Bengal Brio

SPREAD OVER 25 venues in Santiniketan and Kolkata, the Bengal Bi­ennale is showcasing the work of over a hundred artists. For visitors, the scale and scope of the event can sometimes feel overwhelming. The schedule makes you want to be in several places at once, from Trincas to Victoria Memorial Hall, from St James’ Church to Alipore Museum. Curator Siddharth Sivakumar tells us his initial plans were a lot more modest. In early 2024, he was busy laying the groundwork for a small art fair in Santiniketan. Soon enough, the event’s reach and ambition expanded, and by June, Kolkata emerged as a twin site. “As the project grew in scope, attracting more partners and collaborators, it evolved into the Bengal Biennale,” he says.

The idea of hosting a Bengal Bien­nale had lingered in Sivakumar’s mind for years, but if it weren’t for trustees Jeet and Malavika Banerjee, he might never have found the courage to make tangible his vision. The Banerjees run Gameplan Foundation, a trust that has or­ganised the Kolkata Literary Meet (KLM) since 2012. Over the years, KLM has brought in a string of Booker Prize win­ners and Nobel laureates. Its success gave Malavika Banerjee the confidence that she can pull off other large-scale events in the city. She says, “We had booked the URL for Bengal Biennale (bengalbiennale. com) way back in 2016. It was our dream to have a biennale in Bengal, the only state in India which has an art school named after it. We fed off Siddharth’s energy, and he fed off our experience. It was a meeting of people who share a common dream.”

Though he illustrates many of his books and columns, Devdutt Pattanaik doesn’t think of himself as an artist. When Banerjee was persuading him to exhibit his artwork for the first time, she made him an offer he found hard to refuse: “How can you say no to Santini­ketan?” On display at Santiniketan, Pattanaik’s black-and-white line draw­ings of gods, humans, birds and beasts seem to align perfectly with the title Sivakumar has given this first edition of the Bengal Biennale—Anka Banka: Through Cross-Currents. The Bengali word ‘anka’ means drawing, while ‘banka’ is used to describe something aslant, curved or crooked. “The term ‘anka banka’ means meandering, moving through bent and awkward spaces,” says Pattanaik. “I, too, wander through all kinds of mythologies—Indian, Western, Hindu, Islamic, Christian, and so on.”

Pattanaik’s exhibition, MYTrutH, dis­rupts the templatisation that invariably gives gods six-pack abs or makes them look like children. “There are other ways of seeing, but fewer people are searching for them.” Rather than look at art as a “political vehicle” or “commercial tool,” Pattanaik hopes the Bengal Biennale will encourage youngsters to think more creatively.

Tokaroun, the nonprofit space where Pattanaik’s art is now on view, was founded by sculptor KS Radhakrishnan. Inaugurated in February this year, the multipurpose venue for exhibitions, performances, film screenings etc is proof that Santiniketan has more to boast of than Rabindranath Tagore’s famed Visva-Bharati University. An exhibi­tion of Sudhir Patwardhan’s paintings, Fragments of Belonging, can be seen at the Santiniketan Society for Visual Art and Design (SSVAD). GABAA, a space for collaborative art practice, is hosting Ohida Khandakar’s Dream Your Museum, an exhibition that challenges the boundaries of art and film.

ACCORDING TO SIVAKUMAR, Santiniketan’s prominence on the contemporary map of Indian art lies not in nostalgia but in its ability to foster new avenues for dialogue and engagement. “The Bengal Biennale exemplifies this shift,” he says. Banerjee, on the other hand, feels that ever since Santiniketan was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in September last year, a revival has been quietly bubbling under the town’s sleepy surface. “There has been a huge resurgence in Santini­ketan. This wasn’t the case 10 years ago. We talk about Goa being a great art hub, but I don’t think Santiniketan is in any way less. We may not have the great restaurants of Goa, or its beaches, but a lot of serious art is taking place here, and I really feel very heartened to see this.”

Having spent seven years studying at Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati’s Institute of Fine Arts, Mithu Sen has waited nearly three decades to show her work at Santiniketan. She remembers being a teary mess on her last day. “I grabbed a tree and didn’t want to let go,” she says. “I wouldn’t have survived if I told myself I was leaving Santiniketan. I needed to be­lieve I was carrying Santiniketan inside me, that I was somehow taking it away.” Sen says her connection to this place is both “romantic and spiritual”. She some­times thinks her younger self still lives as a ghost here, “or maybe I’m the ghost who lives outside.” Santiniketan, for her, is “home”, and, also, “heaven”.

When Sivakumar invited Sen to the Bengal Biennale, the conceptual artist asked if she could work in Pearson Palli, a Santal village she loved visiting as a student. “The idea of Santiniketan often revolves around the glory of Tagore and Visva-Bharati, but there are minority communities who have been living in the area for centuries. I wanted to work with the Santal community and their Santali language.” Sen reached out to Sanyasi Lohar, an artist from the Santal community, for help. Together, they painted on the walls of four Pearson Palli huts letters and numbers that educator Raghunath Murmu had designed when inventing the Ol Chiki script some hundred years ago. “Though the Santali language survives, its script has almost altogether been forgotten,” says Sen. “The murals we have drawn will last for months, maybe even years. Our hope is that Santals living nearby will become curious about our installation, I am Ol Chiki, and will finally reclaim their alphabet.”

