THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Glance at the day and date. It’s Friday the 13th - the most unlucky and feared day in the western hemisphere. Artists sometimes find such preoccupations of people and use it to design their works.
The multi-million movie franchise Friday the 13th harnessed this phobia (called paraskevidekatriaphobia), by tying it with the suspense and fear lurking around death. If you’re bold enough to chuck aside superstition and embrace these artistic meditations on death and its associated enigma, Aspinwall House has a few haunting exhibits for you. Till March 29. Details: kochimuzirisbiennale.org
Beauty sleep
Conceived by the Russian collective AES+F, the exhibit titled Défilé includes seven photographs. Each image portrays an unclaimed dead body adorned in haute couture, floating eerily towards the viewer.
Since high-fashion is associated with the youth—which is always in defiance of senility—the two themes are clubbed together, as a modern-day counterpart to the traditional juxtapositions of beauty and death. The ensemble explains that, this is done to convey the extreme temporality of fashion and the permanence of death.
Details: aesf.art
Detecting life
Martin Walde’s installation Multiple Choice invites you to enter a dark room and gives you the power to wield death. The area features a human figure—cut out from a single block of wax—seated at the centre. As soon as a viewer walks in, an infrared lamp fixed above the sculpture turns on.
As long as the heating lamp detects a viewer’s presence, it will increase in intensity. By creating impressions of death in relation to time, this Austrian artiste tells the viewer that his sculpture’s life is in their hands. Details: galerie-krinzinger.at
Tracing the ephemeral
Lead blindly, light. This is, in part, what Mumbai-based artist Yardena Kurulkar showcases via her mixed media with light bulbs work called Dance of Death. In this installation, Camille Saints-Saens’ composition Dance Macabre plays in the background as numerous flickering bulbs suspended from the ceiling mark the artist’s birth date.
Over time, these flickering bulbs will die, leaving the viewer in darkness. Kurulkar attempts to evoke a deeper understanding of the cycle of life and death, within the viewer. Details: yardenakurulkar.com
Frozen screams
Gabriel Lester is hell-bent on capturing moments in time. Pun intended. The celebrated Dutch artist’s installation titled Dwelling Kappiri Spirits is centred around a 400-year-old story of murdered African slaves. These slaves—colloquially referred to as kappiris—belonged to the Portuguese.
The traders who when burying their treasure in walls—to hide it from Dutch colonialists—also buried kappiris along with it. “My installation features a floating wooden dwelling with an open window, for spirits to escape. There’s also a ‘forever burning’ cigar, an offering to the local deity Kappiri Muthappan,” says Lester. Details: gabriellester.com