ABSTRACT
Having been invited by the Kochi-Muziris Biennale to take part as an artist producing one of the collateral projects for the second edition of the Biennale in 2014, I put forward the proposition to install a sculptural installation originally made for a previous exhibition site in India in 2012. I chose, then, to re-make this site-specifi c sculpture, End of Empire, which on the surface was a to-scale cloth sculpture of a crashed Hindustan Ambassador car that I had previously photographed on the streets of Delhi. This was not a case of recycling or re-presenting an existing piece of work, but to utilise this particular artwork in response to temporal, historical and spatial conditions of the city of Kochi and through its Biennale. The aim was to re-situate the work in a public space within the city of Kochi that might work with the temporal nature of the event, while considering the object as a potential critical site for dialogues by placing in a public arena during a prolonged period during the event. I considered this an artwork that might take on issues of locality and the separation between public and private space, while it might also give me an opportunity to test the participatory and transactional nature of producing and installing the artwork in Kochi within a public space. This was an issue that I had previously touched on in my writings on the Biennale at its launch in 2012, commenting on the ‘emancipatory effect that art can have on the spectator, to see whether they could be applied in terms of the active participation of art and the possibility of bringing together communities that this biennale has potentially offered’ (D’Souza, 2013: 312). I saw the collateral project as a clear opportunity to engage in the very critique I had made and the possibility of art that I had previously alluded to at the Biennale’s fi rst launch (see Chapter 1 ).
