NEWS & UPDATES
Students’ Biennale National Awards Residency
The recipients of the Tata Trusts National Award for works exhibited at the 2018 Students’ Biennale have completed their residencies in Kochi. Eleven students from the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Kashmir were awarded for the work created for the third...
Art Rises for Kerala: Proceeds handed over to Chief Minister
The proceeds of the Art Rises for Kerala auction, organised by the Kochi Biennale Foundation were handed over to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Wednesday, July 10 in Thiruvananthapuram. The auction, realised in collaboration with Saffronart, raised Rs 3 crore for...
Shubigi Rao is curator of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2020
Shubigi Rao is the curator of the fifth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Shubigi is an artist and writer known for her complex and layered installations. Her works has been showed in exhibitions across the world, including at the 2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The...
Exchange & Flow Reflections
At a meeting on 5 March 2019, in Fort Kochi, Kerala, India at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018 the Exchange and Flow workshop participants discussed a first draft of the ‘Kochi Declaration for Audiences’ set out below. The Exchange & Flow Writing Workshop came...
2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale Concludes
The curtains drew on the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018 with the ceremonial valedictory function on Thursday, 28th March 2019 at Durbar Hall Grounds, Ernakulam. Renowned filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan officiated as the chief guest. The winners of the Tata Trusts...
Statement from KBF
The board of trustees of the Kochi Biennale Foundation issues the following statement. Following anonymous allegations in the media, Riyas Komu had stepped down from all management positions at the Kochi Biennale Foundation on Oct 19, 2018. In the trustee meeting...
ARTISTS & INFRA-PROJECTS
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AERNOUT MIK
Aernout Mik’s video installations present recognizable scenarios and places — workers in a furniture warehouse, people in a courtroom or restaurant, or students in a schoolyard — that descend into crisis. While they at first resemble highly-produced cinematic or news footage, Mik offers no distinct characters or narrative. People’s relationship with one another and whatever chaos surround them is unclear, and when looped, the films seem endless, not allowing their stories to have beginnings or ends. In staging these scenarios, Mik conflates the kinds of images in popular media where things go right — people partaking in work or leisure — with those where things go wrong — visions of war or economic recession. By creating a space where the two intersect, his videos, which are often shown as life-sized installations, the artist encourages viewers to place themselves within the scene, and take the narrative to its conclusion.
AFRAH SHAFIQ
Afrah Shafiq is a documentary filmmaker and artist based between Goa and Bangalore. She has also worked as a film editor, illustrator, designer, animator, line producer, teacher, curator and manager in various worlds ranging from visual art to television. Bringing together these numerous experiences, her art practice moves across platforms and mediums seeking a way to retain the tactile within the digital and the poetry within technology. Her interactive multimedia story Sultana’s Reality won an award for “Art in Mobile Applications” at the Computer Space festival, Bulgaria. It was also included in a package curated by IRL Studio, an incubator of emerging digital media arts in Texas. Her animated comic Searching for Network as a part of Deep Dives Sexing the Interwebs won the South Asian Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity in the “Best web series” /”Special edition” category. She has been awarded an Archival and Museum fellowship by the India Foundation for the Arts and has been a curatorial fellow with the Katha Centre for Film Studies. Her work has been shown at I am Sutradhar – a group show at The Guild Art Gallery, Alibaug; Digital Graffiti Festival at Alys Beach, Florida; Open Studios as part of Mumbai Gallery Weekend at What About Art? Mumbai; Be. Fantastic a Tech-Arts festival in Bangalore; Spams: The Internet Restaurant at The Museum of Human Achievement; The Fusebox Festival and Marfa Open in Texas; Homeostasis Lab at the Wrong Biennale and Gender Bender a group-show hosted by Sandbox Collective and the Goethe Institut Bangalore. Afrah has also worked for institutions such as Majlis Centre for rights discourse and interdisciplinary arts, Parodevi Pictures, What About Art, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Dharamshala International Film Festival, Boiler Room Berlin, MTV Finland, National TV Sweden, and Arts Council England.
AJAY DESAI
Born in 1955 in Lucknow, India, Ajay Desai studied painting from M.S. University Baroda before completing his MA from Royal College of Art. He lives and works in New Delhi.
