Travel Day 922 – Fort Cochin, Kochi, Kerala, INDIA
After taking it easy for the past three days, it was about time to be a little more active again and visiting the Biennale seemed to be a great thing to do…
Biennale Art Installation at the Waterfront
But first I had decided to start my day with an early morning Raga Meditation. The local cultural center was offering a one hour morning meditation while a Sitar player and a Tabla player would recite a morning raga. This sounded like a fun thing to do and it turned out to be a quite relaxing way to start the day. After all, what could be a better way to start the day than listening to some life Tabla music?
Then I was off with a friend from the hostel to the Aspinwall House, the main venue of India’s first Biennale. To this point I really didn’t know much about the Biennale, besides that it was supposed to be an international art show all over Kochi. As we learned rather quickly, the Biennale was a contemporary art exhibit that used all sorts of different mediums and it was hosted in galleries, historic buildings or abandoned warehouses…
Biennale in Historic Building in Kochi
But another thing we became aware of rather quickly was that the Biennale was a rather extensive project. Going through all the different buildings of the Aspinwall House complex alone took us all morning long. After lunch we managed to see a few more locations, but at some point we had to surrender to the realization that it was impossible to cover the entire Biennale in one day only…
It actually didn’t matter too much that this art show was so extensive and it gave me already something to do for tomorrow. On this first day, it was already great to see all the different types of art in all the different kinds of buildings. I personally was not a big fan of all the video art, but seeing the historic buildings alone was well worth it for me and best kind of art for me became those that played with the different spaces…
Biennale Exhibit in unused Building in Kochi
So in the end this day had become quite an interesting and surprising one as I had not really expected so much art here in Kochi, but on the other hand it also showed once more a different facet that made India this great country that was simply impossible to categorize…
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