WSA studio production

Echoing the 'productionist' and curatorial principles of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, staff and students from Winchester School of Art explored the making of art within social conditions examining what underlies the art biennale format, the framing of contemporary art, its labours, and viewership. Working collaboratively across the key areas of the School’s BA Fine Art course – sculpture, painting, printmaking and new media – four signature artworks were created for Tate Exchange, each inspired by seminal works of art created during previous editions of the Kochi Biennale. Intensive collaborative studio production was undertaken at WSA in preparation for 'live' installation on day one at Tate Exchange.

The sculpture studio

A signature artwork of the first edition of the Kochi Biennale was Subodh Gupta 'What does the vessel contain - that the river does not’. The sculpture students used this artwork for a shared project, to re-make the work. In itself, the work is a ‘democratic’ piece: it is about the everyday, about movement of people, of place,the flow of life eand so on. As an object and in relation to its installation at the Biennale, Gupta’s work speaks to Tate’s theme of ‘production’. It is a laboured process, and offers multiple ways of thinking, be it material, conceptual and historical, as well as being about process and about placement . The fact that Gupta's boat is filled with items also presents an opportunity to extend the work within the space of Tate in a participatory way - to allow visitors to contribute to the filling of the boat.

The painting studio

Jitish Kallat was the curator of the second Kochi Biennale. His own work draws upon a range of contemporary imagery, rendered in various ways. There is both precision and play in the works he makes. He is well-known for his early vibrant, ‘postmodern’ paintings, which draw substantially from imagery of the busy street scenes of Mumbai. The combination of pop imagery and material textures and temperatures situate the works in a very particular cultural and political setting. They offer an interesting starting point for the paint studio to think about the rendering the materiality of ‘visual culture’ as it relates to place. Kochi presents a palimpsest of material traces – most of the buildings for the Biennale are old, dilapidated colonial warehouses (many of which had not been accessible until the Biennale made a use for them). The streets of Kochi are full of activities, posters, and debris. Graffiti and wall art are present across the city. Serial fly-posting is ubiquitous, and frequently overlaid, or peeling away with the humidity. There are also walls with carefully stenciled ‘Post No Bills’ signs. This rich ‘canvas’  offered a prompt for collaborative, palimpsestic artwork. Questions were raised about frame and support, taking inspiration from the installation of a painting in the 2014 Biennale: the notable contemporary Indian painter N.S. Harsha exhibited a large format work in the space where Gupta’s boat had been installed in the edition before. Stretched over a metal frame, like a sail, the work  ran the whole expanse of the space. In addition, Tate’s permanent display of painting in the expanded field was drawn upon as part of the considerations for making and displaying work.

The printmaking studio

The windows of the Tate Exchange floor are a key architectural feature and offered great opportunity for showing work, acting both as window and screen. Given that a key interest of this project was to consider how biennales evoke a specific relationship between art, city and people, the windows offered potential as a significant device. A one key prompt was Robert Montgomery’s The Strange New Music of the Crying Songs..., 2012, a large LED text work that ran across the top of Aspinwall House, the primary site of the Kochi Biennale. Montgomery's sign worked as a form of concrete poetry, looking out across the shipping lanes of Kochi; the single sentence poem was an ode to migration, hybridity and encounter. Tate, as a contested location (being a site of communities, of businesses, of gentrification and of modern art) offered a charged location to install a large format print-based work. Thinking of the idea of hashtags, for example, there was a possibility for the work to have an evolving, reactive element as the week unfolded. There was also potential for a performative element, in order to engage with the public as they encountered  the work – a kind of ‘SOS’ looking out from the 5th floor of Tate.

The new media studio

Initial discussions  led to the idea of a primarily sound-based artwork that drew on archival materials and field recordings from Kochi. Given the space available at Tate, there was the potential for a ‘distributed’ audio-visual work. The first edition of the Kochi Biennale was the first art ‘event’ to be archived by the Google Art Project, as part of the work of the Google Cultural Institute. This  offeried the possibility for students to work with the Institute, and also to develop direct links with Kochi through digital means, such as live feeds.