, there was silence from this end. “The phone network is choppy in Kashmir but it got worse in floods. When there was no response, we decided to travel to Kashmir. So we reached and saw the institute isn’t in a great shape compared to other art colleges in India. And there are hardly 30 students,” says Ramakrishnan.
In the following sessions with the students, discussions around the prospective work took place. The visiting curators realised that they were not interested in the usual narrative of Kashmir that is laced with displacement, violence and terrorism.
“All of them had taken part in the rescue operations, saving lives and helping out people. They were drawn towards these stories of regeneration,” explains the young curator.
He adds, “Ethics drove me at the time of selecting art works from Kashmir. I tried to include maximum participants, deviating from the usual practice.”
Refusing to paint a picture of Kashmir either as beautiful Kashmir or bloody Kashmir, they delved into their past, their surroundings of hope and renewal giving glimpses of a normal Kashmir.
“What happens when there are no killings...no tourists and it is all snow around. They feel we all know very little about that Kashmir,” he says.
Damaged photographs, film reels, found in their surroundings were reworked to give a new meaning.
The photo collage series has several copies of the same damaged photograph, redone, each with the face of a different personality sketched over it.
In an interview to the Kochi Biennale Foundation, one of the Kashmiri students, Bushra Mir had expressed, “The floods destroyed all the portfolios of all the students but we consider it as a creative intervention from nature.”"
Accompanying these objects are stories, real and imagined. While one creates a story around a magic carpet, the other one weaves a tale around a puppet, a kangri, measuring tape, sand glass.
Sample one of the stories printed and presented as part of the work: “Puppets” by Rufsa Bashir.
“There was a magician named Rafwa. One day he lost his magic wand, thereafter he used puppets to conduct his magic. Once I met him and came to know that he had lost his magic wand, I decided to help him. I searched the whole country and found the wand finally in the possession of a monkey. I gave a banana to the monkey and asked him for the wand, then I returned to where the magician lived and told him I had found his wand. He, in turn, gifted me these puppets and they have been with me since.”
The group even performed these stories at the Biennale and another performance is being planned in Delhi by Vadehra Art Gallery but the date hasn’t been confirmed as yet.
“They even contemplated destroying the works raising questions like what is art and would it still remain after these objects are destroyed,” says Ramakrishnan.
Alternative platform
Showcasing more than 100 works by art students from 37 government art schools in India, Students’ Biennale, organised in collaboration with FICA, offers a powerful overview of the pedagogies and practices emerging across the country. Fifteen curators have engaged with final year BFA and MFA students of art colleges to bring together the exhibition.
The exhibition spread over Mohammed Ali Warehouse and KVA Brothers in Fort Kochi has been conceived as part of Kochi Biennale Foundation’s higher education programme to create an alternative platform for students from Government-run art colleges in India to reflect upon their art practices and exhibit their works to a global audience.
