STUDENTS' BIENNALE 2014
December 13, 2014 – March 29, 2015
Venues: Mohammed Ali Warehouse and KVA Brothers, Mattancherry
Students’ Biennale has been conceived as part of Kochi Biennale Foundation’s ‘Higher Education Programme’ in collaboration with FICA and FIAE. It endeavours to create an alternative platform for students from government art colleges in different parts of India to reflect upon their art practices and exhibit their works to a global audience.The aim of the Student's Biennale is two-pronged – on one hand the exhibition surveys art institutions and the nature of art pedagogy across the country, and on the other it inducts art students on an international platform like Kochi Muziris Biennale, which has its own educational impetus.
More than 100 works have been brought together from 37 institutions situated in cities like Srinagar, Jabalpur, Vizag, Thrissur, Imphal, Bhubaneswar, Mysore, among others. The art schools range from 150-year-old colonial establishments, to institutions set up in the early years of independence as a part of the nation building project to those that came up more recently in the past two decades.
The research and process of selection was conducted by a group of 15 young curators, who travelled the length and breadth of the country, visiting art schools over a period of three months. Envisaged as a peer learning process, the curators tried to make sense of these diverse sites of art production within the compacted time periods available. They listened and found on the ground the expected narratives of lack and struggle, and noted the different levels of institutional crises that seemed to grip the schools. But what emerged equally strongly were the students’ assertions of hope, courage, determination and self-reliance, and an unwavering faith in their creative labour.Each curator identified his/her own questions and chose immediacies to respond to. The Student’s Biennale, has thus evolved into a discursive open-ended proposition. It attempts to bring together the multiple temporalities and spatialities that need to be acknowledged in the making of the ‘contemporary’ within the Indian context.The generative possibilities of this exhibition are immense – using the highly charged, temporary site of the Biennale to energise practitioners in diverse regions across the country. The Student’s Biennale 2014 is a beginning, the first in a series of initiatives that we are undertaking to reach out to art students across the country through exhibitions, residencies and workshops.
The catalytic exercise of collective engagement with students and art institutions has begun. We invite you all to be part of this process.
Curators
Faiza Hasan
Sumaiya Raza Khan
Krupa Desai
Charu Maithani
Parni Ray
Arko Datto
Lina Vincent
Pallavi Paul
Jigna Padhiar
Pranamita Borgohain
Aryakrishnan Ramakrishnan
Anannya Mehtta
Sachin
Vaishnavi Ramnathan
Geetika Arora
Curatorial Advisor: Vidya Shivadas
Project Advisor: Suresh Jayaram
Director of Programmes, Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2014: Riyas Komu
Programme Coordinator: Sananda Mukhopadhyay
Advisors: Bose Krishnamachari, Jitish Kallat, Belinder Dhanoa, Jeebesh Bagchi, Shukla Sawant, Sarada Natarajan, Vivan Sundaram, Sanjeev Mirchandani, Indrapramit Roy, Sudhir Patwardhan, Aveek Sen, Prateek Raja, Priyanka Raja, R Siva Kumar, Sanchayan Ghosh and B V Suresh.
Institutions
Govt. Institute of Fine Arts, Indore | Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai | Bhartiya Kala Mahavidyalaya, Pune University | Goa College of Art, Panaji | College of Fine Arts, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bengaluru | Department of Visual Arts, Bangalore University, Bengaluru |College of Art, Delhi | School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University, Delhi | Government College of Fine Arts, Thrissur | RLV ( Radha Lakshmi Vilasam) College of Music and Fine Arts. Tripunithura | Institute of Music and Fine Arts, University of Kashmir, Srinagar |
Faculty of Visual Arts, Banaras Hindu University | Department of Fine Arts, Aligarh Muslim University | College of Fine Arts, JNA&FAU, Hyderabad | Department of Fine Arts, Andhra University, Visakhapatnam | Department of Fine Arts, Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderbad | Government College of Art, Chandigarh | Government College of Fine Arts, Jabalpur | Imphal Art College, Manipur | Department of Fine Arts, Tripura University | Department of Visual Arts, Assam University | Kala Bhavan, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan | Govt. College of Arts and Crafts, Kolkata | Faculty of Fine Arts, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata | Government College of Art and Crafts, Assam | Government College of Art and Crafts, Khallikote (Ganjam), Odisha | B.K.College of Art & Crafts, Bhubaneswar | Institute of Music & Fine Arts, Jammu | Faculty of Fine Arts, Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi | College of Arts and Crafts, Patna | Rajasthan School of Art, Jaipur | Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda | Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts, Mysore | College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram | Raja Ravi Varma College of Fine Arts, Mavelikara | Department of Fine Arts, Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady | Government College of Fine Arts, Kumbakonam
Click on the PDF below to get a glimpse of the exhibition and some of the short texts by the curators who were involved in the exhibition process.
