It is either an act of great strategy or the result of a reckless dare to hope to visit all the exhibitions of the Chennai Photo Biennale 2019 in the space of a month. Think 15 venues and more than 50 artists! That's the other thing. They are called artists, not photographers, and I discover exactly why, as I pick two venues with multiple exhibitions, and come to the realisation that contemporary photography is much more of an art today, in bringing compelling ideas to life in formats that are as relevant as they are ingenious.
Chennai Photo Biennale: Life by the Beach
The Senate House is a magnificent heritage structure, normally out of bounds for the public. It makes for an aesthetic auditorium space, with its elegant stage, lofty ceiling of decorated panels, exquisite woodwork, and resplendent stained glass windows. On the day I visit, the tall louvered doors stand ajar, letting in the afternoon sea breeze from Chennai's famous Marina Beach nearby.
Fittingly, my tour of the CPB 2019 begins here with Atul Bhalla's 'On the edge of the sea'. "Chennai was built around fishing villages, and the reason it exists as a city today is because of its coastline," says Gayatri Nair, one of the Founding Trustees of CPB Foundation.“Today, we want our coastline to resemble the Dubai coast or Thai beaches. We want it to be tourist friendly and 'clean', but this would mean moving the fishing communities out. Atul Bhalla, in the process of documenting the daily life of these communities, also forces you to look at them up close."
Chennai Photo Biennale: Surgical Gloves
The next exhibit is a set of tables atop each of which sits a photo book along with a pair of surgical gloves. Gayatri says, "Photo books are now a trend. Instead of printing and mounting your work on walls and in galleries, you create a book. Offset Pitara ('pitaara' means 'travelling trunk' in Hindi) is a reading room curated by Delhi-based artist Anshika Varma who travels with these books." We don our gloves and turn the pages, musing about how the exercise makes looking at a photograph so much more of an involved exercise than say, seeing it on a wall.
Chennai Photo Biennale: Mosaic of Blood
From afar, Pakistani artist Rashid Rana's 'Persian Carpet 2' appears to be exactly that – a Persian carpet with intricate motifs, symmetry and exquisite beauty in the combination of colours, especially the use of red. The nature of the carpet is revealed when you step closer and discover a photo mosaic using numerous small images of slaughterhouses. "We do not want to look at how leather is produced, how meat is produced – all of this happens in our society and we shy away from it. But Rana has shown it in a beautiful but unexpected way."
Chennai Photo Biennale: Holy Testimony
Sheba Chhachhi and Sonia Jabbar's installation, 'When the gun is raised, the dialogue stops' is a roomful of rihals (book holders normally used to place holy books). On each of these rihals, is the black and white photograph and the testimony of an ordinary woman of Kashmir. Each rihal is in turn placed on a small platform of bricks topped with rice, alluding to the domestic, and the many rihals are arranged around a trodden area of earth on which I spot a smear of red light from the afternoon sun slanting through the stained glass window. It feels like an echo of the red in Rashid Rana's Persian Carpet II, and I sense most vividly, the surreal interaction between the venue and the exhibit.
Chennai Photo Biennale: Staging the Scene
If the Senate House was a formidable heritage venue, the Government College of Fine Arts wears its legacy lightly. The spatial design by The Architecture Story is reminiscent of a cityscape and steers the visitor through exhibits by different artists, while also lending a contemporary framework to display the exhibits.
Performance photography is today an integral part of the arts and involves the staging and direction of a subject based on an idea. While Aishwarya Arumbakkam's is a fictional exploration of Ahp, a misunderstood female ghost from Cambodian folklore, Anna Fox's Country Girls is an eerie take on the violence against women in the rural south of England.
Chennai Photo Biennale: Acts of Appearance
Gauri Gill's 'Acts of Appearance' is based in an Adivasi village in Maharashtra where members of the Kokna Tribe make papier mâché masks. Gill commissioned them to create masks representing beings existing in contemporary reality, and she depicts them wearing these masks in everyday situations.
Varun Gupta, Managing Trustee and co-founder of CPB Foundation, shows us his favourite image by Manit Sriwanichpoom from the darkly comic Pink Man series, where Pink Man is seen casually making a call on his archaic mobile phone even as a person is being lynched to death in the background. Sriwanichpoom chooses to draw attention to these shocking historical images in black and white by juxtaposing them with a person dressed as the Pink Man, who is accompanied by his pink shopping cart, alluding to consumerist culture.
Chennai Photo Biennale: Ghost Town and Invisible Women
"Swiss photographer Catherine Leutenegger's Kodak City," says Varun, "is about how Rochester, New York - also known as Kodak City – became a ghost town overnight when Kodak decided to shut down their plant." As Varun points out, the images, scanned from the negatives and printed in Chennai for the exhibition, are exquisite in their tonal range.
Magsaysay award winning veteran journalist, P. Sainath brings to life the stories behind the images in his series, 'Visible Work, Invisible Women,' taken between 1993 and 2002, across 10 Indian states, featuring rural Indian women at work. The stories are informative, amusing, and demand a fair amount of self-inquiry into perceptions about women and livelihoods.
Chennai Photo Biennale: Contrarian Realities
Vijay Jodha's series of images on the agrarian crisis places the visitor at eye level with the subjects of his images – women, usually widows of tenant farmers from Andhra Pradesh and Telengana, holding up a picture of the farmer who committed suicide on being unable to repay a loan. Jodha was available at the time I visited, and he led us through the series, saying, "Ironically, these suicides are happening in some of the richest states in India."
The Chennai Photo Biennale is on until March 24 and apart from guided tours of the exhibits, you can enjoy the the panel discussions, workshops and screenings of movies on photography.
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