Not to be cowed down by the pandemic, the Students’ Biennale, organised by the Kochi Biennale Foundation, has materialised as an online exhibition.
The website went live on Saturday and hosts 45 art projects by students from institutions across the country. A total of 315 artists are part of the exhibition either individually or as part of collectives.
Projects that are part of the online exhibition have been organised into five viewing rooms available as separate tabs on the website — Annals: A Repository, Writings on the Wall, Urban Diaries, Troubled Terrains, and With Grace, the Needle Pierces. The exhibition as a whole is called States of Disarray: Practice as Restitution, and is a “response to an environmental and social crisis of unimaginable proportions.”
Some exhibits include art work on paper or canvas, drawings with charcoal, ink or pastels, terracotta and clay sculptures, wood-cut prints, and an installation of glass bottles. Others fall in the realm of digital art, with some web-based interactive exhibits and videos. The process leading up to a few of the exhibits is also on the website in the form of videos. One project presents a graphic novel of sorts, with a soundtrack.
The Students’ Biennale had five curators — Adip Dutta, Archana Hande, Mano Vyloor, Suresh K. Nair, and Vasudha Thozhur — who put the show together through workshops and discussions with participating artists.
Artist Manoj Vyloor writes in his curatorial note: “These young artists react and respond to the recent events of nation-wide protests against discriminatory laws, cry foul against the injustice inflicted upon the hapless population of downtrodden mass over several centuries, remind the over-exploitation of the geography and its consequences, and expose the inequalities that still plague the subcontinent.”
The online platform allows students to have a broader audience across the globe, not limited to the one who would visit the physical space, writes Archana Hande in her curatorial note.
The exhibition will be available online for three months: https://studentsbiennale.online/
