At Berlin-based performance and installation artist Anja Ibsch’s table, there are glass tiles, papers and loose scraps arranged like ingredients for a recipe. The sea is behind us, pressing its ear to the room. A ship horn sounds, long and blunt. Ibsch holds up a tiny, pink flower shaped like a bouquet. She’s about to press the flower flat. It will soon dry into itself. She tells me that she no longer feels like a subject. “I take myself as an object.” She says it plainly. Flower. Paper. Cut-out. The self is placed on the same plane as everything else. Just another thing that can be handled, moved slightly to the left, left to wait.
Across the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, objects are hard at work. At Delhi-based artist Niroj Satpathy’s landfill, debris refuses erasure: plastic dolls, wires, broken machines glow back at us, insisting on continuity. In multi-disciplinary artist Birender Yadav’s brick kiln, which draws from the lives of seasonal migrant workers in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh, there are no workers. Only their tools wait, as if someone has just stepped out for a quick chai break and work will resume anytime now. Standing inside the installation, it’s hard to believe that who we are exists separately from what we do.
