On the face of it, very little connects these six artists whose works are spread across Fort Kochi and its surrounding neighbourhoods, as part of the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale:
Sister Roswin aka Malu Joy is a nun. Niroj Satpathy once worked with the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). Dhiraj Rabha is the son of a former radical ideologue; Himanshu Jamod, the son of a labourer who stripped ships. Prabhahar Kamble does not separate his art from anti-caste critique; Kulpreet Singh sees no difference between his art practice and his socio-religious identity as a Sikh farmer.
They occupy different positions within the art world, some as yet unrepresented by galleries, some at the very start of their careers, others with a few important exhibitions under their belts. They live and work in different parts of the country, and are between 20 and 40 years old.
Probe deeper, and a few common threads begin to emerge.
All six create art that speaks to their quotidian lives, which in turn are marked by a sustained engagement with the politics and culture of their respective communities.
Kerala-based Joy has drawn and sculpted other nuns in the last stages of their lives.
Satpathy’s exhibit, Dhalan, features rows of photographs of Delhi’s solid-waste-disposal workers, his colleagues at MCD until about seven years ago. He also repurposes salvaged material in his large-scale installations.
For the Vadodara-based Jamod, the ship serves as a substitute for the self in the two series, Retrieve and Seedbed, on display at Kochi.
Singh’s immersive video, Indelible Black Marks, is a collaborative effort that involved a team of 150, including other farmers and artists, and depicts a group of men setting a fallow field on fire in order to ready it for the next crop cycle. “Even asking a question from an AI search engine leaves a carbon footprint. But no one will speak of the ways in which we’re destroying our air and soil every day,” he says.
Rabha, who has lived since age four in a camp for surrendered members of United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), a radical group that advocated for the autonomy of Assam, uses his art practise to drop the viewer into the centre of his dystopian reality: recordings of news bytes clash with videos of interviews with camp residents, and the songs of Rabha’s tribe.
Kamble, whose working-class parents participated in anti-caste social justice movements in Kolhapur in the 1980s, uses art as his medium to speak about the inhumanity of the caste system.
Each of these artists works with a mission. Their identity, while interlinked with the art world and art market, goes beyond it. They are united in how they use art as a way not only to speak deeply of their lives, but to offer insight into the hidden or ignored worlds that they inhabit.
The sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has received 450,000 visitors since it began on December 12. The works of 66 artists and collectives from 25 countries are on display across 29 venues, until March 31. Curated by Nikhil Chopra with HH Spaces, a Goa-based artist-led initiative that Chopra co-founded in 2014, the theme of the biennale, For the Time Being, spotlights “embodied histories of those that came before us and continue to live within us in the form of cells, stories and techniques”.
These six artists show us how communities, too, are receptacles of embodied histories, and the artist is equal parts participant and observer.
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MALU JOY, KERALA : In the spirit of sisterhood
Sister Roswin, 35, was born Malu Joy, the daughter of a painter, one half of a pair of twin girls, enamoured by the way paint stayed on a wall after a brush stroke.
As a young girl, she attended a school run by the Congregation of the Mother of Carmel, the St Joseph’s School in Chengal, on the banks of Periyar river, where she found herself curious about the nuns who taught her. How did they spend their time? What did it mean to love God more than anything else? Who were these women who dedicated their lives to this pursuit?
She joined the congregation in 2013, having completed a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and a certification in counselling.
At the Kochi-Muziris Biennale’s SMS Hall, Joy’s works take up an entire room: 30 drawings in monochrome and colour, eight small terracotta busts, and two large sculptural installations, all featuring older nuns as subjects.
The works are remarkable not only because they offer a view of women who have spent their lives in service and under strict religious orders, but also because they render the religious archetype all too human. Joy does not idealise her subjects, but shows their imperfections and fragilities.
Joy began her artistic journey after taking religious orders. Her first canvas was a wall in her convent, on which she painted caricatures of nuns as well as scenes from the Bible. Her superiors suggested she enrol at RLV College of Music and Fine Arts in Thrippunithura, Kochi, where a number of novitiates have, in fact, studied different streams of art.
Noting rare skill, her teachers nudged her towards sculpture; the department takes fewer than 10 students a year. “When I started art school, I knew nothing about sculpture,” she says.
Her professors recommended she visit beaches, marketplaces, walk along the roads and observe people, in order to find subjects for her art. Malu did so, but also began spending time at a convent near her college, where she met older nuns retired from active service.
“As they opened up and talked to me, they told me about how they navigated their years in the church. As they spoke, I drew the expressions on their faces. I saw their pain and drew it, but I also wanted to give them comfort. I counselled them, because I am a trained counsellor also,” Joy says.
In this way, she developed her art through unique line drawings in her sketchbook. When she translated them to clay, the figures took on astonishing expressions of grief, pain, exhaustion.
