Kochi | Kader Attia, curator of the seventh edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, on Saturday presented his curatorial proposition, the first public articulation of the ideas shaping the art festival, which opens on December 12, 2027.
The proposition was presented at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) in Mumbai at an event organised by the Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF), a KBF release said.
Trustees, patrons, supporters and members of the wider Biennale community attended, including Jitish Kallat, President, Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB).
Kallat later joined Attia in conversation, responding to and expanding on the ideas presented before the discussion was opened to questions from the audience, the release said.
Attia, an Algerian-French artist-curator, placed the relationship between dreams, memory and repair at the centre of his proposition.
He described art and dreams as spaces of unpredictability, in contrast to the increasingly predictive logic of artificial intelligence (AI).
The Biennale, he suggested, will bring together artistic experiences that seek to reclaim sovereignty over the sources of our dreams, while allowing artworks to enter the viewer’s inner life in unexpected ways and open up possibilities of repair, the release said.
His presentation began with dreams and the memory traces from which they emerge.
These traces, he said, shape both the inner individual and the external social structures around us, and are central to the reciprocal exchange that makes us porous beings.
Tracing the history of this exchange, Attia said humanity’s evolution was not just biological. To survive the wildness of nature, human beings, a physically weaker species, began to gather and share memory culturally, materially and intellectually, in the form of technology.
This was deeply paradoxical, he said, because the more powerful technology became, the less control humanity had over it.
He highlighted the tensions of the present, when algorithmic learning machines and AI “harvest our memory traces for the attention economy”.
“In the digital realm we are losing sovereignty over the sources of our dreams,” he said.
Grounding these ideas in Keralam’s history, Attia spoke of Kochi’s harbour, a bridge to many destinations across the Indian Ocean.
It brought to the local shores layers of exchange, invasion and colonialism under Portuguese, Dutch and British rule, shaping the region's creolity, or hybrid identity, the release said.
He suggested that descendants of colonised subjects live in the ‘dream of the empire’, but said it was possible to reclaim selfhood and individuality from this colonial dream.
“The art world is one of the last spaces where society co-individuates itself,” Attia said.
“Our subjectivity is fragmented, like the internet, an intensely fragmented landscape, yet there we are tracked by the algorithm. Exhibitions are important because they produce emotions, activating new traces in our minds,” he said.
“...That is how we produce traces for the future. In the same way we are the traces of our ancestors and of the millions of anonymous subjects who preceded us,” he added.
