Biennale Facilitated Return of Artistic Freedom, Says Prominent Malayalam Writers

KOCHI:
With its showcase of vivid and diverse range of artworks, the ongoing Kochi Muziris Biennale (KMB) can be seen as an avenue for expressing artistic freedom and a platform for collaboration of ideas, according to several noted Malayalam writers who recently visited the ongoing three-month-long art festival here.
Renowned writers Paul Zacharia, K Satchidanandan, and Indu Menon visited Biennale over the past few days and took back with them some invaluable memories.
Acclaimed writer Paul Zacharia also saw the Biennale as a place where art converge into new dimensions.
“I see Biennale as a new progressive movement that allows artists from around the globe to express their fresh ideas and artistic concepts,” said the author who has won all the major literary awards in Malayalam.
“It is similar to the time when the Malayali attained a new sense of literary perception while international literary classics by Tolstoy, Victor Hugo and others were translated to Malayalam. The Biennale does something similar by bringing international artists to the context of Kerala and thus updating us about the emerging trends in world art,” Zacharia said.
Modernist writer Indu Menon said she found the Biennale to offer a relevant space for freedom of expression.
“The Biennale has provided a powerful comeback for art by giving complete freedom to artists to work beyond any external pressure,” said Menon. “I liked the works based on the concepts of death and euphoria, and also the ones based on sounds exhibited here” said the writer.
Poet K Satchidanandan who visited Biennale earlier in January felt Biennale as a place that promotes alternate thought process and perceptions. He lauded artist Sudarshan Shetty who is curating the current edition of the KMB for incorporating several practices such as poetry, architecture, dance, music and drama into the Biennale thus offering a multilayered perspective to the contemporary exhibition.
“With the Biennale, there is an emergence of new aesthetics that goes beyond visual experience. Instead of art works which can be conceived through sound, smell, touch and intelligence, what you can see here is how one can respond differently to an art work,” said Satchidanandan.
The Biennale, said the Sahitya Akademi winning poet and critic has initiated a coming together of artists from all streams.
“Last time such a gathering of artists, sculptures, poets, writers and
architects occurred during the 1950s and the1960s,” he said.
“Biennale has also facilitated a platform for artists to recreate lost worlds through images, worlds lost due to conflicts and wars, thus warning the present about what has happened in past and what should not be repeated in the future,” said Satchidanandan.