Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016: Participating Artists in Sudarshan’s Curatorial Project

“… KMB is a people’s biennale, and that makes it special.”

Those are the words of Sudarshan Shetty, the declared curator of the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale by the Minister for Culture, KC Joseph at an event in the State capital Thiruvananthapuram on July 15, 2015 Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016.
Multiform artist, whose art practice has evolved from painting to multi-media explorations that include sculpture, video, performance and installation, Sudarshan works frequently bringing together heterogeneous object-worlds, insinuating into the familiar an intimation of the strange and the new: arise then a natural, almost involuntary, relation between his practice as artist and the process of curation, which aim, as Sudarshan declares in many interviews, is to bring the visual and experiential multiplicity inside this event, made by people and for the people.

The third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), running for 108 days from 12 December 2016 to 29 March 2017, takes “forming in the pupil of an eye” as its theme: the gaze becomes a leitmotif of Sudarshan’s curatorial work and in particular what he defines as “the ability of the eye to reflect back to the world as much as it takes in”. Through a large selection of nineteen artists with different approaches to their work, from performance to videoart, sculpture, painting, poetry and combined techniques, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) achieves to show the multiplicity of the world, experiences and artistic development in one look.