Dubai-based businessman T.V. Narayanan Kutty has committed to give the Kochi-Muziris Biennale an annual grant of $165,000, the Art Newspaper reports.

The Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which takes place across seven venues in Fort Kochi, in the southern Indian state of Kerala, will launch its second edition on December 12.

Narayanan Kutty, chairman of the transportation and freight company IAL Group, decided to get involved with the Biennale as a donor upon discovering the organization’s commitment to society beyond the arts. “I had always thought that the Kochi-Muziris Biennale was only about art and artists,” he told TAN. “But the Kochi Biennale Foundation’s mission statement made me realize that it was also about the society, that it was about artistic expressions creating a bridge to the society. And I simply got hooked into it.”

Last January, the finance minister of Kerala donated $330,000 towards the biennale’s production costs.

The artist Jitish Kallat, who is curating this second edition of the biennale (entitled “Whorled Explorations”), has divided the programme into five areas: “Artists’ Cinema,” “Students’ Biennale,” “History Now,” “Children’s Biennale,” and “Cultural Programs.”

According to the curatorial statement published on the biennale’s website: “’Whorled Explorations’ is conceived as a temporary observation deck hoisted at Kochi. The exhibition draws upon a wide glossary of signs from this legendary maritime gateway to bring together sensory and conceptual propositions that map our world referencing history, geography, cosmology, time, space, dreams and myths.”