Beyond dhokra & patachitra

Kochi has a biennale, and now Orissa is set to get a triennale. The once-in-three-years event will be a 40-day non-sarkari affair showcasing international art. It will be held sometime in December this year in three cities of the state – Bhubaneswar, Puri and Konark – though the dates and venues are yet to be decided, as are the artists. The organisers, who gathered in the national capital last week to announce the festival, however, named several top-line names among senior practising artists as expected participants – Jatin Das, Ravinder Reddy, Laxma Gaud, Sudhir Patwardhan, Jogen Chowdhury, Prabhakar Kolte, KS Radhakrishnan, etc.

Johny ML, curatorial director, however, has a more immediate problem – where to hold the Triennale? "Odisha lacks the infrastructure for contemporary art, unlike Kochi that uses/modifies existing infrastructure. There are no galleries, or art spaces between Bhubaneswar, Puri and Konark," says ML, well-known in contemporary art circles, and who is looking at abandoned factories and such-like to adapt for the triennale.

While Kochi is spearheaded by two well-known and connected contemporary artists, the triennale in Odisha is being initiated by a relatively unknown body (at least in mainstream art centres of Delhi and Mumbai) called Artists Network for Promoting Indian Culture (ANPIC), based out of the Raghurajpur – the heritage and crafts village near Puri.

Of course, Odisha has produced a number of contemporary artists, most of them trained in art schools outside the state and now live and work in Delhi or Mumbai. Take Jatin Das, who went to JJ School of Art in Mumbai; Jagannath Panda, started out doing a course in sculpture at the BK College of Arts & Crafts in Bhubaneswar before moving to MS University in Baroda and then, Royal College of Art, London. Pratul Dash, a painter, too studied at BK College, but then pursued a Master's at the Delhi College of Art.

"Contemporary artists from Odisha have greater knowledge of and pride in the many traditional and folk arts the state is home to – patachitra and palm leaf painting, Odissi, Gotipua and Chau dance, etc – than, say, those from Kerala," says ML, himself a Malayali. Two artists, who've acquired success outside Odisha, went back to set up art institutions that bridge the contemporary-traditional-folk binaries and create an ecosystem for current art practices. One is Jatin Das's JD Centre for Art in Bhubaneswar, and the other is the Utsha Foundation by Jagannath Panda. Das and ML would like these to be involved in the triennale, but, the latter says, "they are too small-scale and scattered."

More fruitful is the support of Adwaita Gadanayak, an Odiya and the current director of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), the country's foremost contemporary arts institution. The NGMA played host to 'Delhi declaration' of the Triennale in mid-June, which saw a large turnout of Odiya artists in the capital, and a similar one in Mumbai on July 21 will also be held at the city's NGMA.

The ambitions are noble and lofty – Shashank Mohapatra, founder of ANPIC, spoke of international artists mingling with national and Odiya artists – but ML has a more realistic projection for this first edition of the Triennale, scheduled just six months away. "We can easily bring in around 200 artists. But it's not possible to have more than a miniature version of the Triennale this time, produced as a launch programme for the second edition in 2021," he says.