THE world’s finest sculptor alive was born in India, but never made a work that was meant for his homeland. After living abroad for four decades and scripting sculptural statements across the world, Anish Kapoor has finally made a creative connection with India. And he is ready to do more.
On Friday, the Mumbai-born Kapoor unveiled his newest installation, Descension, made exclusively for India, at the 2nd Kochi-Muziris Biennale, in a water-based work that invokes reality, truth and Hindu philosophy.
“I have always wanted to come and make my sculptures in India. But it didn’t happen. That is a shame,” rued the artist known for the Cloudgate in Chicago and ArcelorMittal Orbit at the London Olympic Park.
Kapoor, 60, however, said his participation at the Kochi Biennale was a beginning. “It sets me on a different path. I can now do more for India.”
Descension is a water-vortex, which follows a language of form the London-based artist first began to explore in his work ‘Descent into Limbo’ for the 1992 Documenta IX art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. If Descent into Limbo was a cuboid building that contained a circular void on the floor descending into complete darkness, Descension is a mammoth water-filled cylindrical structure in which a monster motor propels a submerged fan creating a vortex. Kapoor’s work sits on the Kochi waterfront where Indian artist Sheela Gowda had her installation at the first Kochi biennale.
“It is a form of turning inwards,” explained Kapoor about Descension, which is drawing massive crowds at the Aspinwall House, the main venue of the three-month-long Kochi Biennale, which began on Friday. “This is a work I made models for about 20 years.”
Kapoor’s participation in the Kochi biennale, a showpiece contemporary art event that hit international headlines with its first edition in December 2012, started with a phone call from the biennale artistic director Jitish Kallat. “Jitish (Kallat) gave me a phone call. I immediately said ‘yes’. I feel very enthusiastic about supporting the Kochi biennale,” he added.
Kapoor, who visited the biennale venue once to choose the site of his work, also revealed his childhood association with Kochi. “My father was in the Indian Navy and we came to the Kochi dockyard 50 years ago when I was a 10-year-old,” he said. “I have a tangential connection with the biennale,” he quipped.
As per Kapoor, the important thing is trying not to make an art, but make something that has its own reality. “I am a sculptor. I make things with material,” he said explaining his work for the biennale. “I am a studio-based artist. It is so boring.”
Descension, which was built in the central London factory of MDM – the British fabricated product manufacturer with celebrity clients like Damien Hirst and Elton John – uses 14,000 litres of water, which creates a vortex when the motor placed outside the container sets off a fan placed at the bottom.
“The material in Descension is an absent object. Here, the water becomes an object (by becoming solid from the movement) and the work behaves like an object and non-object, like our Hindu philosophy of absent and present,” said Kapoor, who visits India “every three to four months”. “The most poetic things are those we know we don’t know.”
Kapoor said he was not giving any message from his new work. “I have nothing to say and no message to give. Even an abstract form has a very particular kind of language. Abstraction goes to places where narrative can’t,” he said drawing reference to the abstract pattern of pre-historic cave paintings.
After the Kochi biennale, Descension will travel to Italy. “Hopefully it will go on a little tour,” he joked.
Praising the Kochi biennale and its founders Riyas Komu and Bose Krishnamachari, Kapoor said the event has created a buzz about the city on the Arabian coast, which was colonialised by the Dutch, the Portuguese and the British for over six centuries. “Jitish Kallat (curator of the second edition) has tried to look at the post-colonial discussion and Kochi’s relationship with European culture and its contemporariness,” he added.
Comparing the success of the Kochi Biennale with the languishing Indian art market, he said the country had no confidence in its own culture”. “What the Kochi biennale is doing is unbelievable. But a biennale is not enough for reinterpretation of our past. We must do more culturally. We are always looking backward whether in the art market or classical music. We are stuck in the past. The Kochi biennale is saying we have a future.”
Faizal Khan
Faizal Khan is a freelancer
