The Oriental Atlantis: Critical Notes on India's First Biennale

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THE ORIENTAL ATLANTIS:

CRITICAL NOTES ON INDIA'S FIRST BIENNALE

SANDIP K LUIS

Research Student

Visual Studies, School of Arts and AestheticsJawaharlal Nehru University

New Delhi

[email protected]

This is a longer version of an article that appeared in the Economic & Political Weekly,

MAY 17, 2014 Vol. XLIX No 20

mailto:[email protected]



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THE ORIENTAL ATLANTIS:

CRITICAL NOTES ON INDIA'S FIRST BIENNALE

SANDIP K LUIS

Research StudentVisual Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics

Jawaharlal Nehru University

New [email protected]

Abstract: This article critically looks at the recent Kochi Muziris Biennale and a few important

exhibits in the background of the controversies they created. In order to problematise Biennale’s

ideology of cosmopolitanism, through which the organizers tried to surpass the existing

institutions of art and democracy, I will dwell upon the issues of spectatorship and thediscursivity of art practices. The argument I make here is that there is a shift away from the

principles of dissent and radical egalitarianism in the course of contemporary Indian art. The

Biennale is an exemplary case of this turn for its biased interpretation of Kerala’s cultural

history and the uncriticality of most of its exhibits, in which process, the dialogical and

dialectical relationship between the artist and the viewer is undermined.

Keywords: Kochi Muziris Biennale, Cosmopolitanism, Democracy, Spectatorship,

Contemporary Indian Art, Kerala

[I am extremely grateful to Prof. Rustom Bharucha for his support and guidance that made my

arguments sharper and better organised. I also acknowledge Prof. Parul Dave Mukherji for her

suggestions and encouragement and Meera Gopakumar for her continuous assistance and

feedbacks in writing this article. And I thank the Kerala Lalit Kala Academy and the Govt.

College of Fine Arts, Trissur, for recently giving me an opportunity to present a Malayalam

version of this paper and thereby helping me enrich it with new observations. The critical

commentary from the anonymous reviewer of EPW has been significantly helpful in verifying

and refining some of my arguments.]

mailto:[email protected]



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India’s first biennale is over. The transnational exhibition of contemporary art designed to take

place every two years, known as ‘Kochi Muziris Biennale’ was held at Kerala’s business capital,

Kochi, from December 2012 to March 2013. The organisers of the Biennale claim that it opened

the doors of Indian contemporary art to the opportunities and challenges of global art, and

rejuvenated Kerala’s inactive artworld. Along with such self-esteemed claims about the Kochi

Muziris Biennale (hereafter KMB), there remains numerous controversies regarding its curatorial

administration—notably, the heated debate over the dubious procedures of public fund allocation

and expenditure, the complete exclusion of government agencies like Kerala Lalit Kala Academy

and Government Fine Arts Colleges from the decision-making bodies of the Biennale, the

validity of the organisers’ recent claim that KMB was a failure in being a profitable venture but a

success in introducing Indian art to the world, and the Kerala Government’s recent decision to

withdraw the vigilance enquiry by allocating the additional fund of Rs. 4 crore despite the

official reports of financial irregularities, an act subsequently stayed by the Kerala High Court.i

The objective of this article is neither to introduce the ‘idea of biennale’ for its newness in the

Indian context nor to evaluate KMB’s success and failure from the vantage point of an ‘ideal

biennale’.ii Instead, my attempt is to shift the focus away from the above mentioned

controversies regarding KMB’s institutional structure and financial expenditure in order to grasp

the underlying politics of artworks and spectatorial experience by asking as to how a global and

controversial event named ‘Kochi Muzirs Biennale’ was experienced as well as comprehended

within the restrictive limits of the local. Problematising the organisers’ claim that KMB

‘democratised art,’ I will argue that this vastly exaggerated claim has been made not only at the

expense of any serious engagement with institutional procedures in a democratic framework, as

the controversies I mentioned above suggest, but also by disdaining certain principles of art and

democracy in a larger context. In this sense, this essay is not a review of the exhibition and its

curatorial design, but a critique of KMB’s ideological presuppositions among which the idea of

‘cosmopolitanism’ plays the most determining role in deciding the event’s basic aesthetic.

THE ORIENTAL ATLANTIS

What one may note in all the euphoria around KMB is the similarities it has with the

liberalisation rhetoric of the early 1990s in India.iii

KMB’s conceptual note starts like this:



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“There couldn’t have been a better space than Kochi for symbolic free speech; a space for

expressions created and leveraged by the various social activist movements.” This liberal and

expansive vision is further complemented by the next paragraph:

Kochi Muziris Biennale explores the possibilities of blurring the boundaries, in ageographical region where boundaries are blurred in a local and cosmopolitan

way, where the surroundings offer inspiration by way of the character of the placeone can exhibit in. It can generate response to something that is already there as a

public space in the neighborhoods, where perceived political content has been a

major determinant of what survives and of what gets created as art in the first

place.iv

Having lived most of my life in Kochi, I am surprised to read such statements. Though

Malayalis are popularly known as well-educated and sufficiently modernised or even

‘cosmopolitanised’, it is impossible to regard these features as the ideal conditions for good art. Nevertheless, because of the continuing caste/gender inequalities and the influential role of

religious groups in deciding cultural/educational policies of the state, the overblown secular and

egalitarian image of Malayali society has always appeared to me as a dubious construct.v I am

always perplexed by the fact that despite the highly developed socio-economic situation in

