Bengal Biennale

Our first stop on a cool morning in leafy Santiniketan was Somnath Hore International Artist’s Residency. As our toto pulled up, a large structure made from perforated cards came into view. We stepped in and watched as dappled sunlight created shapes over our bodies.

This was the first of two large jacquard installations by Archana Hande at this location. Jacquard is a method of textile production that uses a loom which is programmed to create raised patterns in the fabric based on punch cards. Indoors, we stepped into complete darkness before a light and sound show took over throwing lacy shadows against the walls of the gallery. 

And so it began. Our week long experience of the first edition of Bengal Biennale, which launched on 29th November 2024 in Santiniketan and ran till 5th January 2025 in Kolkata.

Santiniketan, a three hour train ride from Kolkata, is a small town in West Bengal that was established in the 19th century by Debendranath Tagore as a retreat for spiritual meditation. At the turn of the century, his son Rabindranath Tagore envisioned a school where students from all cultures could learn from one another, blending Eastern and Western educational traditions. It became to be known as Visva-Bharati University in 1921. 

In both locations, the biennale made use of myriad venues that include not-for-profit spaces, historic buildings and hallowed institutions, as well as galleries, hotels and homestays. Each venue was marked by a Bankura horse at its entrance, named for the district nearby which produces the handicraft. The Bengal Biennale Bankura Horse Project (try saying that three times quickly) provided young artists including fine arts students from across Kolkata and Santiniketan the opportunity to paint and showcase their skills on the iconic terracotta horse.  

Our homestay Srirangam was venue to one of our most favourite works of Bengal Biennale. In The Troupe, artist Mahesh KS imbued an ensemble of humble pedestal fans with animistic qualities, to give a splendid live performance to classical music.

In walking distance, on the mud walls of the Santhal homes in Pearson Pally,  artists Mithu Sen and Sanyasi Lohar have painted murals of the Ol Chiki script developed in 1925 by scholar Raghunath Murmu to give textual form to the ancient oral language tradition. 

At Mitali, another beloved homestay in Santiniketan, on the opposite end of town, two wonderful works engage with the environment. The compelling Water Tells/Water Tales, included two video works by Nobel laureate Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee and graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee who explain the climate impacts from growing rice in thirsty Punjab and the risks of overdevelopment in Kolkata’s swampy marshlands.

Outdoors at Mitali, Sanchayan Ghosh’s Anatomy of a Landscape, a sprawling installation that marries bamboo and textiles, data and video encourages the viewer to slow down, take a seat on the various chaarpai and engage with the politics of the changing land.

At Tokoroun, founded by acclaimed sculptor KS Radhakrishna, we found a crowd favourite in MYtruTH, where author Devdutt Pattanaik created striking black and white illustrations to symbolise popular mythologies—from Noah’s Ark to the Night Journey on the Buraq to the Mahabharata.

On the third day, I attended a collodion wet plate process workshop by Surajit Mudi, one of the co-founders of  GABAA, an independent artist-led space in Santiniketan. Using a medium format camera and a portable darkroom he built, he demonstrated how the glass plate is cleaned, coated, sensitised, exposed and developed for all participants to create and take home beautiful images—most of them self portraits.

The workshop was conducted in the compound of Kanthar Ghar, a pedagogical project by GABAA that united the women homemakers of Birbhum. Covering a local home in dozens of their hand embroidered quilts, traditionally made for their own families, the site carried the stories of their lives and communities.

A stone’s throw away, at GABAA itself,  Dhaka-based Britto Arts Trust marvellous circus-themed tent contained poignant messaging—each of its textile collages crafted in fine detail. As the only work from across the border, it fit perfectly in an event with Bengal in its name. 

Bengal Biennale offered a slew of programming including an impressive array of open studios and artist-led workshops coordinated by longtime Santiniketan resident, artist Amy Parrish. 

The biennale’s title “Anka Banka—Through Crosscurrents" was also fitting. Anka-banka, meaning to zigzag is an apt name for a festival which had us meandering across the university town and taking a train to the capital city.

The Kolkata chapter of the Bengal Biennale kicked off at Alipore Museum, which was converted in 2019 from a jail to an Independence museum. At Tantkal, the prisoner’s weaving room was Liberation by textile artist Bappaditya Biswas who transformed the space into a gallery of magnificent contemporary weaves that draw upon Bengal’s indigo-stained history.

In the grand Victoria Memorial Hall, no-photography-allowed Between Home & the World, we saw the the theatrical Arabian Nights paintings by Abanindranath Tagore, the striking cubist paintings of Gaganendranath Tagore and the delicate paintings of sister Sunayani Devi. (Artworks by brother Rabindranath were showing in the Nandan gallery in Santiniketan.) In stark contrast, outside the memorial garden gates was a 7000kg bronze jackfruit sculpture by Paresh Maity, and perhaps Kolkata’s most popular selfie spot.

The inclusion of such storied venues and ticketed museums in the Bengal Biennale, meant that the out of town visitor had to put aside a little bit of extra time to look around. Kolkata’s Indian Museum which was built in 1814 is the country’s oldest museum and one of its most encyclopaedic. As such its collection is too vast for one visit but some highlights not to be missed are the 4,000-year-old mummy in the Egypt gallery, a 250 million years old fossilised tree and and Bharhut gallery with the incredible  3rd century B.C.E Stupa. 

Indian Museum was home to Dayanita Singh’s Museum of Tanpura, which chronicled the lives of classical musicians. As with all of the photographer’s museums, she engaged and experimented with the forms of photographic display. On one wall, her maquette on Ustad Zakir Hussain, created from her documentation during her own formative years as an artist was laid out by page on the wall. When the tabla maestro passed a few days later, the book is the first thing I recalled. 

At Academy of Fine Arts was a most poignant show with perhaps the most detailed and layered exhibition design. Into Exile by Paula Sengupta and Sujoy Das is a meditation of the Tibetan experience through photographs, stories and objects from prayer wheels, scrolls, dolls, handpulled pankhas and wooden box panels. 

At The Red Bari in Kalighat, a beautiful heritage building recently converted into a multiuse space, I loved the primitive looking sculptures titled Boring Instruments by Adip Dutta which reflect tools that were once used at construction sites. Dutta also presented a sublime series of detailed drawings called Ruptures. The mostly monochromatic palette of Archaeology of the Present: Traces and Transformations seemed to be in dialogue with the other exhibitions, which included calligraphic works by Nilanjan Bandyopadhyay and pyrographic works by Samindranath Majumdar. 

I am by no means a biennial veteran but have attended the Jogja Biennale, Venice Biennale and Kochi-Muziris Biennale each once. For myself, Bengal Biennale differentiated itself through its curation by Siddharth Sivakumar with its emphasis on mainly solo and two person shows, its inclusion of many local artists, for its generosity of programming and for introducing me to interesting independent art spaces. I appreciated the inclusion of the Bengal masters in this first edition as a placemaking exercise that offered much needed historical context. And I especially enjoyed my time in Santiniketan where I had the opportunity to engage more intimately with the art, in a breezy and lush setting. 

In the opening day panel at Alipore Museum, panelists discussed the Bengal Biennale as “an idea whose time has come.” After witnessing its efforts to shine a spotlight on contemporary art in the region for a week: I’d say so, yes.