AKRAM ZAATARI
Akram Zaatari (b. 1966 in Sidon, Lebanon) is a filmmaker, photographer, archival artist and curator. He has played a critical role in developing the intellectual, and institutional infrastructure of Beirut’s contemporary art scene. As a co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, a groundbreaking, artist-driven organization devoted to the research and study of photography in the Arab world, he has made invaluable contributions to the wider discourse on archival practice. As one of the young artists who emerged from the short-lived era of experimentation in Lebanon’s television industry, Akram Zaatari has produced more than fifty films, videos, a dozen books, and countless installations of photographic material. All these works share an interest in histories related to excavation, political resistance, civil war and the play of letters that have been lost, found, buried, discovered, or otherwise delayed in reaching their destinations. He lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. Akram Zaatari has been exploring issues pertinent to post-war Lebanon. He investigates the way television mediates territorial conflicts and wars, and is particularly interested in logic of religious and national resistance movements, and the circulation and production of images in the context of today’s geographic division in the Middle East. Akram Zaatari had been selected to represent Lebanon at the 2013 Venice Biennale by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, curators for the Lebanese Pavilion. His work has been widely exhibited worldwide in Biennales and venues such as the Centre Pompidou.
ANJALI MONTEIRO + KP JAYASANKAR
Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar are Professors at the School of Media and Cultural Studies (www. smcs.tiss.edu), Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. They are involved in media production, teaching and research. They have played a key role in setting up the School of Media and Cultural Studies, TISS and the MA programme in Media and Cultural Studies. Their documentary films, which have been screened across the world, have won 32 national and international awards Their most recent awards are the Best film award at the International Folk Film Festival, Kathmandu and the Basil Wright Prize for So Heddan So Hoddan (Like Here Like There) at the 13th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film 2013. Retrospectives of their work include Vibgyor Film Festival, Kerala, 2006; Bangalore Film Society, 2010; Madurai International Film Festival, 2012, Parramasala Sydney, 2013, Thrissur International Film Festival 2018 and India International Centre 2018. An adaptation of their film Saacha (The Loom) was a part of the art exhibition ‘Project Space: Word. Sound. Power.’ at the Tate Modern, London, in 2013; and at Khoj, New Delhi in 2014. They have served as jury and as festival consultants and directors to several film festivals in India. They have mentored many student and fellowship documentary film projects as commissioning editors. They have a recent book entitled A Fly in the Curry, on independent Indian documentary, (Sage, 2016) which won a Special Mention in the National Film Awards, 2016. They are recipients of several fellowships, including the Howard Thomas Memorial Fellowship in Media Studies, the Fulbright visiting lecturer fellowship, and the Erasmus Mundus scholarship, among others. They have been visiting faculty at several leading media and design institutions and lectured at universities in the USA, Australia, Europe, and in Asian countries. They are active in campaigns for freedom of expression.
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MRINALINI MUKHERJEE
NATHAN COLEY
Nathan Coley is a Glasgow-based artist whose work examines the nature of belief in our society through a range of media. His gallery-based work and interventions in public space seek to enquire into our relationship with sacred and secular architecture, signage and protest, exploring systems of faith and how these are represented and demonstrated. Coley’s work is in collections in the UK and abroad and he has received a number of major commissions for institutions and events worldwide. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2007.
NILIMA SHEIKH
Nilima Sheikh has inspired several generations over her 50 year career as a Baroda based painter. Sheikh has a solid position in the history of Indian Modernity, and was a student of KG Subramanian. Rooted in Eastern painting traditions such as miniature painting, oral tradition found in vernacular folk songs, as well as her own life experience, Sheikh continues to create bodies of work that evoke mystical imaginary landscapes that address feminine experiences. Sheikh has a gift for storytelling. Inspired by reading Rabindranath Tagore, the artist became interested at an early age in the connection between stories and images, an age-old connection from murals to ancient manuscripts. Beyond appropriating traditional techniques in her work, Sheikh works with figure and narration in her practice, which has also beautifully translated into theatre sets such as the 1993 Vivadi theatre production of Umrao, and also children’s books. © Chemould-Prescott Road Gallery
OORALI
Oorali is a music and art collective working largely in Kerala. “We are an art commune driven by the Oorali spirit existing since 2010 and have performed around India and around the world. Our strengths inspire us and our shortcomings bond us. Each performance assimilates stories from the locality we are in and connect us more with the audience. Oorali always engages the audience with music, conversations, visuals and by sharing properties to play with. The stories of human persistence, the ordeals that we face to survive and the stories of our times are retold, be it a marriage, a party, a college event or a protest. Every performance is an opportunity for Oorali to remind each other, all of us, that we are a commune of humans, beyond whatever we imagine.”
THE OTOLITH GROUP
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