Kerala compared to other Indian states, which is generally described as ‘the Kerala model of

development’, our artists have never found Kerala’s cultural sphere to be particularly friendly to

their creative pursuits. Instead, what we have seen over the years is a mass migration of Malayali

artists to other parts of India (although interestingly, this has not been the case with Malayali

writers, poets and dramatists in general). Then why, all of a sudden, does Kerala become the

most desired destination of contemporary cutting-edge art, and why did this situation not exist

before? If the answer to this question lies in the allegedly cosmopolitan and progressive outlook

of Keralites, then how does one account for the huge exodus of Malayali artists to other

metropolitan cities, which even the organisers of KMB were part of? Maybe the answer lies not

in the quasi-secular and imperfect egalitarian character of Kerala society in general and the

people of Kochi in particular, but in the invention of a mythical and utopian place called Muziris

to complement the malfunctioning Malayali public sphere.

Muziris was an ancient seaport and urban centre that existed from around the 1st century AD,

which was developed during the period of the Chera dynasty. From the 6th

century onwards, it



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mysteriously disappeared from every known map of antiquity. Today it is widely presumed that

there was a catastrophic cyclone in 1341 which drowned the port-town in a massive flood,

completely altering the region’s geography. The recent discovery of the lost town created a huge

controversy among Kerala’s historians along with contestations on the presence of Buddhist

culture in the region.

It is the additional ornamentation of Muziris as the land of milk and honey, cultural exchange

and cohabitation, that provides the feeble conceptual ground of KMB. Leaving aside numerous

issues around the history of Muziris like the understudied conflictual trade relations of Jews,

Romans, Arabs, Jains and the local inhabitants, the tragic disappearance of Buddhist culture and

the violent establishment of Brahmanism and its caste-system and among other factors,vi

KMB’s

version of this ancient port-town represents a false history in the guise of making a utopian future

possible in the here and now. The ancient port city that sunk into the ocean of oblivion becomes

an oriental Atlantis and resurfaces as a new site of cultural ideals. But if it is a certain chunk of

human history that was engulfed by water as this narration would have us believe, then what we

see in KMB is an eclipse of human history itself by different variations of the flood myth. Along

with the disappearance of history, a story of struggle and dissent also disappears. It is this

replacement of committed historicity by mere histrionics that drives many artworks displayed in

KMB, including that of Subodh Gupta and Vivan Sundaram.

Installations by Subodh Gupta and Vivan Sundaram: Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2013



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Subodh Gupta’s large traditional boat of coastal Kerala, containing randomly collected objects

of everyday life, effortlessly evokes the feeling of migration and departure/arrival. Though the

answer to the crucial question, what causes migration in the here and now, was deliberately left

vague on account of the artwork’s alleged ‘complexity’ (a term which recurs in the popular

media when talking about the installations exhibited in the Biennale), for an average Malayali

the artwork was easily understood within the context of recent fear-mongering ‘flood narratives’

which have proliferated around the Mullaperiyar Dam and tsunami related tragediesvii

. This

paranoia in the popular unconsciousness about the coming Deluge was further reinforced by

Vivan Sundaram. Using the discarded shards from the excavation site, he tried to recreate the

‘lost civilisation’ of Muziris. The visual result was a flat simulacrum of the existing popular

imagination about the historical site as a ghost town of unidentifiable ruins and muddy relics,

reminiscent of a grand past lingering in shallow melancholy. By indirectly complementing

humanity’s age-old ‘flood myth’ and making use of the narrative’s global currency in the

contemporary post-tsunami era, Sundaram reinforced the ideological credentials of KMB, which

are not only ahistorical, but anti-historical.

In all these cases, the real protagonist is Nature in all its power and grandeur. This

replacement of historical forces by natural powers also reveals that history as we understand it

today is ultimately determined by the autonomous laws of nature. It is by substituting history

with nature that the popularised story of Muziris city meets the contemporary versions of

eschatological imagination (I will elaborate on this point while discussing Vivek Vilasini’s

artworks). If history is understood as a fall from the Eden of cosmopolitan life in which everyone

lived as sons of God (remember St. Paul’s version of cosmopolitanism), and also if the

momentum of history is seen as driven by natural forces that vary from great natural calamities

to our simple sinful drives, then what is left for us to do is the retrieval of our lost innocence.

But the notion of ‘innocence’ has always been an ideological category designed to eradicate the

subjects’ critical rationality and to inculcate an unconditional belief in the messiahs from otherworlds. That is why there is an invocation of spiritual metaphors in the KMB conceptual note

when it says: “[KMB] is the allure of possibilities that inspired the great thinkers and saints to



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embark on numerous adventures—of the body and the mind.” But how radical are their

adventures?

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF CRITICALITY

According to KMB’s conceptual note:

[Kochi’s cosmopolitanism] is one that is at the crux of the civilisational crisis—

one that is economical, ideological and, thereby geo‐ political. The compendium

of these complexities is what gives this Biennale a context and an enquiry. […]Conflicts that lend a modern explanation for the mutual distrust and misgivings

that pervades in not just the immediate society but also snapping at the delicate

fabric of India’s assertion as a nation‐state and the globe that is ironically

celebrating its flat character at the same time.

