Sindbad the Sailor by Abanindranath Tagore
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
The New York Times Spelling Bee does not recognise Biennale as a valid word. It sticks with Biennial, as in the Whitney Biennial, though the Venice Biennale has made that word part of global art vocabulary. So we have the Gwangju Biennale, the Biennale of Sydney, Dak’Art or the Dakar Biennale. And now after Kochi, Bengal gets a Bengal Biennale.
Given Kolkata’s British connection it could have been a Bengal Biennial. “But Bengal Biennale just sounds better in Bangla,” chuckles Malavika Banerjee who, along with her husband Jeet, is one of the trustees. The Venice Biennale was always her benchmark. “It seemed very inspiring to me that a place can be so suffused with art for a period of few months every other year,” she says. She has been there thrice. Curator Siddhartha Sivakumar remembers going to the first Kochi Biennale as a young artist. “We were in no position to think of realising something like this then.”
Initially, it was just supposed to be an art fair in Santiniketan says Sivakumar. “It just grew,” he says. “The word biennale was the elephant in the room,” adds Banerjee. It was the dream nobody dared name. But by end June the Santiniketan art fair had become a biennale involving over 100 artists spread across 25 venues in both Santiniketan and Kolkata.
Twilight landscape with trees and lake by Rabindranath Tagore
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
Why Santiniketan?
While it might have been easier to do the maiden biennale in a metro like Kolkata where Banerjee already helms the Kolkata Literary Meet, she says she wanted to do it in Santiniketan because that is “India’s first university town, Tagore’s dream child, has a whole school of art, has had great masters and just got its UNESCO tag, but nothing much has really been done there”. They started considering Kolkata because initially they were unsure if the university administration in Santiniketan would come on board. Now they have and Banerjee says, “I am glad it worked out this way. Because if we had started in Kolkata, I don’t think we would have gone to Santiniketan.”
Santiniketan proved a draw for artists such as Mithu Sen and T. V. Santhosh who studied there but have never really shown there. Another alumnus Jayashree Chakravarty’s massive scrolls have shown all over the world but not in Kolkata till now. Even for those without a Santiniketan background, Tagore’s university town resonated. The biennale will open in Santiniketan with Devdutt Pattanaik’s artwork, something Banerjee says has been “hidden in plain sight” in his books. When she asked him if he would like to come to Kolkata instead, Pattanaik replied, “No, what better place than the Mecca of art if I am making my debut?”
Eye on contemporary art
Bengal has had a pivotal role in the art history of India. The Bengal School of Art originated in Kolkata in the 19th century and spread across India. Santiniketan has its Kala Bhavan. “You will see the masters on sale at auctions, but the contemporary scene slipped away from Bengal,” says Sivakumar. “When a contemporary show happens it tends to happen outside Bengal.” The Last Harvest, an exhibition of Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings marking his 150th birth anniversary, travelled to Delhi and Mumbai, says Sivakumar but not to Kolkata. With the biennale, he hopes “to bring that [contemporary] art to Bengal and expose our art to the visitors from outside.”
Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen
| Photo Credit:
Nemai Ghosh (courtesy: Satyaki Ghosh)
Bookended between the twin gods of Tagore and Satyajit Ray, the rich art heritage of Bengal can fall into the nostalgia trap. “We are not celebrating nostalgia,” says Sivakumar firmly. “We have exhibitions of Rabindranath, Gaganendranath, Abanindranath and Sunayani Devi. But these are original works that we don’t get to see often. In fact, we are calling the first edition Anka-Banka: Through Cross-Currents.” Anka means drawing. Banka means aslant or bent. But together anka-bankaconveys something winding, where the meaning exists outside the straight and narrow. So, musician Louis Banks and economist Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee are in the biennale alongside well-known artists such as Sudhir Patwardhan and Dayanita Singh.
Rabindranath Tagore
Challenge of finding sponsors
The road to the Biennale has been anka-banka, too. Banerjee readily admits that despite a lot of excitement, “it’s difficult to expect corporates to pay for art on such a big scale”. A six-day literature festival is easier to sell than a two-month biennale. Also the current financial woes of the pioneering Kochi Biennale could unnerve potential sponsors. So, this year she says they have to make do mostly with blessings.
Will it be easier next time around? Banerjee isn’t sure but tells a story about Yellowstone National Park, which was going through a crisis about 30 years ago.
Head of a man by Rabindranath Tagore
As authorities mulled overmaking the facilities more modern and tourist-friendly, an ecologist said they just needed to get some wolves. It turned out the wolves ate the small animals that were decimating the grass, and when the grass grew taller, the deer returned. Their droppings helped the aspens grow. The beauty of the aspens drew tourists back. “What I am saying is I don’t think anything directly would happen from one biennale,” says Banerjee. “But if we create an ecosystem, in time people would perhaps look at Bengal differently and Bengal would look at itself differently.”
But who are the wolves? “We are,” says Banerjee without hesitation. “And we will have to create the ecosystem.”
Through Cross-Currents is from November 29, 2024 to January 5, 2025.
The writer is the author of Don’t Let Him Know, and likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not.
Published – November 23, 2024 08:00 am IST
