Chennai Photo Biennale 2021

Titled Maps of Disquiet, the new edition of Chennai Photo Biennale will fundamentally aim at creating awareness about the mind churning social, environmental and technological exigencies of life. The Biennale is curated by eminent personalities such as Arko Datto, Bhooma Padmanabhan, Baoz Levin and Kerstin Meincke. Returning to Chennai in its new hybrid, physical-digital format, this edition has a wide range of engaging programmes such as physical exhibitions and digital screenings at various established galleries and spaces across Chennai. Moreover, international student workshops, artists talks and virtual exhibitions will be conducted to connect to a larger audience. 

To know more about this year’s edition, we spoke with Bhooma Padmanabhan, who is a curator, researcher and arts programme manager. She completed her BA in Fine Arts from Stella Maris College, Chennai, and MFA in Art History, from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University of Baroda. Bhooma has curated several exhibitions featuring emerging talents, and actively worked with artists to create platforms for public art, art education and resource sharing. Important curations include FICA Homepage 2014 and 2016 editions; ID/entity, 2010 (co-curated with Vidya Shivadas and Julia Villasenor), and Urgent: 10ml of Contemporary Needed, 2008. She was also part of the curatorial team that brought the seminal exhibition Our Beautiful Daughters by Yoko Ono to India in 2012. Her curatorial work with photography and lens-based art includes A Million Mutinies Later: India at 70, 2017 (co-curated with Anshika Varma and Iona Ferguson under mentorship of Prashant Panjiar, for Nazar Foundation); Invisible Cities, 2014; and Apna Ghar, 2012 (co-curated with Vidya Shivadas). Bhooma was part of the Kochi Biennale’s Students Biennale 2018 Education team that worked towards identifying existing frameworks of learning, and imagining new directions in pedagogical practices in art colleges in India.

Excerpts:

When asked to come on board as a curator, what was it that excited you the most about this project?
Personally for me, I came on board towards the end of November in 2019. I was actually thrilled to curate in Chennai itself which happens to be my hometown. I had moved back to Chennai less than a year back. I had experienced the second edition of Chennai Photo Biennale, curated by Pushpmala N., and it was such a beautiful experience, so I was very excited to come on board and work with the CPB team. I was also quite interested in curating around photography because earlier I had curated a show under the mentorship of Prashant Panjiar. This happened in Wales and it was a fantastic experience. It was also quite different from my experience of working with contemporary artists.We’re constantly looking at images on social media, print media, and so I was very excited to explore questions around how photographers archive their projects. And, also how the city is central to a large number of artists’ work. As a curator, this project allowed me to explore this avenue of curation and also work with a fantastic team of co-curators. 

We must talk about the power of an image in today’s time.
We live in a world completely mediated by images today. One of our artists, Sridhar, spoke about how we’re almost made of pixels now because of how we engage and interact through the digital medium, through the lens of the camera. Of course, we live in a highly image-saturated world, but I think the question that I was interested in was to make sense of this world of images. Anybody can produce images on their camera, considering we have fantastic phone cameras now, but how does one engage with questions of the role of images today. How we make sense of the social responsibility of making photographs today? How do people consume images today? What is the politics of an image within disciplinary political spaces? For instance, we have two projects within the curation which are particularly asking questions about the role of images within archeological spaces and the discipline about archeology and I think it is a very important question to be asking today because we have inherited these modes of looking at images as truth, when, in fact, that itself is something that we need to rethink. So certainly, the power of image is important to discuss in our contemporary context. 

You have viewed the Biennale as an audience before and now you are viewing it as a curator — how different is the experience and where would you like to take the fourth edition of the Biennale? 
I have viewed the Biennale more as a citizen of the city in the past. I knew the artists who were showing, and my curiosity came from the venues they had opened for the Biennale — the colonial structures that were used in the second edition. So, I think the viewing experience of previous Biennale was certainly a very memorable one. But at the same time, I think, we were very aware of the fact that we want to go beyond a certain question of heritage within Chennai and what kind of architecture would fall under heritage as a term. So, we wanted to expand that idea of heritage and that’s why we actively reached out to spaces that are active spaces of knowledge production, circulation and thinking. We were very keen to work with universities and other such spaces because these are spaces where culture and knowledge is being engaged with today. So, for me, the Biennale spaces also have to do with living cultures and the various different kinds of people that make the city. 

What was your curatorial process behind the Chennai Photo Biennale?
This is a very complex question, but I will try to keep it very short. When we started out the agenda, it was to curate at venues across the city, collaborate with local organizations, but due to Covid, our schedules were also postponed and shifted around. And finally, when we arrived on a hybrid model, we were very aware of the fact that a hybrid model can’t just be online but needs to also take on various ways of circulation. We were keen to bring on text via the journal we were looking at. We wanted a journal that we wanted to sort of lead us into the Biennale. And then, we were very keen to do a print iteration of the Biennale. We are calling it MOD Publication which is going to be a set of newspapers that will be circulated during the two months of the Biennale. Us, as curators, have gone back and forth amongst ourselves to think about the various ways in which we can reach our audience and think about the various ways in which we can archive what we’re doing now because of the limited possibility of getting people to Chennai. So the curatorial process has been very conscious of these various modes of engaging with our varied audiences and to build different avenues of engaging with them. 

What more can you tell us about the new online journal?
The idea for an online journal came when we decided to shift to an online platform and we were looking at different ways of expanding the curatorial beyond just the website. So a journal seemed like a way via which we can invite thinkers, writers and different modes of thinking about photography, and we split it into two issues. The first issue dealt with the way images are shaped or were shaped by the pandemic. The way the pandemic shaped how the artists were producing images and how people were consuming images in the pandemic. We have a fantastic essay that is a photographic response to our curatorial note for the journal. 

There are two very interesting podcasts as well, focussed on how artists functioned during the pandemic, and also about new ways of thinking about the world that the pandemic started. This new way of looking at life and the world. Proximity was not something that we could take for granted anymore. We were all intimately connected with each other across screens. At some level, it allowed us to think about how images mediated this experience. And some of the artists were actually talking about how they were making sense of the things that were actually happening around us then. The second journal is directly related to the curator’s question itself. It calls the artists and scholars to contribute to the main theme of the Biennale this year. The issue is yet to come out. But to give you an idea, we are looking at people who are institution builders and are thinking about how major changes can be brought about through platforms such as the Biennale. 

Text Hansika Lohani Mehtani
Date 13-12-2021