The Pune Biennale was conceived in 2012 by Dr Kiran A. Shinde, an urban planner and then Principal of the Bharati Vidyapeeth University College of Architecture in Pune, together with colleagues at the College — an unusual institutional origin for a contemporary biennial in India, where the comparable institutional precedent in Kochi had been founded a year earlier by working artists. The Pune Biennale Foundation, established as the organising body, framed the project as a "grass-roots movement" to bring "art, architecture and design" to bear on the visual aesthetics of a metropolis then among the fastest-growing in India and the Asia-Pacific region. The institutional pitch was that Pune — Maharashtra's second city after Mumbai, the eighth most populous city in India, and the cultural and educational capital of the Deccan that Nehru had named the "Oxford and Cambridge of India" — could host a biennial of its own without rerouting through the Mumbai or Delhi gallery axes.
The third edition's curatorial argument took its title from a wordplay between habit and cohabit: to attach the prefix to a habit is to transform a ritual into a shared condition, and a shared condition implies the recognition of the other's rhythm. The reference under that wordplay was to the late Roland Barthes lecture-cycle Comment vivre ensemble (How to Live Together), delivered at the Collège de France in 1976–77, and to Barthes's medieval-monastic concept of idiorrhythmy — a form of communal life in which each member is free to live, work and wander according to a specific personal rhythm without surrender to a single collective tempo. Colah and Cerizza took the question Barthes posed — how, exactly, can different rhythms cohabit a single architecture? — and inserted it, in the curators' own phrase, "into the flesh of the city of Pune".
A diffused exhibition without a central pavilion
The structural feature that distinguished Habit-co-Habit from the inaugural and second editions of the Pune Biennale — and from the comparable Kochi-Muziris Biennale model — was its explicit refusal of a singular central exhibition venue. Where the 1st edition (January 2013) had taken "Celebrating hills" as its theme and the 2nd edition (6–15 February 2015) had programmed under "Heritage — Yours and Mine", the third edition spread its commissions across an itinerary of twenty-five-plus sites in central Pune, alternating between spaces of isolation, privacy, social control and community: the Pataleshwar Caves on Jangli Maharaj Road, the PES Modern High School, the Municipal Printing Press, the Mahatma Phule Museum, the Balgandharva theatre, the Z-Bridge across the Mutha river, the Sambhaji and Bal Gandharva public gardens, the ABIL underpass, and a network of more than ten city galleries operating as partner venues. Participating artists included Yona Friedman, Shilpa Gupta, Tomás Saraceno, Susan Philipsz, Marinella Senatore, Massimo Bartolini, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Sarnath Banerjee, Tushar Joag, Amol Patil, Rupali Patil, Shubigi Rao, Marcello Maloberti, Sanket Jadia, Jimmy Chishi, Nikhil Raunak and the Natak Company collective.
The 2017 edition was, by the curators' own framing, less an exhibition than a citizen-test of cohabitation — the wager that a fast-growing Indian metropolis whose growth had been driven by waves of incoming workers, professionals and students from across the subcontinent could be made legible to itself by inserting contemporary art commissions into the most ordinary of its public surfaces. The institution announced an appointment of the Delhi-based KHOJ International Artists' Association — directed by Pooja Sood — as curatorial partner for an intended 2019 edition; that edition does not appear in the public record to have opened.