Nikhil Chopra, curator of the 2025-26 edition of the Kochi Muziris Biennale, came across her works in her final year presentation, and they “jumped out” at him, he says.
“There is a certain sophistication in the way Malu Joy understands her relationship to material, subject and herself and her identity and position within the social fabric of the university or within the social-cultural fabric of her convent. (One can see) with how much sensitivity and criticality she felt her own presence as a caregiver for sick nuns or those nearing the end of their life,” Chopra adds.
Joy is already taking her next big step. She has been invited to join a residency in Berlin next year, and show her work in Mumbai later this year. Many of the line drawings on display at the biennale have also sold. The money, she said, will go to the congregation.
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NIROJ SATPATHY: Crafting art from Delhi’s discards
41-year-old Niroj Satpathy’s story sounds like the plot of a Ritwik Ghatak film: a caste iconoclast, indifferent to class status, is driven to lift the veil off things that society generally keeps hidden.
“I’ve seen Delhi at all times of day and night. When I first came to the city in 2012, after completing an MFA (Masters in Fine Arts) in Odisha, I spent the first six months taking buses to all corners of the city,” he says.
He found a job with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), as a conservator in Lal Qila. After a year and a half, when the project he was working on ended, he was at a loose end again. He returned home to Odisha, where a meeting with a stranger at a restaurant got him his next gig, as a night supervisor in a private company hired by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi’s solid waste management department.
Between 2013 and 2018, Satpathy’s life revolved around Delhi’s discards. He changed his sleep cycle to collect the garbage from 12 sites between Paharganj and Daryaganj in the dead of night; grew accustomed to the stink; made friends with those who worked at the landfill.
“The landfill is the original data centre. As it fills up, another layer of the history of Delhi is accumulated. Clearing it is impossible; there is no place to dump the unsegregated waste,” he says, echoing what ecologists have been saying for years.
Satpathy’s interest in the city’s waste isn’t an activist’s outrage. It is an artist’s curiosity about history, memory and social hierarchy. “When I first started the job, some of my friends stopped talking to me. Back home, my upper caste family asked me to stop visiting the temple and performing rituals,” he says.
His one-room flat in north Delhi is now a museum of sorts. The walls are plastered with images of things he saw in those five years. He bore witness to the city’s materialism, as well as to the labour of its people — second-hand market dealers and waste segregators at the landfill, residents of shanties who live on and near the landfill, surrounded by noxious fumes and undrinkable water — who work to keep Delhi from drowning under its own waste.
At the biennale, large kinetic sculptural installations made with material recovered from landfills are placed around towering shelves that carry curios and collectibles that are no longer familiar visuals today: a compact, portable Aniko TV with inbuilt FM radio; a range of Barbies (some worse for wear) that show the evolution of the doll; cassettes; Russian and Eastern European dolls.
“You have to understand what it means to live at a landfill. It is difficult, but adapting to that environment means that they are the true dwellers of the apocalypse. They’re more than human,” Satpathy says.
Surrounding these installations is a series of prints of the faces of the men and women who venture out at night to collect Delhi’s waste, anonymous and unseen. “I’ve dedicated this wall to the labour that goes unseen everywhere in the country,” Satpathy says.
“There is an elegance in the way Niroj deals with and understands his role as an artist in being able to gather, collect, archive, clean, wash, label (the waste), and place (it) in his collection,” says biennale curator Nikhil Chopra. “It takes a certain kind of madness, and I don’t want to romanticize this, but it takes a certain ability to place your body in an environment that is toxic and deeply harmful. And to then create from (there), feels like the artist shows the world how to rise from the ashes like a phoenix.”
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KULPREET SINGH, PUNJAB: Rising from the ashes
“Sometimes I think that what I do on the canvas is no different from when I farmed. My brush is like an extension of the stubble, fire operates as both colour and process, and the canvas is like the field. It transforms into a terrain where agrarian labour and artistic gesture converge,” says Kulpreet Singh, whose installation comprising paintings and a film from his larger project, Indelible Black Marks (2022-) at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale seems to tackle the burning issues facing India’s metropolises — stubble burning, air pollution, food security, farmer’s rights.
The 40-year-old who won the Asia Arts Future (India) Award at this year’s Asia Society’s Game Changer awards, is quite literally a son of the soil. The Patiala-based artist comes from a family of farmers.
As an artist, his materials of choice include ash from burnt crop stubble and nails strewn on the roads to deter farmers from progressing to Delhi during the farmers’ protests in 2021. His mediums include performance, video, sound and canvas. Put together, his body of work — presented by Galerie Mirchandani+Steinruecke — is rooted, authentic and urgent.
