Chennai Photo Biennale postponed to next year, releases first list of artists

However, the organizers recently announced the first list of artists, collaborative projects and the curatorial concept for the upcoming edition.

The curatorial team working on this edition consists of Arko Datto (Kolkata) and Bhooma Padmanabhan (Chennai) from India, and Boaz Levin (Berlin) and Kerstin Meincke (Essen) from Germany.

Titled Maps of Disquiet, the third edition of the Biennale will reflect on the exigencies of our times – resisting majoritarian impositions, ecological collapse, and technological dystopias by reclaiming pluralities of thought, voices, and art, and building new networks of solidarity and care.

According to Varun Gupta, Founder, Chennai Photo Biennale, “CPB Edition III hopes to provide much-needed respite to arts audiences through both immersive public art experiences, for which we have been collectively yearning, and through its incisive curatorial position that invites visitors to unlearn and to question.”

The site of the 'Great Trigonometrical Survey' of 1802, the first colonial attempt to measure and map the subcontinent, Chennai today is an arena of contested visions of a common future that resonates beyond, according to the organisers.

Anchoring itself in Chennai, the biennale will delve into the invisible realms of power and knowledge that shape our global present while simultaneously proposing the creation of resistant cartographies.

It asks, whose resources? Whose rivers? Whose interests? Whose voices? Whose images?

The biennale brings together artists and practices that explore the representation of labour, urban imaginaries, the commons, economic and migratory flows, archaeology and mining, and what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, describing growing hostility towards minorities across the world, refers to as a ‘fear of small numbers’.

Said Tarana Sawhney (Trustee, CPB Foundation & Chairperson, CII Task Force for Art and Culture), “I am particularly excited because I see the potential of what a photo biennale of this magnitude has the ability to create - a rich thriving ecosystem for contemporary art in a novel region of the country, the power to bring together communities and the capacity to become one of the most significant events in South Asia to represent a extraordinary form of art to the global community.”

Chennai Photo Biennale is founded and organised by the CPB Foundation and Goethe-Institut Chennai, and is dedicated to promoting the photographic art form across demographics.