Decaying matter narrates a story

KOCHI:  Can decaying elements from nature lead one to explore ideas of death and grief? Yes, if young Veda Thozhur Kolleri’s project at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is anything to go by.At Pepper House in Fort Kochi, Veda’s installation is an assemblage of weather-worn materials salvaged from wetlands. “I have always had the urge to collect. These objects I would collect are things you don’t see too much on campus,” says the 29-year-old artist.

Why specify campus? Well, it was during her MFA programme at Shiv Nadar University in Dadri (east of Delhi) Veda began to work with organic remains in various states of degradation. What all? Parts of trees that were shed, soil, dried leaves, cut grass, dead plants, bones of animals, quills and hives. “I collect these while exploring my surroundings on foot. Such trips help me develop very specific associations with certain objects.

They became my medium of work. The length of their life also interests me. I use soil and dried leaves. I rearrange them to make large-scale drawings or patterns on the ground. Wind or rain too might help them settle,” she says. 

Veda’s work ‘Rigor Mortis’ is an assemblage of materials from her time in Dadri as well as her encounters during a month of onsite work in Kochi ahead of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. “Having been in Kerala during the monsoon, my interactions with the sea and residues of the landscape, too, have found their way. The things I generally collect are things that one would want to hold on to or something that one would want to think there isn’t enough of,” says the Chennai-born artist about her mixed-media installation.

Using short video clips, photography, drawing, text and collected objects, Veda tries to create an environment — one with rot, decline and preservation that rehearses anticipation of loss. “It’s almost like you think if you practice something enough, you will get better on it. So the whole idea of rehearsal was something I thought it through surrounding myself with these dead objects,” she says.

The artist tries to create a ‘preferred’ environment in which objects are picked for the traces they carry and, as a rehearsal, creates for itself the fiction. The idea is to make everyone come in term with the urban realities, she explains. “The flip side of it is that by walking through these spaces, you sort of encounter more of death and loss. That is when it was no more rehearsal but became actual realities,” says Veda, who uses these elements as a metaphor for survival.