KBM6: Biennale Opens its Residency Exhibitions

KOCHI:
Seeking to kindle the interest of audiences, the Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF) opened its four Residency exhibitions featuring artists whose works offer insights into the deep bond between nature and human beings and the consequences of exploiting it.

The exhibitions, held at Devassy Jose and Sons, Mattancherry, portray the world as belonging to all, seeking to erase all boundaries and lines.

The works of Berlin-based artists, Flo Maak and visual artist Juliane 9uTübke, are an evolution of their artistic process of their KBF Residency in 2019. They could not display their work owing to the COVID pandemic.

Flo Maak’s work delves into harmony of life and cohabitation through the so-called invasive weeds in one part of the world and revered in other parts while Juliane 9uTübke explores entangled relationships between humans and their environments.

Their works ring a bell with those of the other two Residency artists— educator and independent researcher Daniel Godínez Nivón who explores the wonders of nature, the commodification of vanilla through artificial pollination; and Shivay La Multiple, who looks deep into the features of the invasive water-hyacinth and considers it a blessing for the waters.

“The Residency programme offers space for research in Fort Kochi and surrounding areas and for collaboration as well with residency projects across the nations to help strengthen international collaboration,” said KBF Director of Programmes, Mario D Souza.

Daniel Godínez Nivón’s work is grounded in tequio, a form of traditional unpaid collective work rooted in indigenous communities, especially in Oaxaca, Mexico, which shapes a methodology merging social participation, pedagogy, and collective knowledge-making. He investigates ties between dreaming and the natural world, asking how the dreams of humans and other beings can illuminate environmental crises and spark collective imagination.

Flo Maak, a graduate of the Städelschule, Frankfurt, and Cooper Union, New York, explores the entangled relationships between nature and culture, questioning notions of autonomy to reveal networks of mutual dependency. He has exhibited internationally and taught as a professor of art photography at Chung-Ang University in Seoul.

However, German artist Juliane Tübke’s practice traces the entangled relationships between humans and their environments. She engages with the agency of non-human beings such as water, weather, plants, ecosystems, and the material residues of human activity through photography, imprinting processes, text, and sound.

Shivay La Multiple, who holds French nationality and is also associated with New Caledonia, seeks to attune the language of dreams to reason, creating lines of flight toward unprecedented worlds, multiverses, and pluriverses through a multiplicity of mediums. Her research moves from the global to the visceral, the macro to the micro, dream to reality, and the physical to the digital, drawing inspiration from the poetics of relation.