Another biennale, another country

This is that time of the year when you sit back and reflect upon all that went by. Just as one is settling down after setting the stage for the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), one can’t but mull over another biennale in another country, far away from the madding crowd. The year 2016 has been extremely good to me as I was invited to curate the first biennale in an unknown city in the northwestern part of China on the foothills of the Helan mountains.

I was pleasantly surprised when Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Yinchuan asked me to curate a biennale there. A visit to the museum was even more surprising because MOCA Yinchuan is located in the most unusual place. It is on the outskirts of Yinchuan city, about an hour’s drive from the downtown of the Ningxia Hui autonomous region’s capital in a commercial compound along the Yellow River. One has to drive past dusty trucks carrying building materials, past ramshackle farmhouses and through noxious bi-products spewed into the air by the occasional factory to reach one of the most splendid buildings one can expect to see. The new contemporary art museum stands like a space ship that has just landed in this marshy land.

I thought, “Here is one more challenge.” When one had begun setting up KMB one had never imagined that it would become one of the most significant art events in the world. I was no less enthusiastic with Yinchuan. My idea was to bring the best of international contemporary art to a place where the people including some of the employees in the museum were clueless about contemporary art practices.

After months of hard work with my team in India and in MOCA Yinchuan, we managed to invite 73 artists from 35 countries. I don’t remember having been on a  Skype conversation for such a long time and with so many different people across the globe, in different time zones! The roll call was no less ambitious. It included names like Anish Kapoor, Yoko Ono, Santiago Sierra, Liam Gillick, Robert Montgomery, Ivan Navarro and Matias Faldbakken, to name a few. There was only one hiccup when the Chinese government denied us permission to show Ai Weiwei. We recovered in time to put up what could be one of the most spectacular shows I have been part of in recent years.

It was amazing to see wide-eyed visitors from within Yinchuan asking questions about each work. I am told the biennale, which ended on December 18, was visited by nearly everyone in Yinchuan and even from neighbouring places. I was once again convinced no success can be achieved without the local people: They are the ones who need to understand the depth and power of an art event and then share it with others. And, they need to keep coming back and bring others with them for that rare glimpse of what we had titled ‘For an Image, Faster Than Light”.

(The author is a leading artist, co-founder of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and curator of the inaugural Yinchuan Biennale)