What we have to note in this vague statement is a subtle but clear contradiction. Ifcosmopolitanism is an ideology of transcending national boundaries and imagining a global

community, then on what grounds can we expect that it is sympathetic to the ‘delicate fabric of

the Indian nation-state’?

Even long before the Third International’s famous distinction between ‘bourgeois

cosmopolitanism’ and ‘proletarian internationalism’ Frederic Engels said that ‘the fraternisation

of nations, as it is now being carried out everywhere by the extreme proletarian party [is] in

contrast to the old instinctive national egoism and to the hypocritical private-egotisticalcosmopolitanism of free trade’ (Engels 1845). Though reading this sentence in the ‘post-Soviet

era’ and withered proletarian internationalism necessitates critical revaluations, one thing is

undoubtedly clear. The space left by the progressive communist politics does not invalidate the

analytical distinction Engels had put forward for a simple reason: the extreme vulnerability and

easy adaptability of cosmopolitan humanitarianism for the sinister objectives of oligarchic

capital (Amin 2011:130). Hence, the daunting question of our time is this: what can be regarded

as the ‘outside’ of cosmopolitanism other than the ideologies of nationalist/racist parochialism or

religious fundamentalism?

The task of this essay is not to answer this massive question but to emphasise the need for a

radical outside, assuming that there cannot be a critical voice other than from the ‘outside’.viii

It



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is by looking from this vantage point that the KMB’s pretension of criticality collapse into its

own self-contradictions. Its conceptual note says: “Critical imagery can only have its genesis in a

shared space where celebrations of ethnicity or historical themes can collapse into metonymic

utterances that cancel the distinctions between places and boundaries, aesthetics and politics,

between life and art.” Here is the paradox. We are familiar with the great avant-garde dream of

unifying life and art, aesthetics and politics (Burger 1984:92). But this was a self-consciously

fashioned objective of avant-garde art and not a presupposed condition to practise art, as is the

case of KMB. What is the function of the so called ‘critical imageries’ within an ideal space of

no division when criticism by definition is a gesture of partisanship and an act of separation? In

other words, what is there as ‘outside’ to the grand unified space claimed by KMB? If there isn’t

any, then the conclusion is that what we are encountering here is a criticism with reformatory

interest, not radical concern.

The idea of a unified/self-contained space also means that there is no dialogue / conflict

between the artworks produced / exhibited within the ideal world of KMB. If this is the case,

then the only ‘Other’ that these artworks and artists face is the viewer. By following the

quotidian sense of the term, ‘viewer’ is a form of subjectivity which does not take part in the

production and reproduction of the artwork. Hence, potentially, the viewer is outside the work of

art as its other. But whoever tries to create a separate space outside the conceptual premises of

KMB can only be seen as a subject of regressive sensibilities because the Biennale is already the

seat of all desired virtues like cosmopolitanism, free speech and cultural cohabitation.

Since there is no space available outside the Biennale other than as a deviation from its

unquestionable ideals, it is not at all difficult to see that this outside is constituted by a dual

agency: the spectator-subject as the ‘other’ of artwork and the citizen-subject as the ‘other’ of the

cosmopolitan artist. This latter point is well explained on the website of the Biennale Foundation.

It says: “The Kochi-Muziris Biennale seeks to create a new language of cosmopolitanism and

modernity, [and] to reflect the new confidence of Indian people who are slowly, but surely,

building a new society that aims to be liberal, inclusive, egalitarian and democratic.” Given the

facts that India is already the ‘world’s largest democracy’ despite its inherent caste/class

contradictions, and a primary example of third world modernity, it is not at all clear in this



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statement as to what KMB actually intends to do. Despite the lack of clarity, what is evident here

is nothing but a desire to paternalise Indian people, through the comprador figure of the

‘Cosmopolitan-Indian Artist’. It is not difficult to see that the ‘other’ of this glorified mediatory

figure is the belittled figure of the third-world citizen-spectator. And it is through him/her that we

are compelled to mark an outside space of resistance for further investigations.

SELF-PORTRATIS OF AN ARROGANT ARTWORLD

'Celebration in the Laboratory’, Photography installation by Atul Dodiya: Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2013

Atul Dodiya’s ‘Celebration in the Laboratory’ displayed unnamed photographs of his friends

from the artworld (varying from artists to buyers) along with a few portraits of western masters

of art. The selective and tension-free history that Dodiya narrates is in sync with the overall

project of KMB because of their common denominator of cosmopolitan rhetoric. Whereas the

ideology of cosmopolitanism conceives the whole world as a big family, as the cliché of

vasudhaiva kutumbakam suggests, Dodiya’s installation depicts his “personal view of the Indian

art scene exactly like a large joint family.”ix

Dodiya further says that the site of exhibition was a

laboratory before and he wanted to use this aspect of the space as part of the concept of his

installation. Indeed, on the KMB website, it is stated that “[The] laboratory is the place where a

scientist experiments and here the artist [Dodiya] becomes a scientist using the ‘white cube’ of

an old chemical lab to evoke a chemistry between the art and the viewer.”x



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The simple question here is: what is it that makes these photographs of the artist’s friends

exhibition-worthy? In other words, what is it that an ordinary viewer is supposed to read from

these unnamed photographs, other than a self-enclosed ‘great and joyous joint family of art’ to

which s/he is still a stranger? The boastful images of Indian artists with luxury cars or

participating in glamorous cocktail parties blunt the viewer’s critical sense because the audacious

arrogance and unabashed flamboyance s/he encounters here are after all the private matters of a

big family which does not have anything to do with the outside-public world. The paternalistic

feudal romance of our family-man is also designed to absorb the voices of dissent, especially that

of the younger generation: for example, note the photograph of Johny M L, a Malayali art critic

based in Delhi, who struggles to create a parallel artworld under his curatorial title and has

openly challenged KMB’s curatorial agenda, if not its ideology as such.xi

‘Between One Shore and Several Others’, Digital Prints by Vivek Vilasini, Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2013

