Bengal Biennale and the tale of the wolves
The first edition of the festival that begins next week in Santiniketan and Kolkata is tasked with creating an ecosystem for contemporary art
The New York Times Spelling Bee does not recognise Biennale as a valid word. It sticks with Biennial, as in the Whitney Biennial, though the Venice Biennale has made that word part of global art vocabulary. So we have the Gwangju Biennale, the Biennale of Sydney, Dak’Art or the Dakar Biennale. And now after Kochi, Bengal gets a Bengal Biennale.

Given Kolkata’s British connection it could have been a Bengal Biennial. “But Bengal Biennale just sounds better in Bangla,” chuckles Malavika Banerjee who, along with her husband Jeet, is one of the trustees. The Venice Biennale was always her benchmark. “It seemed very inspiring to me that a place can be so suffused with art for a period of few months every other year,” she says. She has been there thrice. Curator Siddhartha Sivakumar remembers going to the first Kochi Biennale as a young artist. “We were in no position to think of realising something like this then.”