Take the 8.5-minute video on display at the Anand Warehouse in Fort Kochi. Visually stunning, it captures a choreographed performance around the ritual of stubble burning, alternating between an aerial view and ground-level perspective. Singh and a group of farmers set fire to the stubble lining a field, then cover the ground with long sleeves of canvas. As the camera captures a group of men running through the smoke and searing heat, we notice how the ash leaves an imprint on the canvas.
The soundtrack takes the viewer beyond the shocking visual. Screaming sirens, shouting voices, foghorn alarms mingle with a burbling stream and a verse of Gurbani or Sikh prayer.
“It’s a hidden dialogue taking place,” Singh says. “There is always something in the background, the larger issue, the crux of the matter, which remains unseen. It’s the same with stubble burning, which accounts for only a small part of the whole pollution issue. Even asking a question on AI search leaves a carbon footprint. But no one will speak of the ways in which we’re destroying our air and soil every day.”
Singh does not see his role as an artist as being too different from his agrarian identity. There is a service inherent in it. In this instance, it is to hold up a mirror to show the viewer what they don’t get to see. “Ecological disaster is part of the way we live. We’re hollowing out mountains to build tunnels, we’re flattening out plateaus, we’re at war and flattening cities in other parts of the world, we’re polluting our lakes and rivers with industrial waste. So is the issue that the farmer is burning stubble? Or is it that we are living in a world where global warming is a reality, and as a human race, we are in the midst of a global crisis?” he says.
Singh’s art practice is collaborative: He has used ash from the stoves that farmers cooked on during their protest; hosted a langar during one of his exhibitions; a team of 150, including artists and farmers, came together to make Indelible Black Marks. It is also expansive: In 2022, he started work on Extinction Archive using data on endangered animal, plant and fungal species drawn from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN’s) Red List of Threatened Species. On rice paper layered with burnt stubble, he rendered drawings of hundreds of endangered species. The installation, which began as an exploration of the fallout of the Green Revolution in 1960s India, turned into a global overview, and was most recently displayed at the India Art Fair in February.
“This is how the Earth holds each one of us,” he says. This sentiment is part of the video which ends with a verse from the Granth: “Pavan Guru, Pani Pita, Mata Dharat Mahat / Divas raat due dai daya, Kheley sagal jagat. (Air is the Guru, Water is the Father, and the Great Earth is the Mother / Day and night are the nurses in whose lap the world plays).”
“Kulpreet’s work shows how the body is really at the centre of what it is that we’re looking at. And here you see Kulpreet Singh’s own body become alive in his work. The bandages that Kulpreet and his brothers run through the landscape create music and poetry, and at the same time, the fabric serves as records of the scars on the land. While, at the same time, he hangs them as paintings in the gallery, and so (they return to being) landscape, which brings us back to this (question) of what it means to paint,” biennale curator Nikhil Chopra says.
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PRABHAKAR KAMBLE, MAHARASHTRA: Choosing lines to live by
The seeds of 40-year-old Prabhakar Kamble’s calling were sown early in his life. His parents worked at a textile mill in Ichalkaranji in Kolhapur, Maharashtra. Like most of their neighbours and workmates, they were actively involved in the anti-caste social justice movement, and the Left-aligned trade union and labour movements.
Kamble says some of his earliest memories are of textile workers gathering for weekly celebrations that involved singing Bhim Geete, or songs in praise of BR Ambedkar.
“All the people I was inspired by had trained themselves or they learned it from people like them… one was a poet and musician, another was an activist and a painter named Yashwant Kamble and Arun Nimbalkar. Inspired by them, I started my artistic practice painting signboards, background banners and advertisement hoardings on walls and portraits in enamel on galvanised tin sheets,” Kamble says.
At the Anand Warehouse in Fort Kochi, a giant painting harks to Kamble’s pre-art-school practice: the 6-ft x 24 ft diptych created in collaboration with painter Arun Sutar. It depicts an egregious incident that occurred in the life of Malayalam cinema’s first Dalit woman actor, Rajamma, who played an upper-caste woman in the 1928 film Vigathakumaran (The Lost Child).
“Rajamma was not even permitted to enter the theatre and watch the premiere of her film. The largely male, upper-caste audience took great offense to her portrayal, which showed her performing religious rituals. An angry mob set fire to her house, and called for the film to be banned. Rajamma managed to escape to Tamil Nadu and changed her name to PK Rosy. She lived the rest of her life in anonymity,” Kamble says.
The artwork, painted in the style of a billboard, shows snippets from Rajamma’s life and from the now-lost film — a mob setting a house on fire, a sharply-dressed man courting a young woman, Rajamma’s serene face — all drawn from Kamble’s imagination.
For, the result of the backlash was also forceful erasure: there is no print left, and no one knows for certain what Rajamma looked like. The only image of her available is based on a film poster.
