Anita Dube is an Indian contemporary artist and is currently curator for the 4th edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, December 2018. An art historian and critic by training and a visual and performance artist in practice, Dube’s conceptually- rich, politically-charged works have been widely exhibited, including at the first Kochi- Muziris Biennale in 2012. Her practice uses objects and industrial materials, performance and text to critique contemporary socio-political realities. Her aesthetic idiom, in many ways, re ects her background as a member of the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association—a short-lived but hugely in uential collection of artists and art students who rebelled against what they perceived to be the commodi cation of art in India.
Born in Kerala in 1963, Bose Krishnamachari studied at Sir J.J. School of Art (1986- 1991), Mumbai, and then completed his Masters in Visual Art Theory and Practice from Goldsmiths College, University of London (1999-2000). He also taught at J.J. School of Art in the year 1992. His artistic and curatorial practice includes drawing, painting, sculpture, design, installation and architecture. Bose Krishnamachari created Gallery BMB in Mumbai in 2009 with a vision to bring the best international contemporary art to India. He is also known for nding and promoting the emerging young artistic talent. He has been the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the Mid America Arts Alliance Award in 1996, the Charles Wallace India Trust Award in 1999 and the Kerala Alit Kala Akademi Award in 1985 and felicitated in 2009 with the Lifetime Fellow of Kerala Lalit Kala Akademi. He is the Artistic Director and Co-Curator of India’s rst Biennale – The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012, Director of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014 and President of the Kochi Biennale Foundation.
Jitish Kallat was born in Mumbai in 1974, the city where he continues to live and work. Kallat’s works over the last two-decades reveal his continued engagement with the ideas of time, sustenance, recursion and historical recall often interlacing the dense cosmopolis and the distant cosmos. His oeuvre traverses varying focal lengths and time-scales. From close details of the skin of a fruit or the brimming shirt-pocket of a passerby, it might expand to register dense people-scapes, or voyage into inter-galactic vistas. While some works meditate on the transient present others invoke the past through citations of momentous historical utterances. Frequently shifting orders of magnitude, Kallat’s works can be said to move interchangeably between meditations on the self, the city- street, the nation and the cosmic horizon, viewing the ephemeral within the context of the perpetual, the everyday in juxtaposition with the historical, the microscopic alongside the telescopic. Jitish Kallat has exhibited widely at major museums and institutions around the world. He was also the curator and artistic director of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014.
Reena Saini Kallat (b. 1973, Delhi, India) graduated from Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai in 1996 with a B.F.A. in painting. Her practice spanning drawing, photography, sculpture and video engages diverse materials, imbued with conceptual underpinnings. She is interested in the role that memory plays, in not only what we choose to remember but also how we think of the past. Using the motif of the rubberstamp both as object and imprint, signifying the bureaucratic apparatus, Kallat has worked with officially recorded or registered names of people, objects, and monuments that are lost or have disappeared without a trace, only to get listed as anonymous and forgotten statistics. In her works made with electrical cables, wires usually serving as conduits of contact that transmit ideas and information, become painstakingly woven entanglements that morph into barbed wires like barriers. Her ongoing series using salt as a medium explores the tenuous yet intrinsic relationship between the body and the oceans, highlighting the fragility and unpredictability of existence. Her works are part of several public and private collections and she has widely exhibited at institutions across the world.
Robert E. D’Souza is a London based artist, designer. He is Head of Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, where he is Professor of Critical Practice. He has an international personal practice and research agenda that lies in the cross-cultural interactions of the overlapping areas of visual art, cultural study and social science with a sustained focus on India. His approach is to work collaboratively with other practitioners, writers, academics, institutions and students through a practice that questions the mythologizing of Indian identity by considering wider ideas of the interchange and tensions between identity, location and context. Recent publications, projects and exhibitions that respond to social and political change in relation to India include Outside India at W+K Exp Gallery, Delhi, 2011 and the accompanying publication Outside India: Dialogues and Documents of Art and Social Change (W+K Delhi, 2012), Barcelona Masala: Narratives and Interactions in Cultural Space (Actar, 2013) and the inclusion of his installation End of Empire, at the 2nd edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014. Recent projects in relation to biennales include The Indian Biennale Effect: The Kochi- Murziris Biennale 12/12/12 (Journal of Cultural Politics, Duke University Press, 2013) and India’s Biennale Effect: A Politics of Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2016) launched at the 3rd Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2016 and more recently the review 'Timely Provocations: The 3rd Kochi-Muziris Biennale' for The Biennale Foundation website in January 2017.
Born in 1961 in Mangalore, India, Sudarshan Shetty lives and works in Mumbai. Shetty initially trained as a painter, later turning to sculpture and installations which now account for all of his practice. A conceptual artist, he is renowned for his enigmatic and often mechanized sculptural installations, Shetty explores the fundamental ontological challenges presented by our immersion in a world of objects. His hybrid constructions question the fusion of Indian and Western traditions as well as exploring domestic concerns and the notion of movement. His installations are developed around a rigorous grammar of materials, mechanical exposure and unlikely juxtapositions of things that may belong to culturally distinct spheres. Moreover, Shetty’s object language eschews narrative as well as established symbolism. He has exhibited widely in India and around the world. Sudarshan Shetty was also the curator of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016 in addition to participating as an artist in the inaugural edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale curated by Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu in 2012.
Zhang Qiang is a calligrapher and performance artist with an international reputation, having had works shown at the British Museum; Columbia University Art Museum Warrick; University of Kansas Spencer Museum; Union Square and National Museum of Melbourne; Art Commune in Hong Kong; Italy Venice Armory; The Grand Palace in Paris; Seoul Municipal Art Museum of Korea; Museu de Arte de Macau; and Taiwan's National Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall. Zhang Qiang is notable as an avant-garde Chinese calligrapher, whose performance practice is framed within the context of global, contemporary art, gender politics and cross-cultural exchange. Zhang Qiang is also Professor at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and Director of Modern Video Arts Research Centre for Chinese Calligrap hy and Ink Painting. He is author of his multi-volume work ‘Zhang Qiang Artistic System’; Honor Winner of ‘Two River Scholar’, and organiser of the international conferences ‘Re-construction of Art History in the context of Globalisation’; and ‘Chinese Calligraphy in the backgrounds of Visual Arts History.
Zuleikha Chaudhari is a theatre director and lighting designer based in New Delhi. Her works typically explore the structures and codes of performance as well as the function and processes of the performer as reality and truth production. Drawing on a set of high-pro le historical court cases in India, recent productions have examined law as performance, the role of performance in law and the performativity of legal truth- production. Her works have been shown at theatre festivals, galleries and exhibitions in United States, Germany, France, Belgium, Vienna, South Africa, South Korea, China,
Japan, The Netherlands, Pakistan and India including KMB 2016, KunstenFestivaldesArts, Brussels, Weiner Festwochen, Vienna, Festival d’Automne, Paris, Seoul Performing Arts Festival. She was awarded the Sangeeta Natak Academy’s Yuva Puruskar in 2007 and the Charles Wallace India Trust Award in 2001. She is currently developing the theatre archive at the Alkazi Foundation of the Arts, New Delhi.