Chris Dercon, the director of the Tate Modern Art Gallery , London , is excited by the
talent of South Indian artists and the enormous success of the Kochi-Muziris
Biennale
Photo: Chris Dercon and his wife, Sonja Junkers, with MP P. Rajeev at Aspinwall House
By Shevlin Sebastian
Chris Dercon, the director of the TateModern Art Gallery , went to see a video
installation of the ‘Burmese resistance of 1988’ at Mattancherry. While there
he saw four policemen who were taking down notes. “I asked them why they were
doing so, and one of them said, ‘This is so interesting, I did not know about
this resistance movement,’” says Chris. “He was jotting down impressions not
because of his job, but as a human being. I was moved by that.”
Dercon has been very impressed by the art
works at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the people who are attending it. “I
have never seen so many families and young people at a biennale,” he says. “I
wanted to read the text placed next to the exhibits, but I could not do so,
because there was a crowd standing and reading it. It means that people are much
more complex thinkers than before. They want to understand these art works.”
And although some have found the art works
baffling, they have been drawn again and again to view them. “An acquaintance I
met in Fort Kochi told me that his friend said,
‘My God, art in this biennale is mad, it is really mad, but I have come
three times already,’” says Dercon “I am not surprised that 75,000 people have
visited the event.”
And Dercon, who had come to Kochi 20 years ago,
has been taken aback by the tremendous changes in the city. “The place is
booming,” he says. “There is much more of tourism. There are so many nice
homestays in Fort Kochi , but the pollution is a
problem. I cannot separate art from pollution. I love to see art polluting the
world, but not plastic.”
He says that Kochi is on the verge of something
special. “In the next few years, there should be a development of tourist and
cultural infrastructure,” he says. “Local arts and handicrafts should be
promoted. There should be social inclusion and ecology. If you can make a
master plan whereby you can include these points, Kochi will
become another Venice .”
Meanwhile, one indirect impact of the Kochi
Biennale is that South Indian art has been placed on the global stage. “It is
wonderful,” says Dercon. “I was much impressed by the painting of KP Reji and
the installation work of Sumedh Rajendran.”
So, hopefully, one day, there will be
exhibitions of South Indian art at the Tate, which receives five million
visitors annually. And significantly, a large chunk of them are young people.
“They come to museums not to see art but to
ask questions about sexuality, religion, economics and life,” he says. “This
inner search is not only because of the decline of formal religion, but a loss
of belief in politics and a feeling that there is nobody to represent them.”
Art today makes up for those feelings of
loss. “It is touching on subjects which they feel unable to discuss with their
friends, like identity and sexuality,” says Dercon. “There are some fantastic art
works in this biennale which asks similar questions.”
Dercon has always been interested in Indian
art. When he was the director of the Haus der Kunst (House of Art)
inMunich, he organised an exhibition on Amrita Sher Gil (1913-41). “She was a
young Indian artist who wanted to find a way to express her country in her
art,” says Dercon. “She did not want to obey the rule that the art of the west
is the dominant one. Amrita wanted to say that both [Pablo] Picasso and
[Rabindranath] Tagore were her idols. Amrita took from the East and the West
and was communicating back and forth.”
And Dercon is convinced that most Indian
artists of today will be doing the same thing what Amrita did so many years
ago.
(The New Indian Express, Kochi)
(The New Indian Express, Kochi)