Whereas Atul Dodiya’s arrogance lies in treating viewers as mere specimens of an imaginary

laboratory, in the case of Vivek Vilasini’s artwork the arrogance can be discerned in his

understanding of history itself. His exhibition of prints titled as ‘Between One Shore and Several

Others’ gives us a clearer understanding of the idea of aestheticised arrogance that we have

discussed above. In Vilasini’s work we find that the artist is a powerful presence effortlessly

intruding on the existing narratives of history, upon whom the dead and flattened icons of the

past fall as mere ephemeral shadows. In a series of self-portrait photographs, the artist’s face is

unabashedly superimposed by the projected images of famous personalities like Che Guera,

Malcom X, Mother Teresa, B R Ambedkar, Sree Narayana Guru, and M K Gandhi. The spirits of



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historical past from all over the world are conjured up here by the shamanic artist for some

unaccountable reason. This strange spiritual cosmopolitanism that the artist seems to be claiming

here is surprising on many accounts. Without taking the incommensurability between most of the

historical figures into consideration — for example the fierce ideological battle between Gandhi

and Ambedkar on the issue of Dalits — the common link that connects these photographs is the

artist’s enlightened face and the blurred background of book shelves. What ‘synthesises’ the

projected luminous image with the self-portrait photograph is a cheap visual trick; adjusting one

eye of the image to coincide exactly with one of the artist’s eyes. The vulgar result which

Vilasini confidently presents as a sign of intellectual companionship inadvertently reveals the

artist’s impaired historical vision: the cyclopean perception of history as one-dimensional and

unilateral.

'Last Supper Gaza', Digital Print on Archival Canvas by Vivek Vilasini, Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2013

It is through the signals of this weakened artistic vision that we have to understand another

work by Vivek Vilasini known as ‘Last Supper Gaza’, displayed on the opposite wall. It is a

recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic ‘Last Supper’, featuring thirteen young women clad in

burqas in place of Jesus Christ and his twelve disciples. By reading this work along with his

earlier rendering of the ‘Last Supper’, in which the original characters are replaced by Kathakali

actors of Kerala within a metropolitan background, one can assume that here as well what

interests the artist are the fluidity of identities in the globalised world and the laissez faire

economy of cultural differences.



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If not advocating the ideology of multiculturalism, which was the case in Vilasini’s earlier

works, ‘Last Supper-Gaza’ seems to preach a different dogma which is far more overarching and

sublimated: the value of cosmopolitan morality. For example, the ‘lot notes’ published in

Christies’ auction-site says that ‘Last Supper Gaza’ “brings forth contemporary global concerns

on the issues of faith and betrayal.”xii

In every interpretation of the artwork, two things come to

the fore: its moralistic content with global outreach and its strong eschatological reference, in

other words, foundation of a privileged communion and redefinition of human history as a story

of redemption. ‘The Last Supper Gaza’, at least in its auction-house versions, is a token image

for global humanitarian discourse to protect fragile international laws, in order to guarantee the

coming kingdom of cosmopolitan rule where man’s natural disposition for a sinful life is

promised to be redeemed by founding a new communion. This story of redemption, however, is

just a story of displacement where the ‘natural laws’ of capital and social inequalities will be

displaced and sublimated as ‘natural flaws’ of human beings which will be redeemed when the

narrative of history is suspended by ‘divine’ intrusion. In this sense, Vilasini’s two versions of

the Last Supper theme, one as redemptive and other as laissez-faire, can be read in their ultimate

complementarity made possible by the artist’s displacement technique for sublimating the

explicit apolitical aesthetics of his earlier works.

SURGES OF GLOBALISATION AND A DROWNING PAINTER

‘Thoombinkal Chathan’, Oil on Canvas, by Reji K P, Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2013



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In the context of India’s liberal democracy, Dalits have a unique role to play by keeping the

state in check. But when the neoliberal state’s liberal policies have given way to transnational-

NGO activism, many Dalit spokespersons have succumbed to the lure of global capitalism for

immediate tactical gains by diluting larger strategic principles. K P Regi’s painting represents

such a problematic tendency of Dalit politics. The painting in question is named after a local

Dalit legendary character ‘Thoombinkal Chathan’, and the description displayed along with the

painting goes like this: “According to most versions of the legend [of Chathan], he has managed

to protect the land by sacrificing his own life [by being a human-bund to protect the paddy field

from flood]. In a broader sense, this narrative symbolises the Dalit community’s deep rooted

relationship with land and ecology, even though most often they are deprived of any form of

ownership to the land. The painting traces this local legend in order to initiate a discourse on our

contemporary time.”

