"Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason," Amit Chaudhuri wrote in 'A Strange and Sublime Address'.
From the early 2nd century BCE terracotta pottery, sculpture, and architecture to the dreamy, romantic imagery using the East Asian technique of watercolour wash in the 1900s, Bengal has a long, unbroken lineage of art and cultural heritage. With the Bengal Renaissance at the turn of the 19th century, Kolkata — then Calcutta — became the epicentre of the Bengali artistic tradition. In many ways, the establishment of the Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan in 1921 was the culmination of that social, cultural, intellectual, and artistic movement.
It is only right then that the inaugural edition of Bengal Biennale takes place simultaneously across several venues in Kolkata and Santiniketan from November 29, 2024, to January 5, 2025.
India's second international contemporary art festival of its kind after the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the Bengal Biennale will "seek to invoke the multilayered cultural heritage and intellectual history of a liberal Bengal, a leading light for discourses on art, social justice, and spiritual and critical thinking in India". The festival will be held in Santiniketan from November 29, 2024, to December 22, 2024, and in Kolkata from December 6, 2024, to January 5, 2025, across over 20 citywide venues. The Biennale will showcase the works of over 100 emerging and established artists working in diverse mediums from India and abroad such as Madhvi Parekh, Sarnath Banerjee, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dayanita Singh, T.V. Santhosh, and Aradhana Seth.
As part of the Bengal Biennale, Dayanita Singh will be premiering the 'Museum of Tanpura' — a rumination on time, music, and the ephemeral nature of human connection — at the Indian Museum in Kolkata.
Between 1981 and 1986, with her very first camera in hand, Dayanita Singh travelled throughout India for six winters with the tabla maestro Zakir Hussain. During these trips, she had the privilege of photographing many of the stalwarts of Indian classical music, creating an extensive archive of them on stage and backstage, in their homes, and on the faithful bus which took them from concert to concert across India. The 'Museum of Tanpura' — the book and the exhibition — celebrates the 'tanpura', a long-necked, four-stringed Indian classical music instrument, as a musician's constant companion, the environments and relationships which bring music into being, and embodies what Singh sees as her greatest learning from all the performers she befriended, the rigour and aesthetics of riyaz.
The Bengal Biennale will also transform the colonial Alipore Central Jail — now a museum — into an exhibition space for Aradhana Seth's 'Sadak', a series of photographs that transform the Indian street into a stage for stories of everyday life and memory, dissolving the hierarchies between 'high' and 'low' arts. Once a site of incarceration for leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Chandra Bose, the the Alipore jail becomes a space where Aradhana Seth’s photographic fragments serve as ‘breadcrumbs’ — guiding visitors through a reflective journey.
Learn more about the Bengal Biennale here.
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