Kochi Roundup

In the center of a large white room, entered via an eclectic antique shop’s statue-filled corridor, hangs a single split-flap board of the sort once used to announce departures at airports. As the flaps on this board change, the words “MY LAND FELL OFF” are momentarily suspended. In the adjacent room, a wall, a piece of chalk, and a sheet of paper, all white, invite us to make a drawing that will leave no legible mark. A vitrine in one corner contains a singular stack of graphite pencil leads, like bullets in a casing.

Shilpa Gupta’s “Listening Air” provides viewers with much-needed respite from the otherwise dense satellite exhibitions to the Kochi Biennale.1 Her sculptural work raises questions, implicating both audience and artist, around silence and complicity. These climax in the third and final room of the exhibition, where audio speakers, disguised as moving microphones, play global patriotic songs in an orchestra void of people other than those looking on.

Gupta’s work also appears in Ishara House’s inaugural exhibition “Amphibian Aesthetics,” curated by Riyas Komu at the historic synagogue, Kashi Hallegua House. On entry, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s cut-up mirrors (Divisione e moltiplicazione dello specchio/Division and multiplication of the mirror, 2025) seem to fracture the ground into floating islands, destabilizing the space. Shanvin Sixtous’s In, Between (2025) is a steel sculpture evoking the remnant of a sunken ship, so large that viewers are pushed to the periphery of the room. The installation—rusted on the outside, ordered and clean on the interior—speaks to the conditions of containment and movement that im/migrants continue to negotiate on both chosen and forced transit routes. In the external corridor of the building, positioned as though coming up for air, Dima Srouji’s Foundations (2025) stages the plan of a colonially excavated tomb from Gaza as a monument whose oxidized walls become a site for rest, revision, and return.

Also at Ishara House is the Kabir Project, whose twenty-three-year-old archive Ajab Shahar (displayed for the first time) meticulously documents the poetry of mystics (among them fifteenth-century poet Kabir and eighteenth-century poet Shah Latif) through performances by and conversations with contemporary folk artists. A careful selection from these video archives by Anisha Baid, Smriti Chanchani, and the project’s founder Shabnam Virmani is projected onto layered sheets of translucent embroidered silk. In following the routes of centuries-old poetry, these archives thread together disparate languages, religions, and regions in a climate where such connections are being actively erased. Their work exemplifies the potential of the archive as an agent of gathering the lost and the living.

How can art be practiced in precarious conditions, where both bodies and territories are under threat? Here, Kochi’s Student Biennale offered more scope for dialogue than did the main exhibitions. At VKL Warehouse, Remains of a home (2025), an emotive installation by Aadil Farooq Malik (curated by Salman B. Baba and Khursheed Ahmad) forces us to look through an empty window frame towards an old blanket splayed along a wall, a somber wooden chair, and a vacant self-portrait of the artist in Nike trainers. Malik displays the remains of his family home in Kashmir, which was destroyed in a road expansion project. The desires of a young man, the promise of modernity, and the violence of imperial expansion coalesce as themes in a work that forcefully rejects the abstraction of art from its context. In the same warehouse, refusing to succumb to mere “representation” of minority experiences, Rutuja Sonawane revitalizes her father’s nearly fifty-year-old Mahar brass band with a vivid multimedia installation, The People's Orchestra (2025), featuring the sounds of their Ambedkarite songs being performed in and around Satana in Nashik district. 

At the entrance of Arthshila, a student from Santiniketan (home to Visva-Bharati, the university founded by Rabindranath Tagore in 1921) presents 15,000 terracotta pieces (fired, semi-fired, and unfired), each with unique, aghast, facial expressions. Behind each piece, the fingers from the hands that molded it remain imprinted. The installation displays the names of the fifteen people from the Kumhar community in Uttar Pradesh who were involved in its making, redacting the word “artisan” and replacing it with “artist.” In doing so, Expression of Fragility (2025) invites viewers to confront their own extractive relationship to labor in India. The student’s name—Durgesh Prajapati— is printed last on the list.

Alkazi Theatre Archives’s Re: Public (2024) and Re: Staging 1990s (Delhi) (2025) fill the old prison cells at the Jail of Freedom Struggle with hundreds of documents—maps, photographs, facts and figures printed on board—relating to theater spaces that have emerged and disappeared post-independence. The archives act as historical proof that culture is never separate to social, political, economic, and legal events; with only a handful of these spaces still operating today, eerie parallels are drawn between those practicing creative expression (in a climate championing its repression) and the freedom fighters who were once imprisoned in these eight cells. Yet, the exhibition is simplistically assembled, visually dense, and only accessible to those with English: the archives axiomatically display how cultural spaces can reveal more than they intend. With over thirty venues compressed into Fort Kochi's small peninsula, art has transformed the city into a living laboratory whose inequities are impossible to ignore. How might a lavishly funded international exhibition situate itself in the local culture? What alternative models of support might sustain those creating the most urgent work?

Forplay Society, a nine-year-old artist-run space founded by Seljuk Rustum, offers an example of how biennials can lay the necessary ground for conversations between international art institutions and grassroots organizations and art practices. When I visited, the energy from the performances hosted by Forplay carried into a street party, initiated by a handful of neighboring kids and some portable speakers. At the exit to Rustum’s fantastical space lay a fishbowl for donations. By bringing in creative workers from across the world, biennials can provide a real opportunity for organizations like Forplay to continue their work. Yet it’s those for whom precarity is not a theme but a condition who remain most committed to building safer infrastructures. Nurturing a creative practice requires a return to the very communities that foster them.