“Biennale Facilitated the Return of Artists to the Region’: Riyas Komu

KOCHI:
The Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) has facilitated both a rise to primacy for art in Kerala and the return of artists to the region, observed eminent artist and Biennale co-founder Riyas Komu at a conclave of scholars here.
Komu was responding to a question about the utility of art posed by renowned academician Prof. Nissar Ahmed during his keynote address at the opening of a four-day conference on Friday (Jan 13) titled ‘Art, Body, Thought: Expressions’.
The conference – organised by the Kochi Biennale Foundation and supported by HCL and Kiran Nadar Musuem of Art – will run till Monday (Jan 16) at the Pavilion in Cabral Yard, Fort Kochi.
“To escape conservatism, there had been a tendency among Kerala artists to migrate in search of opportunity – from Raja Ravi Varma, who left because he couldn’t find models for his portraits, to KCS Panicker. The Biennale facilitated the return of artists to the state,” Komu said. “Traditional art works act as cultural acupuncture in the contemporary world,” he added.
Noted poet Latheesh Mohan had presented a paper on ‘Regional as Language’, where he discussed the relation between language and the physical make-up of a region. He observed that it was high time to discard the search for origin theories to language.
“Digging around a dark, blurred past only gives you more darkness. The monopoly of language should be broken, moving away from a situation where modulation of language signifies one
’s social positioning to a process where language is understood to be an evolving process that can accommodate every marginalised and ignored voice,” Mohan said.
Renowned film critic Prof. C.S. Venkiteswaran contended that local cinema had become a response to globalisation. “Packaging the region in a beautified way for the global market has become a trend in regional film industry. A consumer state like Kerala, which is constantly exposed to and inspired by global trends, can never reflect the regional. Persisting with the local is how we can resist this trend,” Prof. Venkiteswaran said.
In an earlier session, media veteran Sashi Kumar said the process of making art is being lost due to over interpretation. “Forms can be changed, especially art forms. The entire thrust of digitisation is to disembody – virtual reality instead of reality, hologram instead of human, part instead of whole. Video art is a manifestation of this phenomenon,” he said.
The conference has already seen discussion by a number of eminent thinkers like poet Anita Thampi; writer Kalpetta Narayanan; scholar Prof. T.V. Madhu; Dileep Raj and Ranjini Krishnan.