Tomorrow, organizers in India plan to announce the creation of the emerging economic giant's first-ever major art biennial. Set to debut in 2012, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale will take place in port city of Kochi in the Kerala province on the southwest coast of India, and in neighboring Muziris, known for a rich historical heritage that reaches back to the days when it was a center for spice-trading with the Roman Empire.

The creative directors of the inaugural Kochi-Muziris Biennale are artists
Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, both of whom have experience with
international art events. Krishnamachari was guest curator for the
India pavilion at the 2009 ARCO art fair in Madrid, while Komu was one
of two Indian artists selected by curator Robert Storr for the 2007 Venice
Biennale, and is set to have work exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in
Paris later this year.

Details about the specifics of the biennial are still coming together, but an announcement stated that it
would focus on artists from both India and abroad, as well as the history of the area. Also promised is a wide-ranging program of related seminars and workshops, which like the biennial proper, will take place at venues throughout the two cities.

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The new Indian art initiative comes in the wake of the announcement of India's first-ever dedicated pavilion at the Venice Biennale later this year, and the continuing growth of New Dehli's India Art Summit fair, which had its latest installment in January. In a recent ARTINFO Op-Ed, Vadhera Art Gallery director Parul Vadehra argued that such developments evidenced a qualitative deepening of the Indian art scene. The launch of an ambitious new biennial is certainly testament to this continuing ascendant trend.