Happenchance

Happenchance follows four artists — Australia’s William Eicholtz, an eminent sculptor, and mandala artist Louise Rippert, alongside India’s Narayanan Mohanan and the musician Revati Sakalkar — as they explore the unfamiliar setting of Kochi. As the Biennale takes its course, the stakes rise and the artists collaborate to produce installations together. Our remit covered both the film and the original music.

The artists were not illustrating finished work; the body of work only came into being as the Biennale ran. They used Snakes and Ladders — the ancient Indian game — as a conceptual springboard, re-interpreting the symbolic images of traditional and contemporary boards to explore luck, fate and karma. The film holds iconic imagery from both India and the West, and sits inside the larger Serendipitous Happenstance initiative, which exposed six Australian artists to India’s living craft traditions.

The film closes with the opening of the Serendipitous Happenstance exhibition, timed to the Biennale itself — a cross-cultural collaboration captured end to end, from first meeting to gallery wall.