Kochi-Muziris Biennale announces first list of artists

The Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF) has announced the first list of participating artists for the upcoming Kochi Kochi-Muziris Biennale, slated to open on December 12 this year.

Shubigi Rao is a polymath, she is an archivist, visual artist and writer known for her complex layered installations of books, drawings, metaphysical puzzles, ideological board games, garbage and archives. Her work has been extensively exhibited and hoarded internationally. She is also a part-time lecturer of Art Theory and is an MFA Dissertation supervisor for the Faculty of Fine Arts at LASALLE College of Arts, Singapore. As a mark of her excellence in art and archives, Rao will be curating the fifth edition of the biennale titled 'In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire'.

On the challenges of curation during the pandemic, the inevitability of physical isolation informing the artists' work, their rethinking of how they produce art, the biennale as a space of comfort and consolation — a counterpoint to isolation and pain — and unearthing the marginalised and subsumed histories and narratives in her work.

Those whose names have been announced in the first list include Ali Cherri, Cecilia Vicuna, Colectivo Ayllu/Migrantes Transgresorxs, DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency), Daiddadallu, Gabrielle Goliath, Iman Issa , Joan Jonas, Martta Tuomaala, Mithra Kamalam, Pio Abad and Frances Wadsworth Jones, Priya Sen, Richard Bell, Samson Young, Seher Shah, Slavs and Tatars, Thao Nguyen Phan, The u-ra-mi-li project, Thuma Collective, Vasudevan Akkitham, Yinka Shonibare and Zina Saro-Wiwa.