Akkitham Vasudevan presents ‘lockdown journal’ at Biennale

KOCHI

Like everyone else, artist Vasudevan Akkitham was forced to stay indoors when the novel coronavirus rampaged through the country. 

As an artist, he wanted to paint but could not get enough raw material as shops remained closed for a few months on the trot. So, he sat down at the dining table and painted a 365-day lockdown journal. ‘An Almanac of a Lost Year’, as the work is titled, is on display at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, at Aspinwall House.  

“During the lockdown, I decided to explore the domestic space and work with a medium which is easy to deal with and has a certain degree of fluidity. As I began to work on it with small papers and watercolour, a disconnect with the world outside happened inside me. So, I created a new world which was sometimes sad, bizarre, and at times optimistic,” says Mr. Akkitham, 64, who hails from Palakkad but resides in Baroda in Gujarat.  

The large installation is almost a world in itself replete with fantasies, thoughts, imagination, and political issues. He says that the work lays bare many incidents that moved him during the period. The project is a personal statement on some issues happening around him from the perspective of a closed space.  

‘Distance’, a work that features three paintings titled ‘Departure’, ‘Journey’, and ‘Arrival’, is also on display nearby. “It’s autobiographical. It is about how our mental makeup is framed during childhood and how we carry it till our death in different ways. It is also about how we move from our roots and migrate to different places for survival,” he says.