In Reji’s painting, it is the peacefully reclining figure of the artist that we recognise as the

modern avatar of Thoombinkal Chathan. The representational space is divided into two by the

naked body of the artist. On the one hand, there is a placid and lively space of local cohabitation

filled with the memories of a communist culture, pitched against the background of a mammoth

naval ship (arriving from the distant horizon as if it were a symbol of global power). It is from

this dominating space of local-global conflict that the Dalit body of the artist seems to be

protecting a narrow area of farmland at the bottom of the painting.

Whatever inferences the viewer can deduce from the painting, the artist clearly states one

thing through the allegory of Thoombingal Chathan. Like the legendary hero, the painter wants

to prove his loyalty to his vocation. Reji K. P is one of the few artists in India who manages to

hold the poetry of art along with the politics of self. But when the tides of global art come, he

seems to be anxiously defensive about his painted life-world upon which, as the allegory of

Chathan suggests, the artist does not have any claim (perhaps due to the increasingly alienating

power of the existing gallery-system and art market).

The success of Reji’s painting is that it confidently engages with the issues of the unwritten

histories of subaltern life and the disappearance of local habitats. But along with the dead

‘mediatic-realist’ language of the painting, he seems to be paying a huge price for his artistic



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merits.xiii

The painting is said to be a depiction of a Dalit’s self-sacrifice for what he loves. But in

a land where dissenting Dalits have been buried alive to be human-bunds in paddy fields, the

legend of Thoombinkal Chathan and his ‘uncompromising love’ for the land can only be read as

a dubious construct. And when someone speaks on behalf of the Dalits and narrates the above

mentioned ‘tragic story’ without showing any critical engagement or irony, what else can we say

other than that the history of Dalit atrocities is repeated here as a mere farce? The self-sacrifice

of K. P Reji can be read as a gesture of love (for art or land), but in its discursive entirety, this

mindless performance can only be seen as a mockery of Dalit politics in a globalising world.

RESISTANCE AS EVENT AND NON-EVENT

‘The Sovereign Forest’, Multimedia Installation by Amar Kanwar, Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2013

The installation created by the Delhi based documentary film maker, Amar Kanwar becomes

an intriguing case study for anyone who is interested in the intersection of art and politics.

Researching extensively the popular uprising in the Orissa tribal village, Kalinganager, against

land grabbing and forced displacement since 1999, Kanwar’s ‘The Sovereign Forest’ provides a

unique and highly unsettling aesthetic experience. Instead of narrating any dramatic story of

heroic adventurism, Kanwar carefully employs two different narrative strategies that are

complementary to each other. On the one hand, there is an objective account of incidents, participants and victims through reproductions of photographic evidence, including voter’s IDs

and newspaper reportage. On the other hand, there are poetically charged narratives of nameless

characters and their emotional and existential pursuits, presented through video projections and

illustrated story books. The viewer is expected to freely associate both these complementary



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forms of narratives that are carefully lighted up within the gloomy darkness of the exhibition

space. Accompanying these artifacts Kanwar also inserts a film here, known as ‘The Scene of

Crime’, earlier exhibited in Documenta (13), which offers an experience of a landscape just prior

to erasure as territories marked for acquisition by industries and government. According to the

artist; “Every location, every blade of grass, every water source, every tree that is seen in the film

is now meant to not exist anymore. ‘The Scene of Crime’ is an experience of ‘looking’ at the

terrain of this conflict and the personal lives that exist within this natural landscape.”xiv

The high emotional density of the installation is a result of the carefully orchestrated play of

sound and visuals. In addition, level of immediacy between the subjects of narration and the

viewer in the dark is made possible by the fabricated absence of the artist’s agency within the

installation’s textuality. It is the experience of immediacy and cumulative emotional impact that

work as both the limitation and success of the installation. Kanwar’s archive of repressed voices

and erased memories creates a sense of internal coherence and unity; his installation attains its

emotional density by being absorbed in its own internal reality, to which the viewer has no other

role than to witness the singularity of the narrated event—the suffering and struggle of

Kalinganagar villagers. By carefully avoiding any suggestion of theatricality, which generally

take place by making the authorial agency discursively present, Kanwar ‘presents’ himself in his

films as a witness analogical to the indifferent eye of the camera.

The problem with Kanwar’s installation is neither his ‘indifference’ to the narrated event nor

his passive act of witnessing, but the carefully erased agency of the witness (artist/viewer) for the

sake of a universally valid emotionality. This is the very logic of cosmopolitan humanitarianism.

Under the guise of evoking global sympathy for the downtrodden masses, cosmopolitan

humanitarianism abstracts its practitioners’ concrete identities and universalises them as agents

of a shared morality. Through this strategy, the basic requirement of capital and third world neo-

liberalism is fulfilled; to conceal their feeble micro-politics which can be challenged from the

particularities of human life as they have been historically and provisionally articulated in the

forms of third world nationalities and post-colonial citizenships (Brennan 2001:93). Here, the

struggles of Kalinganagar localites against the forces of neo-colonialism can only be supported

by the ‘cosmopolitanised’ viewer/artist by resorting to some global human rights discourse



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which in history, has always been in the hands of oligarchic-capitalist powers, especially when it

comes to representing third world subjects (Amin 2011:129-145; Chandler 2002:115-135; Cheah

2006).

