Kochi Artist Studios
While in Kochi, we visited several artist’s studios engaged in active creation around the Biennale. Among them, we met with:
Zakkir Hussain
Zakkir Hussain, a Kerala native, is an artist known for his mixed media works that depict the struggle between human impulses and the control exerted by social institutions. His compositions are visually rich, filled with people, discarded objects, and marginalized spaces.
Hussain's oeuvre reflects his critical concerns and explores multiple notions of reality. His works feature recurring motifs such as houses, wounded bodies, and empty dresses, which serve as mutable variables in his visual vocabulary.
Through disjunctive pairings and the juxtaposition of organic and inorganic elements, Hussain challenges perceptible and experiential limits. His works act as declarations against the established order, traversing forgotten memories and silenced voices, and serving as markers of the expanding terrain of suffering and the unspeakable.
Sujith S.N.
Sujith S.N.'s art comprises a poetic, narrative, abstract, and evocative visual language that depicts vast landscapes teeming with light and shadows.
His large-scale pieces showcase a range of landscapes, forests, and cities, all tinged with an air of magic, hinting at his discomfort with the world he inhabits. Occasionally, figures and architecture populate his landscapes, acting as a means for the artist to capture a state of mind, rather than simply telling a story.
Stemming from the artist’s adolescence in rapidly urbanizing South Indian cities, his art is greatly influenced by these spatial transformations.
Upendranath T R
Upendranath T R is a self-taught artist who began his practice in the 1990s. Through his works, the artist questions the socio-political environment of Kerala, his birthplace, in the context of the current global order. His artistic practice employs a variety of materials, including paper collages, serigraphs, ink, paint, and more.
These materials are used in various ways, such as "stampographic" pattern-making on paper, anthropomorphic montages with discarded magazine pages, hand cut-out collages with home décor wallpapers, stenciling, assemblages with disused household objects, Xerox montages with candid photography of everyday people and places in Kochi, and social experiments on social media platforms, including quirky self-referential digital photo-montages.
Having been involved in making contemporary art for nearly three decades in Kochi, Upendranath is greatly influenced by the social and political climates of Kerala. His oeuvre is derived from a personal image archive that actively seeks to convey the ancestral stories of socially-excluded communities.