One evening, artist Zakkir Hussain was having a cup of tea at a hotel on Bazaar Road in Mattancherry near Kochi. When he stepped out, he heard a man shouting at another person, “You must vacate the house as soon as possible. Otherwise, I will get you evicted.”It raised a major issue for Zakkir, who has a studio in Mattancherry. “Too many people do not own houses in Mattancherry,” he says. So, when he was invited to take part in an exhibition called ‘Mattancherry’, curated by Kochi Biennale founder Riyas Komu at the URU Art Harbour gallery recently, he focused on the subject of homelessness.
There are three works hanging side by side. In one, there is a woman with a fan hanging near her head, and there is a house and a goat along the front of her body. She is standing on the steps of a house, balancing herself on a small wheel. “The wheel indicates that they are members of a floating population, with no permanent place to stay,” he says. “I added a goat because it is a common sight across Mattancherry.” The other two paintings featuring men also explore the same theme.Apart from this, 23 portraits by photographer KR Sunil are on display.
He spent two months wandering around the bylanes of the town. “And I finally decided to do portraits,” he says. One of the portraits is of a porter who works on Bazaar Road. He is standing bare-bodied, with tufts of grey hair on his chest, and a folded towel over his head.“The 70-year-old man is the senior-most porter,” says Sunil. “But I noticed that he had more energy than many of his young counterparts.”
For artist Saju Kunhan, his work is devoid of people. Instead, it is a drone-like image, focusing on Mattancherry, Fort Kochi, Vypeen and the other smaller islands. Ships with sails can be seen in the sea. “This area has a centuries-old history of migration, thanks to a natural harbour,” says Saju. “So, a lot of ships kept coming for hundreds of years till the 19th century.”
To make the artwork, Saju took a printout of a Google map. This was transferred onto a teak wood surface using an acrylic medium. “It is a long drawn-out process,” says Saju. But the 12x5 feet work, ‘Our land is part of the globe’, was among the eye-catchers at the expo.Other participants included poet Anitha Thampi, whose Malayalam poems, written on one wall of the gallery, explored the life and times of the place.
On another wall, artist PS Jalaja had done a large and remarkable portrait of a working-class man. There was also a Chennai-based Urban Design Collective, which traced the history of Mattancherry through maps and graphics, while the research collective Route Cochin focused on the enduring charm of the Dutch Breudher bread. Asked about the reason behind choosing this theme, Riyas says, “Because of the Biennale, I have been visiting the town for past eight years. So, I felt it was the time to argue for the problems of people of Mattancherry. ”