It is because of this mistaken and therefore futile political strategy that there is a self-defeating

irony in Kanwar’s installation. The major partners and funders of KMB in which Kanwar’s

artwork is exhibited and the main culprits of Kalinganagar tragedy are the same: TATA group

and Jindal Steel and Power Ltd. Though this can be regarded as an accident, one can map a

larger discursive framework to which Kanwar’s installation is affiliated. His testimonial

installation in particular and many of the artworks exhibited in KMB in general, displace the

violence of capital from the immediate reality of the third world citizen-subject into distant,

perhaps even exotic domains which are approachable only by the viewers’ sympathetic and

charitable feelings. The impossibility of imagining otherwise becomes visible only when we ask

the question: what if we do invite these distant domains of resistance and struggle to our own

immediate life-world, in order to initiate spaces of dialogue and ideological exchange? This was

exactly the underlying conceptual thrust and purpose of Jonas Staal’s project titled as ‘New

World Summit’.

‘New World Summit’ by Jonas Staal, Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2013



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Staal’s artwork drastically differs from that of other non-Indian artists whose works in general

show mere visual gimmicks that are often backed by some exoticised understanding of regional

culture – for example, the works of Alfredo Jarr and Ernesto Neto.xv

Staal planned a summit of

outlawed, so called ‘terrorist’ organisations from all over the world, twenty four Indian and

twenty one from abroad, on the theme of ‘history according to resistance movements’. At the

Biennale site, he built a dais surrounded by billboards depicting flags of invited organisations

including that of Indian Maoist groups and Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). As a

result, a case under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was registered against the Biennale

organisers by the Kerala police, though Staal argued that his endeavor was “legal” enough.

Consequently, many of the billboards had to be covered by black paint according to the police

instruction.

Staal’s venture is part of his larger project with the slogan of ‘Art in Defense of Democracy’.

The driving force behind this project is his belief in ‘fundamental democracy’, a term by which

he means “a form that effectively makes the democratic instruments available for the people as a

whole. This is where art can demonstrate its power, namely: its imagination.” (Staal 2012)

Elsewhere in the same write-up he explains,

I believe in democracy as a universal movement [that] fights for a non-exclusive

political space where every voice can make itself heard, seen and felt, without a

‘state of exception’. As an artist I want to create the conditions for this politicalspace. I do not want to create art within a so-called democracy; I want to help

shape democracy myself. And as it has become apparent globally, I am far from

alone therein. (ibid)

Keeping this ambitious vision of Staal in mind, it should be noted that it is the ‘failure’ of his

project to realise its utopian imaginations that eventually becomes its success because through

the artwork’s incompleteness, we are able to negotiate with the limits of our own freedom. In

experimenting with the existing artworld’s democratic and cosmopolitan claims by pushing its

discursive conditions to the limits, Staal’s work becomes a blind spot within the spectacle of theBiennale. Though many of the flags displayed in the installation-site were covered by the

organisers themselves, there was no description which informs the viewer about the unfortunate

fate of the artwork. Moreover, there were no proper representatives from the invited

organisations because of the travel-ban imposed upon them reinforced by the state’s paranoid



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precautions, despite our belonging to a ‘cosmopolitan’ world of unhindered mobility and

exchange.

In the ideological plane, the reasons behind the failure of ‘New World Summit’ can be seen as

a result of sharing the leftist legacy of internationalism within the discursive space of

cosmopolitanism which has been historically and ideologically shaped by displacing the former.

The irreconcilable contradiction between both the ideologies has been firmly captured by

Timothy Brennan as follows,

If cosmopolitanism springs from a comfortable culture of middle-class travellers,

intellectuals and businessmen, internationalism—although based no less on therealities of global interpenetration and homogenization, mass migration and mass

culture, under the dominance of capital—is an ideology of the domestically

restricted, the recently relocated, the provisionally exiled and temporarily weak. Itis addressed to those who have an interest in transnational forms of solidarity, but

whose capacities for doing so have not yet arrived. (Brennan 2001:77)

By evoking the still relevant legacy of internationalism and putting KMB’s cosmopolitanism at

task, the ‘New World Summit’ tells us that the conditions for a transnational solidarity in the

realm of political practice and democratic deliberation are yet to be met. For Staal, as I have

already mentioned, such a condition is also necessary for realising the power of creativity — that

is, imagination — in its proper form and function. Thereof what the staged failure of Staal’s

experiment with the existing institutions of democracy questions is not only the contemporaryideology of cosmopolitanism, but also the pretentious claims made by the contemporary artworld

on the basis of its inexplicable say on ‘creativity’ and ‘imagination’.

A comparison between the nature of artworks designed by Jonas Staal and Amar Kanwar

would be illuminative here. Contrary to Kanwar’s self-contained installation, Staal’s work is a

staged process which was interrupted by the state for its deliberate provocativeness. Whereas

Staal invites the banned Indian Maoist militants who also fight in backward states like Orissa, to

participate in his public art project, Amar Kanwar’s installation claims to represent the

unrepresentable destiny of Orissan tribals without further problematising the available

institutions of representation both in the artworld and the bourgeois democratic state. When

Kanwar abstracts himself and the viewer as mere witnesses to the exotic ‘singularity of the evil’



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(by a strategic use of the exhibition space’s gloomy darkness contrary to the aesthetic of Staal’s

outdoor art work), the latter evokes a counter-discourse in which the completion of the work of

art becomes part of our collective responsibility as citizens of the state and inheritors of an

ostensibly democratic ethos. It is the non-happening of the event / summit that makes Staal’s

work striking and disturbing contrary to the ‘eventfulness’ of Kanwar’s artwork. The ‘non-event’

of the New World Summit leaves the viewer staring at the void represented by blackened flags,

while compelling him/her to look more closely through the dark symbols of the present to find

the remaining spaces of dissent and struggle.

