The theme artist and curator Bose Krishnamachari has chosen as the curator for the first Yinchuan Biennale at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is "For an Image, Faster than Light". It's based on the Sanskrit chant Tamsoma Jyotirgamaya, which loosely translates into 'out of darkness and into light'.
It could possibly be a statement about his life. Artist, curator, writer, mentor, speaker and architect, Bose and sculptor/artist Riyas Komu have been placed at Number 86 on ArtReview's list of the 100 Most Influential People in the Contemporary Art World, 2016 - mostly for co-founding the Kochi Muziris Biennale.
The Yinchuan Biennale will be held from September 9 till December 18, and it's already in the news for all the right reasons. Despite being located far away from downtown Yinchuan, MOCA has already been named one of the best museums in the world in 2015.
More From This Section
He is a man on a mission to promote contemporary art. So he visits universities and talks to students about how the international language of contemporary art has developed. How do you create from nothing? How do you bring text into art? He's looking at minimalistic art, numbers, and contextual readings.
With less than a month to go to the Biennale, he and his four-member team in India are coordinating with 74 artists from 33 countries including Ai Wei Wei, Anish Kapoor, Yoko Ono, Lala Rukh and the latest BMW Art Journey award winner Abigail Reynolds.
Where most contemporary artists usually work closely with architects, Bose has done away with the scenographer entirely and designed each room for different kinds of artworks ranging from video and installation to Braille. He's extended the show inside and outside the gorgeous fluid premises.
Jesal Thakkar, who's working closely with him on the project, calls him a pioneer. Galleriest Shireen Gandhy finds him to be a risk taker. V Sunil, creative director of the "Make in India" and "Incredible India" campaigns and a trustee for the Kochi Biennale Foundation, says Bose doesn't have the capacity to think small. College friend and curator of the 2014 Kochi Biennale Jitish Kallat adds with a laugh: "Even at art school, Bose's persuasive vision brought in artists, poets and film makers to transform a dull college event called Kala Mela into something unusual."
To gather artists for Yinchuan, Bose has travelled to almost every major exhibition in the world over the past one year. He's visited artist studios across the world and had curator friends suggest artists to him. He says it's not been easy to bring the list down to 74.
Has his place in the 100 most influential people list helped him? He plays it cool, saying: "Internationally, everyone looks at this list so I'm happy that two Indians are on the list. It helps when I travel. It will keep changing." However, when I wrongly call it the list of the 200 most influential people, he quietly corrects me!
As well he should. Bose may have achieved fantastic success, but he's reinvented himself many times. A year ago, a friend may have laughed as he said that "every celebrity in India has to be photographed in front of a Bose painting," but Bose's aesthetics, vision and generosity have often run ahead of his circumstances.
When he found that curators from Delhi and Mumbai weren't looking beyond a few chosen artists for their shows, he made portraits of living artists and exhibited them across Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kochi. When Anoop Scaria and Dorrie Younger of Kashi Art Gallery bought a catalogue at this show, he agreed to curate his first exhibition for them on the condition that they put up all the artists for a week in Kochi.
He formed a gallery with three art connoisseurs called BMB Gallery that quickly became known as one of the best art spots in Mumbai. It closed down, not least because it held an exhibition of the best Western artists - which no one could afford.
Gandhy, who is on the Artistic Advisory Committee of the Kochi Muziris Biennale, says: "He doesn't do anything in half measures". She mentions LaVA, a travelling library that Bose filled with books, journals, CDs and modular furniture that he designed, exclaiming, "Who buys a library of books?" It travelled across Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Kochi.
Kallat describes Bose as "an archive of optimism". When the second edition of the Kochi Biennale ran into an acute paucity of funds a month prior to its opening, at no point did Bose lose hope, humour or conviction. Gandhy rolls her eyes at this topic as well. "There's this perception that the Kochi Biennale must be well endowed because it's doing so well."
The truth is somewhat different. The Kochi Biennale was conceived in May 2010, when the then Kerala minister for culture and education, M A Baby, visited Bose's home in Mumbai. When Baby asked Komu and Bose for thoughts on how they could make contributions to Kerala's cultural scene, they suggested an exhibition on the lines of the Delhi Triennale that Mulk Raj Anand and Octavio Paz, the then Mexican Ambassador to India, had started in 1968.
"There was hardly any infrastructure in Kochi for exhibitions. We redid the Lalit Kala Academy gallery and then gave it back to them with the agreement that we would use it every two years. People started giving spaces. Then DLF and the Gujral Foundation provided us with Aspinwall House," Bose says. "People were initially skeptical but they slowly started believing in us. Some people left jobs, some architects and students joined as volunteers. Now words like Biennale and Installation have become part of the lexicon in Kerala. It's known as the People's Biennale. Every artist dreams of creating something like this."
Bose and Komu also brought on board a team of trustees like Sunil, Jose Dominic, the CEO of Kerala-based CGH Earth Group, and P K Hormis Tharakan, the former chief of the Research and Analysis Wing.
"Each trustee is able to bring in a different ecosystem that makes the biennale stronger," says Sunil. "Bose, for many years, has been a mentor to younger artists, especially from smaller towns across India. That generosity and openness is what helps spread creative energy around the Biennale and the entire city of Kochi."
"In Kochi, we invite everybody. We don't classify anyone as a VIP. The doors open for everybody at 12 o'clock in December," says Bose.
I ask him how he handles his multiple roles. Bose replies philosophically, "I believe that life itself is art. I am an artist first but what is most important is to live a good humanist life that is aesthetically rewarding. My village was beautiful. Then I moved to Mumbai. It taught me a different way of looking at things. From nothingness to everything and everything to anything..."
What's China learning from us through the Yinchuan Biennale? "Emotional, intellectual and spiritual awareness. I hope to bring together this trinity of experiences through this inaugural edition," Bose signs off.