As I walked through the colourful streets of Mattancherry, switching from one warehouse to the next in search of Kochi-Muziris Biennale locations, I was lucky enough to stumble upon an artist who was working on his sculpture. This is how I got acquainted to Rinku Augustine. Pursuing a four-year Bachelor of Fine Arts course at Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, he learns sculpture and graphics besides painting. His installation titled ‘Emerging from the Emerged’ creates a dialogue between the human body and its mechanised counterpart. The sculpture, made out of melted metal sheets and wax, have diverging properties as one is rigid while the other is malleable in nature. This produces a paradox between the ‘technocentric constraints’ posed by the society (such as norms with regards to social media validation) as opposed to the natural order.
Rinku says that the creation of the artist exists as a component of his identity within himself. One must shed his exterior superficial skin that is governed by the society to be able to discover what one can call art in its most raw form within himself. The materials are also metaphorical to the art and the artist as the ‘actual art’ which is a skeleton made out of metal sheets is engulfed by an outer later made out of wax which is set to melt completely by the end of three months. Hence, “the artist dies and creation begins”, he explains. In this way, the artist completely gives himself to the art.
The Students’ Biennale which has been developed by the Kochi Biennale Foundation runs parallel to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale with most venues being in and around Mattancherry. Students from art colleges across South Asia have been encouraged to deliberate on their practice and showcase their artwork on an international platform. Focusing on how the notion of making can become a process of responding and reflecting, a blanket theme of ‘Making as Thinking’ has been adopted.
One can spot other installations and artwork that address ideas similar to that of Rinku such as questioning the identity and the self, and the relationship between the artist and his work at the ongoing fourth edition of the Kochi Biennale.
