New Delhi/Kochi, Jan 20: The Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB)
2014 coveys the message that India is poised to take forward a recent surge in
the country’s experimental work in the field of art, according to the Young
Presidents’ Organization (YPO), which scheduled its annual retreat at the
108-day exhibition on in this city.
“The show, with its variety of mediums, blew my mind away,”
said YPO Mumbai chapter’s Dinesh Vazirani of Saffronart, a leading auction
house for art and antiquities based in that metropolis. “The second coming of
the biennale, which has found a space for such interesting, experimental work
shows that we can now have more of this. I hope this goes forward and gets
transported to the spaces that we live in.”
The 40-strong group, which consists of heThe YPO delegates who visited the biennale said that the contrast between the old-world feel of Fort Kochi and the contemporary exhibition was striking, and the fact that the exhibition is titled in favour of the local region makes it interesting and is not what would be usually seen at art shows. “This region takes you back a few centuries and it is incredible that the KBF has attempted to bring such an event here,” said Archana Hingorani, CEO of an investment management company. “It is great for the community to have something like this, where they can be involved and broaden their horizon.”
ad honchos of
Mumbai businesses, lauded the gumption of the Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF)
for pulling off such an event. “The scale of the show is eye-popping,” said
Vazirani, who organised the trip. “You could not have something like this in
Mumbai, so I would ask everyone to please come to this scenic corner of India
and see the exhibition.”
Even for the art collectors in the group, who have been to
other international biennales, the show felt “extraordinary”. “It is wonderful
to see that the artists have pushed themselves to link their work to Kochi,”
said Amrita Jhavari, a gallerist, collector and art advisor. “It is really
poetic. It is a really tightly curated show; you can tell the different that came
from the artists working with a curator and here, the artists working with
Jitish Kallat, who is first an artist and then, a curator.”
The Mumbai YPO group was here on a three-day visit of the
KMB ’14 sites. The retreat also included a talk by the country’s top five
collectors. “The retreats are meant to be educational and fun,” said Vazirani.
“It’s a ‘Whorled Exploration’”.
