KOCHI: Artists in Kochi celebrated International Women’s Day with all the fanfare. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale created a huge graffiti titled ‘Pakalinte Vilakkin Toonukal’ (Lamp posts in Daylight) at Fort Kochi to pay tribute to the untiring women workers across the world.
The women employees of Tamil origin at the Biennale were depicted in the graffiti work along with this year’s theme ‘DigitALL: Innovation and Technology for Gender Equality’. The Tamil women staff were selected to represent all the hard-working women employees and hence no face was portrayed in the graffiti.
‘Pakalinte Vilakkin Toonukal’ was created by artists and volunteers Hanoona Melethil, V N Abina, Edward Rajan, Diya Malar, K B Abhijit, Anna Johnson, Aparna Vishakh and Siddharth S Hari. The Kalakari Collective organised a feast of events titled Kalakari Pluralogue to celebrate International Women’s Day at Durbar hall on Wednesday. The programme brought together women visual artists from across Kerala to perform, exhibit their works, and discuss art-related topics.
The event opened with performance art, ‘Land of Repressed’ by artist Suhaima C K. The artist dressed in white prayer clothes tried to represent the life of a woman who’s compelled to carry all the weight of religion and social reforms.
The curators of Idam, the exhibition of Malayalam artists as part of the Biennale, honoured the self-taught elderly artist Sathyabhama, fondly called ammayi, who in the later stage of her life has come across art accidentally.
“It’s very enlightening to see how young women are creating powerful art these days. By joining hands and being a part of the collective, women can change the outlook of Kerala,” Sathyabhama says. Later artist Kavitha Balakrishnan presented a video essay called ‘Notes on Gender Politics’. The event concluded with a projection of artworks by various women artists.