Bengal Biennale 2024 First Look

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Transcript

00:00Hi, I'm Siddharth Sivakumar. I'm the curator and the director of the Bengal Biennale.

00:30The essence of Aka Baka is not really translatable in that sense. So I also wanted it to be very

00:45rooted to what we are doing here. It was never going to be a straight line. You couldn't

00:50do it right away. There were a lot of challenges. So you had to kind of find your own way through

00:55all of this. So that image had a kind of impact, as in that stayed in my mind, that it's not

01:02as straightforward. And it's a curious phrase, right? It's not in English. We are trying

01:07to impose the language. But then again, it is not just Aka Baka, Aka Baka through cross

01:23currents. So when I talk about cross currents, the fact that there's no one single direction,

01:30lot of things are happening simultaneously, maybe not in the same direction itself. And

01:36in Bengal art, if you look at the Tagore household, you would see people practicing differently

01:42or getting influenced by different art practices. In the Jorashakwa household, you have Agunendranath

01:50doing his Arabian Nights series, and you have Gaganendranath doing his own take on cubism.

02:00I'm Mithushen. I'm a visual artist. So when I was invited by the Bengal Biennale, I was,

02:10of course, I was overexcited. And then I was given freedom.

02:20When I received the invitation from Siddharth, the curator of this exhibition, I was immediately

02:38excited because I was like, this is my ticket to go to Shantiniketan. You know, I've been

02:43thinking about it, dreaming about it.

03:14Hi, my name is Devdutt Patnaik. I write on mythology, but I also illustrate my works.

03:21And this is the first time I'm exhibiting my artwork at the Bengal Biennale.

03:25Hi, I'm Mahesh KS, a visual artist based out of Bangalore. This idea and the installation,

03:50the troupe has come to me three years back, when I was like making some drawings of the

03:55pedestal fans. And as a person, like personally, I always cherish the moment when the air current

04:02hits me through a pedestal fan. And the feeling of that, plus these, the form of the pedestal

04:11fans, plus the music has something to do with me. That's something from where like, you

04:19know, I got into this idea of making the fan dance.

04:26Besides the curatorial vision and all of that, what is so important to me is to make sure

04:33that the Biennale leaves behind some kind of positive energy from which other things

04:42can happen. It is not about what we do now, but what happens when this ends, what conversations continue.