Though art is endlessly changing, its ability to make worlds meet is constant: the worlds of the artist and the art consumers break into conversation, the subjects in a piece of art and the audience pause to converse.
SAJI P MATHEW OFM
Initiating conversations is perhaps the greatest modern virtue. Our world, in this era of alternative facts, propaganda, thought control, and post-truth, is more polarised and divided than ever before. Most are stuck in their own petite filter bubbles and echo chambers. We are diametrically opposed to each other on virtually every issue that matters -climate, citizenship, refugees, racism, caste, gender –you name it. Exclusive black and white, left and right, for and against is the new mantra for political success. The rest of the population, in between the poles, is ignorantly comfortable and indifferent. To be in a state of being talkable, or people to be in a position to converse is made tougher by people getting offended by the slightest of disapproval. Of course, the time when only a tiny group in society was allowed to get offended, and the rest had to just keep working and keep going quietly is far gone.
Art Questions Silence
Art is an expansive concept. The permanent possibility of change, expansion and novelty makes art what it is; it gives art its distinguished place in the world. Though art is endlessly changing, its ability to make worlds meet is constant: the worlds of the artist and the art consumers break into conversation, the subjects in a piece of art and the audience pause to converse. Art has the potency to initiate conversations. Even Dadaism, which was an anti-art movement, where art was deliberately made meaningless, had a strong anti-war message to the post First World War world.
Art conveys powerful messages across the linguistic and cultural barriers that so often divide us. There is no burden of convincing anyone with art, there is no pressure of winning an arguement. Sometimes it is too much to ask people to stop, think, and act. There are times when it is a challenge to make people even to stop and think. But with art we can at least ask them to stop; because art is attractive.
Art dispassionately and nonviolently breaks the spiral of silence. It makes the silent and indifferent uncomfortable. Initiating conversations is the biggest service of art to humanity. Art avoids, though not always, chronological details and geographical particulars of an issue, thus making an issue less personal to anyone, and so makes issues talkable, without offence.
This Biennale Speaks a Language of Resistance As we enter the main venue of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022/23 we are welcomed by an upset and unwelcome Aboriginal Embassy, an installation by the noted Australian artist Richard Bell. Bell’s installation is inspired by the first Aboriginal Tend Embassy pitched on the grounds of Australia’s parliament house in 1972 by four young men demanding aboriginal land rights. The work here brings the visitors face to face with the aboriginals of Australia who are now aware of the exploitation and land grabbing of the past and present; and are beginning to resist. The reality is no better anywhere. The adivasis, the tribals, the indigenous, the aboriginals of every land are helpless when the powerful walk on to their land, and occupy it in the name of growth and development. Whose growth and development would be an interesting question to explore. According the UNHCR there are an approximate 103 million forcibly displaced people in the world, of which 36.5 million are children below 18 years of age.
The Aboriginal Embassy sets in the thrust of this biennale –to make people think, converse, and act for aboriginal and indigenous people’s rights. Thus the curation seems to be deliberate in including a village swallowed by an ill-planned dam project, documentation of female genocide, Nepali women’s quest for relevancy and visibility, disturbing images of manual scavenging, showing light on the importance of indigenous people, and the list goes on. The relegated and banished have found voice through art.
∎
