Colombo Art Biennale ‘Makes History’ with it’s Third Edition

Kurchi Dasgupta

Colombo Art Biennale saw the contemporary manifestation of the turbulent though dead yet alive past through the aesthetics of the present with the eye of the future. Kurchi Dasgupta reports.

The Colombo Art Biennale (CAB 14) recently held its third edition, ‘Making History’ across seven venues involving fifty-two artists from sixteen countries in the Sri Lankan capital. Even as Annoushka Hempel, the biennale’s Founder-Director inaugurated it alongside a host of senior diplomats and corporate partners at the Lakshman Kadigamar Institute on the afternoon of January 30, we were tempted away from the exquisite colonial structure by eerie strains of the violin – to find a performance in progress! In response to Tristan Al-Haddad’s extended brick structure, Womb/Tomb (2014) Eugene Draw was improvising a haunting soundpiece, Elegy (2014). Park Street Mews, a renovated warehouse up a chic alley hosted a number of works including those by India’s T V Santosh and Rakhi Peswani. Santosh’s Effigies of Turbulent Yesterdays (2011-2013) dominated the space. Modeled after an equestrian monument, the piece is an obvious critique of state-sponsored monuments, which is predicated on the discourse of official masculine power and violence. A life-sized horse stands tall with a headless rider on its back, a fountain of blood spurting from the gaping neck. The monochromatic piece –all in black — is crafted exquisitely out of fiberglass. LED timers blinking random moments from across the globe littered the horse’s body. The sculpture comes together as a visual metaphor for the fragility of centralized power as well as a warning bell against impending environmental doom or political collapse. ‘Making History’ was the chosen theme for the current biennale — in logical progression from ‘Imagining Peace’ in 2009 and ‘Becoming’ of 2012.