The superficiality in comprehending local histories is a common feature of the artworks

exhibited in the Biennale and in a sense this is unavoidable because, for foreign artists like Jarr

and Neto, Kerala can only be a distant land of cosmopolitan hospitality to which they have to be

grateful. And for the Indian artists like Sundaram and Vilasini, the representations of local

history can only be less disturbing and more consensual to the regional authorities of power

without whom the task of accomplishing India’s first Biennale is impossible. Hence, what

KMB’s organisers need is a theoretical justification for this inevitable superficiality of the

artworks, and it is through the ideology of cosmopolitanism that they attempt to meet this

challenge. The very success of Jonas Staal’s lies in inverting this unavoidable superficial quality

of his artwork to reveal the deep-rooted crisis in India’s art and democracy as they are valorised

by KMB’s transnational cosmopolitan rhetoric.

The few artworks discussed here represent for me the best examples of KMB’s problematic

aesthetic. Though there are minor cases of exception to the troublesome aesthetics propagated by

KMB, for example the interesting works of some Burmese artists, in the final analysis they

ultimately succumb to its sweeping narrative of cultural cosmopolitanism due to their trouble-

free distance from the Biennale’s internal contradictions as well as their relative absence in

KMB’s media stunts.

In the conclusion to this article, I would argue that KMB’s rhetoric of cosmopolitanism may

have created an uproar in the Indian art scene and Kerala’s cultural and political discourse, but

this is by dismissing the criticality of art and importance of democratic institutions in the

country. In this article, I have consciously shifted the focus away from the key controversial



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issues linked to the curatorial administration of the Biennale to something more specific to art

and spectatorial experience. What this writing in essence has tried to uphold is the importance of

dissent and radical egalitarianism in extending our collective histories of struggle that necessarily

have to start from the very dialogical and dialectical relationships between the artist and the

viewer. Kochi Muziris Biennale’s paternalist rhetoric of cosmopolitanism is not designed to

grapple with this basic principle of art and democracy.

References

Amin, Samir (2011): ‘Humanitarianism or the Internationalism of the Peoples?’ in Endingthe Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? (Pambazuka Press)

Brennan, Timothy (2001): ‘Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism’, New Left Review No. 7,Jan-Feb, pp. 75-84.

Bürger, Peter (1984): Theory of the Avant-Garde (USA: University of Minnesota Press)

Chandler, David (2002): “The Limits of Human Rights and Cosmopolitan Citizenship” in

David Chandler (ed) Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics (Palgrave Macmillan)

Cheah, Pheng (2006): Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (USA:

Harvard Unversity Press).

Engels, Friedrich (1845): The Festivals of Nations in London,

(www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/12/01.html). Viewed on 27 March 2013

Staal, Jonas (2012): Art in Defense of Democracy, (NRC Handelsblad/Cultural Supplement)

i ‘Does Biennale Have People on its Canvases?’, The Hindu, Thiruvananthapuram, 12

November 2012; ‘Finance Dept: Seeks Blacklisting of Biennale Foundation’, The New Indian Express, Thiruvananthapuram, 10 November 2012; ‘Biennale Funding: HC Seeks

Govt’s View on Vigilance Probe,’ The New Indian Express, Thiruvananthapuram, 8 January

2013; ‘Skeleton of Biennale Tumbles Out of Cupboard’ by Chandran T. V, The Baroda Pamphlet, No2, November-December, 2012.

ii For a critical introduction to the contemporary and global phenomenon of biennale culture,

see Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art by J. Stallabrass, Oxford University

Press, New York, 2004. To understand how the biennale has, despite its decolonising and

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/12/01.html







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democratic claims as one can see in the much celebrated Documenta 11, still proved toembody the traditional power structures of western / global artworld, see, ‘Biennials without

Borders?’ by Chin-Tao Wu, New Left Review, No. 57 , May-June, 2009.

iii Since most of the artworks exhibited in Kochi Muziris Biennale were installations and

digital reproductions (the very forms of artworks which claim to exist outside the art-market),

an analysis of their unacknowledged market-behavior is impossible unless and until weacquire a larger picture of artworld politics and its market strategies that are shaped by the

transnational capital. Keeping the critical awareness of market economy in the analytical

horizon, we should engage with the following question: How is it possible to form a critique of contemporary art as it is showcased in KMB by focusing on its ‘relatively autonomous’

epistemic and experiential parameters? Though the autonomy of art practices from existing

institutional and economic pressures is an illusory image created by the advocates of artworld

liberalism, it is impossible to discredit this idea without immediately falling into some sort ofsociological or economic determinism. Hence I find it is necessary to follow a methodology

in which the critique takes departure from the very ‘autonomy’ that the artwork claims from

all forms of social and political constraints (a claim used by KMB’s organisers to freethemselves from all forms of accountability and institutional procedures). This article is a

preliminary attempt along these lines. .

iv From: http://kochimuzirisBiennale.org/concept/ Accessed on 2 March 2013.

v While it could be argued that the principal difference Kerala has with other Indian states

