Building an Art Biennale day 1

TUESDAY 8 MAY - INSTALLING A BIENNALE...

From 12 – 4 pm Staff and students from Winchester School of Art and Bose Krishnamachari, founding director of Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (see the video interview) collaborated to install large-scale artworks that were created for Tate Exchange, each inspired by seminal works of art created during previous editions of the Kochi Biennale. The ‘Biennale Office’ was established as an open space to learn about the diversity of biennale practices. Visitors were able to meet with all those involved and enter the project’s Office to discuss and challenge ideas about the making and installation of work, the nature of biennales in general, and to debate the value of contemporary art within wider social contexts beyond the art museum. Bose Krishnamachari led a discussion at 4.30pm.

Installation of WSA Fine Art student artworks at Tate Exchange. This includes the sculpture students' re-making of  Subodh Gupta's 'What does the vessel contain - that the river does not’ — a signature artwork of the first edition of the Kochi Biennale; the rendering by the paint studio of the materiality of ‘visual culture’ as it relates to place, inspired by Jitish Kallat was the curator of the second Kochi Biennale, who is well-known for his early vibrant, ‘postmodern’ paintings, which draw substantially from imagery of the busy street scenes of Mumbai; and the printmaking students use of the windows of the Tate Exchange — a key architectural feature that offer great opportunity for showing work.

Discussion with Bose Krishnamachari. Bose is Artistic Director and Co-Curator of India’s first Biennale, The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012, Director of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014 and President of the Kochi Biennale Foundation.