KOCHI:Curtains went down on the second edition of Kochi Muziris Biennale (KMB)as the officials ceremonially brought down the Biennale flag at the main Aspinwall House venue in Fort Kochi in the presence of artists and art lovers on Sunday.
The second avatar only reaffirmed that it is indeed India’s biggest contemporary art expo, featuring 94 artists from 30 countries for a nonstop 108-days and attracting almost 2 lakh visitors.
Soon, the officials will get down to mounting and dismantling the art works in order to pack them and send them back to the where they belong from.
Parallel to it, the KMB foundation will sit down to form a committee and select the artistic curator for the next edition, expected to begin on December 26, 2016.
To an active observer, reckoning the controversies that surrounded the first edition when it got over, it all might appear like things are falling into place in favour of the Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF). But things may fall apart.
If the promised state support is not going to come in within the next few hours, KBF will land in serious crisis, tells sources.
After much liaison from the part of KBF, the government had promised a non-budgetary allocation of Rs 2 crore for the art show. But the Government Order (GO) to release Rs 1 crore out of the total amount was issued only on Friday.
With the financial year coming to an end within a day, will the state be able to issue the cheque based on the GO and release the funds within the next few hours?
Sources tell us why this is important. “We have run out of funds gathered via ticket sales, private funding and other support systems.
From next week onward, we will have to start un-mounting and dismantling the artworks and ship them back. This is one of the most expensive processes and will cost more than Rs 2 crore,” said a top official in the KBF team.
He added that if the art works are not returned on time, it is much likely that the respective foreign artist or the nations, as in some cases the embassies are also involved, will turn against the KMB.
After the end of this financial year, the files will have to clear another round of sanctioning starting from the Finance Department. It means the liaison process will have to start from the scratch, once again.
“It’s not about walking the verandhas of the three government departments (Finance, Culture and Tourism) that worries us,” tells the source, “but it’s the repercussions that the delay in shipping back of art works will attract. We know the show must go on. But, how?”