(especially Maharashtra, Delhi and Gujarat in which the contemporary Indian artworld is

largely located) is the relative marginality of communal parties like Bharatiya Janata Party

(BJP) or the right wing organisations like Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), this featurecannot be taken as an instance of Kerala’s secular culture. In Kerala, the political arena is

highly determined by Christian, Muslim and Nair groups, while in the social domain, theHindu communal associations like BJP, RSS and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) also play

an increasingly major role. Recently, their role in influencing the State policies has beenwell evident in 2008 when the Communist government in Kerala tried to radically secularise

the school text books. It precipitated furious reaction and the government had to give up this

plan. Likewise, the non-egalitarian character of Kerala was exemplified by the fate of therecent pro-Dalit movie Papilio Buddha (2013) which became controversial for its explicit

rejection of the ideologies of Hinduism, Communism and Gandhism. The Congress-led state

government, with the support of the opposition led by CPI and CPI (M), decided to ban themovie because the film makers disagreed with the Censor Board’s recommendation of over

forty cuts and several mutes and blurs. Even after long negotiation and legal fight they had

to succumb to most of the Censor Board’s proposals. Tellingly, KMB’s organisersmaintained a safe distance from the public debates around Papilio Buddha, despite their

self-appointed claim to be Kerala’s new cultural vanguards.

vi Regarding the presence of Buddhist culture in and around Muziris and the brahmanization

of Kerala history see, ‘Buddhaprathimakale ippozhum Bhayakkunnathaarokke?’ (‘Who are

Still Afraid of Buddha statues?’) by Aju K. Narayanan and Ajay Sekhar, Mathrubhumi



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Weekely, December 2-8, 2012. Also see, ‘Buddhism in Kerala’ by P. C. Alexander,Annamalai University, 1949.

vii Mullaperiyar dam, located in Kerala, was constructed in 1895 by the British rulers in the

erstwhile Madras Presidency. In 2009, IIT Roorkee submitted a report to the Kerala

government about the dam’s structural instability. According to the report, an earthquake

measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale could result in the collapse of the dam any time andaround thirty lakh people could be killed by water and flood. This report frightened the

already panic-stricken masses that had experienced of the 2004 tsunami which inflicted

colossal damages.

viii In this sense, what I put forward here is a critique of KMB’s cosmopolitan aesthetics and

ideology that as a methodological principle, necessitates certain theoretical abstraction(especially when it comes to the question of spectatorship and citizenship) and therefore, a

selective case study of the exhibits based on their respective discursive capacity to

identify/dis-identify with the curatorial logic of KMB.

ix ‘Involve People in Organising Art Events, Says Atul Dodiya’ by S. Anandan. The Hindu,

Kochi, 5 September 2012

x kochimuzirisbiennale.org/artist-in-laboratory/ (Accessed on 9 March 2013)

xi Along with his anti-KMB press releases, blog posts and participation in public meetings

organised by local artists and cultural enthusiasts, Johny M.L curated the ‘United Art Fair’

(UAF) in New Delhi, 2012, while the preparations for KMB were on. By showcasing

around five hundred ‘new’ artists who were less visible in the leading art circles side by side

the ‘affordable’ works of few established artists (who were not included in KMB), Johny ML tried to forge a new alliance in the Indian artworld to compete the monopolised market

economy. Since the discussions around this initiative was almost eclipsed by KMB’scontroversies and its fabricated success, it remains to be seen how the organisers of UAFwill regain their visibility and redefine the politics of the Indian art scene, even though their

curatorial initiative seems unpromising in engaging with the larger issues of inherent elitism

and market-driven politics of the contemporary Indian art. In the final analysis, they appeal

to be capitulating to what they claim to be rejecting.

xii www.christies.com/lotfinder/photographs/vivek-vilasini-last-supper-gaza-52158899-

details.aspx (Accessed on 9 March 2013). ‘Lot notes’ are used during art auctions by buyers

and auctioneers for immediate reference purposes regarding the artworks presented for sale.

xiii The term ‘new mediatic realism’ in the context of post-liberalisation Indian art was

popularised by the cultural theorist, Nancy Adjania, in order to legitimise the painterly style

of young artists like T. V Santhosh, Baiju Parthan, Riyas Komu (the co-organiser of KMB)and so on. Belonging to this generation of artists but unlike them, Reji K P is known for his

ability to forge intriguing subject-matters (often about migrant laborers and

underclass/lower-caste urban life) all the while following the stylistic features of the

‘mediatic realists’. ( For more on ‘new mediatic realism’, see Nancy Adjania, ‘The Mutable



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Aesthetic of New Mediatic Realism’, Art India Magazine, 2005, Volume X, Issue IV,Quarter IV)

xiv ‘Ways of Seeing and Thinking’ published in The Hindu, Orissa, 27 August, 2012. See,

http://www.thehindu.com/arts/ways-of-seeing-and-thinking/article3826861.ece (Accessed

on 10 April 2013)

xv Whereas Alfredo Jarr quoted certain verses from Kalidasa’s Mekhasandhesam in his

playful installation in order to illustrate his argument of the trans-regional experiences

imagined in ancient Indian culture, Ernesto Neto’s quasi-sculptural installation, withreferences to Hindu mythology and Kerala’s age-old spice trade, was designed to give an

intoxicating experience of color and smell.

The Oriental Atlantis: Critical Notes on India's First Biennale

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