KOCHI: As Raul Zurita wades barefoot through the knee-deep seawater that covers his installation space in Kochi Bienalle at Aspinwall House. It is only his steps that are uncertain, not his intent. That much is plain from his ‘Sea of Pain’. “I am not his father, but Galip Kurdi is my son,” reads Zurita’s poignant eulogy to the five-year-old brother of Alan Kurdi, the toddler whose prone body was found set against the Mediterranean Sea on September 2015.
For Zurita, Galip is the victim the world overlooked - “There are no photographs of Galip Kurdi, he can’t hear, he can’t see, he can’t feel” - and representative of the other faceless forgotten in other crises and conflicts around the world. His tribute - a haunting poem composed of a series of disjointed queries that line the walls of the enclosure - is as much for them as for Galip.
Through the installation, Zurita depicts sea as a gulf between people, a site of suffering, death and disappearance. Through verse and water, he asks visitors to become both audience and witness to this body of pain.
‘Sea of Pain’ is in keeping with Zurita’s history of art interventions. In 1982, the completion of the second part of his trilogy, Anteparaiso, saw 15 verses of the poem written in the New York sky. In 1993, his poem Ni pena ni misdo was printed in the sands of the Atacama Desert in Chile. “There is nothing special about artists, but the entire gamut of humanity is captured in the act of making art. The only thing that matters is the agency behind it,” Zurita said.