The themes of reclamation and revival apply not just to Sen’s work, but to the Bengal Biennale as a whole.

Home to several iconic artists—Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy and Tagore—Bengal’s influence over India’s visual language has significantly waned over the years. Sivakumar says, “Once the leading centre of modern art in India, the Bengal art scene saw a shift post-1960s, as other art centres, especially Delhi and Mumbai, emerged as economically and politically influential hubs. As the art world became more market-driven, new voices from Bengal were further left out.” Banerjee, for her part, believes that “the media has conflated the flight of industry with the decline of art”. Rather than lapse back into nostalgia, she feels the Bengal Biennale will bring contemporary art back to the front and centre of the state’s consciousness: “We haven’t lost the artists. We’ve only lost the ecosystem that celebrated them.”

One of the 12 biennale venues in Kolkata, the Victoria Memorial Hall will put on display the work of yesteryear masters—Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore— but those who visit the monument will also see outside its gate a 26-feet-high sculpture that Paresh Maity has sculpted in bronze. Titled Urbanscape, Maity uses the shape of a jackfruit as a metaphor for city life. The artist says, “No matter where I look—at the spikes on the outside or the seeds on the inside—the jackfruit always reminds me of how big and small houses harmoni­ously co-exist in cities.” Overjoyed by the fact that Bengal now has its own biennale, Maity adds, “Be it art, cinema or music, Bengalis have always been pioneers, but of late, the state wasn’t getting the proper exposure. This biennale is a big boost.”

In 2009, Prateek Raja and his wife, Priyanka, founded Experimenter, a Kolkata gallery which has since exhib­ited many leading South Asian contem­porary artists. A member of the Bengal Biennale’s advisory board, Raja hopes the event will benefit the practice of artists in the city who haven’t been given the atten­tion they rightfully deserve: Even though Raja agrees that an older generation of artists continues to hold sway in Bengal, he feels that young contemporary artists here only need “an organised platform, just enough support and a little encouragement” to be more impactful.

Comparing art to music, Raja feels the success of ITC Sangeet Research Academy (SRA) in Kolkata’s Tollygunge area could serve as a template. Dedicated to the promotion of Hindustani classical music, SRA, a residential institute, has nurtured the talent of several young musicians since it was set up in 1977.

DAYANITA SINGH WAS in her twenties when she began visiting SRA in the early 1980s. Here she met stalwarts like Ajoy Chakrabarty and Rashid Khan. For six winters, she trav­elled with these doyens of music on the SRA bus, photographing them as they took Hindustani classical music to re­mote corners of the country. Poring over her contact sheets, Singh found she had pictures of these musical greats in vari­ous settings—in hotels and green rooms, performing on stage, and lounging on the bed. What tied these images together was the ubiquitous presence of the tanpura: “Nobody gives it much importance, and yet, you can’t have classical music with­out it.” Singh’s exhibition of photos from her SRA trips, Museum of Tanpura, has never been shown in India. “It’s premier­ing at the Indian Museum in the Bengal Biennale. What more could I ask for?”

Even though Singh has displayed her work in several museums across the world, she says the Indian Muse­um is her favourite: “Every time I am in Calcutta, I have to go there. I have been photographing there for over 20 years. Its scale and architecture are both astounding, but more importantly, no gallery on earth could ever get you that much of an audience.” According to Singh, biennales perform a crucial func­tion—they take art out of the galleries and bring it to public spaces that many more people have access to. “Galleries are there to sell the work. Their agenda is not to educate or create awareness. Biennales can better perform that role. It’s great we have Kochi, but the Bengal Biennale will now also encourage us to look beyond commerce.”

Aradhana Seth feels a number of Bengal Biennale’s Kolkata venues are architecturally beautiful, but the Alipore Museum, which used to once be the Alipore Central Jail, is best suited for an exhibition of her photographs. For the last three decades, Seth has been build­ing a photographic archive of signs that have been painted by hand across India. Inspired by Ghare Baire (Home and the World), a Tagore novel that Satyajit Ray had also adapted, Seth has named her exhibition Jaile Baire (The Jail and the World). Making the case that biennales are democratic spaces, Seth hopes the event will bring to the city peo­ple from across India and maybe even abroad. Banerjee echoes this sentiment: “The art we exhibit is not for sale or acquisition. We wanted this biennale to be open to everyone who wished to see it, and that will always be our mantra.”

(Bengal Biennale Anka-Banka: Through Cross-Currents runs in Santiniketan from November 29 to December 22, and in Kolkata from December 6 to January 5)

art and cultureBengal BiennaleKolkataMithu SenParesh MaityRashid KhanSantiniketan