‘I’ve considered this edition of the Biennale as a crucible to hold very disparate conversations’: Shubigi Rao, curator, Kochi-Muziris Biennale

I believe the Biennale has around 40 new commissions. If you could tell us how it was to work on them given the absence of on-site ideation due to travel restrictions.

In 2019-20, when I initially drafted the artists’ list, I had invited several artists to work on new commissions, especially production in India. Part of the experience of the Kochi Biennale, which is an artists-driven Biennale, is to offer opportunities to artists that may not have had yet, to expand their work and explore how it finds resonance in India. I was very interested in that. For instance, Claudia Martínez Garay from Peru looks at pre-Columbian traditions and works a lot with clay, which is also extensively used in India. It would have been interesting what she would have produced here, but the pandemic made travel difficult and she had to send a film instead. So, a lot of works that were new commissions haven’t materialised that way and other artists who had more time now were able to do new commissions. The works that Thao Nguyen Phan (Vietnamese) and Ali Cherri (Lebanese) showed at the Venice Biennale this year, for instance, they had proposed to me earlier. Both films are sublime, brilliant works, and I’m so glad they were shown to the world, in Venice. Thao will be showing the same film in Kochi now, with new paintings. The Biennale will also have works of her mentor, Joan Jonas. There is a legacy of women teaching women, and this Biennale, among other things, will showcase generational artistic collaborations with works of a number of artists who have also been mentors to the young.

What kinds of challenges did the pandemic pose?

The pandemic changed people’s lives radically, and for artists it has also meant several projects getting pushed to 2022. These artists have been with me for three years and have had faith in the Biennale. We postponed the event twice, so several of them have already changed their work twice. When we were first supposed to show in 2021, the foundation was keen to adopt a hybrid approach, where people from within India could travel for the event and the international audience would view it online — at the time, several artists switched to digital and virtual media that don’t normally work with. Consequently, this edition will see lesser production on-site than what I had envisioned and a higher than anticipated proportion of digital works, but that has resulted in a beautiful demonstration of how artists have worked around challenges, using varied media. Music and sound have become defining aspects of the Biennale, where one will listen to all kinds of sounds, from non-verbal to humming, human voice, animal sounds, disembodied noises and so on.

It’s important to realise that this edition has faced extreme challenges. All previous editions had resources we do not have and there have been massive personnel changes as well. Moreover, none of the venues were available to us until very recently and given that these places were shut for three years, major repair work needed to be done, which has delayed installation. A new commission requires a new install plan and that becomes even more difficult in the given situation. The pandemic has also affected shipping, which means a lot of stuff can’t be transported. For instance, South Korean artist Haegue Yang needed fabrication for her installation and with many places in Kerala shutting-shop during the pandemic, we finally had to trace someone in Bengaluru to do it. So, we are trying to make adjustments, rethink ideas.

You are the first curator of the biennale who isn’t based in India. Does that enable a different viewpoint?

For the artist-led biennale, every edition allows for an unconventional exercise in curating. As the curator of the edition, and as an artist in conversation with other artists, I think about curating the KMB beyond the final production. For me, an artist curates from a space of empathy, practice and affinities – an understanding of craft, process, techniques and ways of seeing – whilst also acknowledging limitations, pressures and fatigue. While this edition will celebrate the diverse strategies that artists conjure in the face of diverse circumstances, it will also celebrate process, method, technique, undercurrents and friendships. I decided to keep in abeyance the issues of my practice whilst retaining the impetus and drives behind my work – the belief in storytelling as strategy, in the subversive power of humour, and in creating as resistance. This approach allowed for a porous process of research and underpinned my conversations with the artists I met across the globe. The impulse was to be taken by practice, ideas, nonconformity and to bring together a set of practices that spoke to me.

During the pandemic, it was difficult for me to plan from a distance, especially when the office in Kochi also shut, but I have been in touch with my artists. I was worried about the ground realities, so we directed our efforts towards working around things.

Will your journey as a writer and archivist also reflect in your approach to the biennale?

These areas of interest may inform certain aspects of my curatorial framework, though that influence is more through method or approach, rather than as a dominant aesthetic or core issue. For instance, my work around libraries is less a valorisation of books and sites of knowledge, but rather an exploration of the contexts and issues, like knowledge custodianship, access, and the conjoined trajectories of literature and violence. My method involves listening as much as it does collecting, and making apparent the connective tissue between ideas, material and practice. As an artist my texts, films, and artworks have examined ecological and human interactions through the movements of objects and language. My work is about violence, war, fascist politics, censorship and how to resist all of this. It’s about how the powerless empower themselves against the powerful, and the Biennale too, to a certain extent, is about that.

One of the things the pandemic did was expose inequality more than ever. The ‘one percenters’ of the world made obscene amounts of money during the pandemic, while the rest suffered. But haven’t people in power always been turning a blind eye to the suffering of most of the world? This is something I had highlighted in my curatorial note, written in 2019, and in earlier writing from the early 2000s till today. I did not need to change that because the problems remain the same. As with my own approach, many of the artists I have chosen are investigative in their methods and excavate problems and issues, whether it is environmental destruction in Amazon, or the targeting of the Indigenous people there, or even corruption in the art world.