The painting also incorporates a quote by professor Gautamiputra Kamble, an award-winning Marathi writer and one of the more important contemporary intellectuals from the Phule-Ambedkarite social justice movement. The professor helped co-found the Secular Movement in 2014, and together with Prabhakar Kamble, co-founded the Secular Art Movement four years later. Raising social awareness and intervention in such man-made unequal and inhuman practices of the caste system cannot be separated from his role as an artist, Kamble said.
Like the rest of the works that form part of Kamble’s exhibit, this painting is symbolic of the tenuousness of Dalit lives.
The suspended chandelier installations are different-sized earthen pots placed one below the other, decorated by ropes, bells, metal hooks, cowrie shells and straps of leather. All the material used in these installations are associated with caste-based forced occupations and devalued artisanal practices.
For instance, the bells used in these installations are similar to those that decorate the necks of bullocks that till the farms, and Kamble has used them to remind the viewer of the landless farm worker whose labour is overlooked in the larger social discourse around farmers’ rights.
These installations also hold out an aesthetic dissonance, as none of them match the viewer’s expectation of what a chandelier must look like.
“When people look at art, at the same moment, they forget their real-life experience. Art is never meant to lull you into forgetfulness.”
“In a world where genocide has become a dining table discussion, (Prabhakar’s work makes us ask) what do we need to kill? What do we need to confront? What do we need to bury? Caste is certainly one such thing,” says biennale curator Nikhil Chopra.
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DHIRAJ RABHA, ASSAM : Songs from a separatist rehabilitation camp
Four years after Dhiraj Rabha was born, his family fled from their home in Baraligaon, Assam. His father, Dhananjay Rabha, had joined the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) as a student, in 1984. By 1999, convinced that the rebellion had lost its way and keen to be part of the promised peace talks between the government, Rabha’s father laid down his arms. As a senior member of the political wing of ULFA, this meant he and his family were now under threat.
Rabha, 30, still lives in the rehabilitation camp to which they moved. It sits within an abandoned cotton mill, with privacy secured using bamboo and cloth. Tall bamboo machans serve as surveillance towers. Its architecture of surveillance has informed his art practice.
His graduate degree presentation at Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan included a watchtower, built on site, which led into a room covered in poems and drawings relating to former ULFA members, and songs of the Rabha tribe.
In the coir godown at Fort Kochi’s Aspinwall House, his exhibit, The Quiet Weight of Shadows, takes the viewer through a large installation of carnivorous plants, embedded with speakers blaring news about the political situation in the northeast. Interspersed between these neon-lit flowers are watchtowers playing videos in which former ULFA members talk about their lives: why they joined the movement, the dreams they gave up, the disappointments and fears they live with.
The juxtaposition of news broadcasts and personal narratives raises the question: What is the real narrative of a region? Who gets to speak it? And, what narrative will the distant viewer pay more attention to?
“These individuals are neither heroes nor villains. They are people shaped by a particular historical moment, and long after the guns fell silent, they continue to live at the margins of society,” Rabha says. “Over the years, I have heard many stories from people in the camp, stories they had never shared with anyone else. Sadly, some of them passed away with their painful, unspoken memories, leaving gaps in our collective understanding. I felt an urgency to reconnect with those who once lived in the camp. I began reaching out to people I knew through my father, especially those still living in my district, which allowed me to build trust and reconnect more intimately. Their stories are diverse: some politically charged, some deeply emotional, some recounting encounters with the army, and others reflecting on the personal struggles they faced during and after the movement. There are accounts of survival during conflict, but also quieter stories about love, longing, and loss.”
A wooden room constructed on-site holds ephemera from a rebel’s life: letters, photographs, pages of writing, everything charred and destroyed. This is not the fate of Rabha and his two sisters. They have graduated and pursued careers. But this past is still part of our lives, Rabha says. “My mother had so many dreams that she could not fulfill. My father has PTSD. We can’t really move on.”
“By revisiting these narratives, Dhiraj Rabha does more than just map the landscape; he offers a lens through which to reassess the region’s majoritarian insurgency history. He centres the stories of those once tied to these movements, reclaiming the inherent humanity lost in official records,” says Madhurjya De, who is part of the biennale’s curatorial team and a member of HH Spaces, an artist’s collective co-founded by Chopra.
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HIMANSHU JAMOD, GUJARAT : Getting the hull picture
Until a decade ago, Himanshu Jamod’s father was a labourer at Alang, one of the world’s largest shipbreaking yards. He grew up watching behemoths broken down.
“In a ship, everything is stripped down, from the furniture to the washing machines and iron sheets. Everything is sorted, segregated and either resold or reused in other industries,” says Jamod, 31.
Other members of his family too have found employment in ships, including three uncles, in Alang. The younger generation, his brother and cousins included, work in managerial positions in businesses dealing with the resale of ship parts.
The artist was the first in his family to leave Bhavnagar. He studied art at MS University in Baroda. But the shipyard never left him.
In a series of canvases displayed at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, he brings the surreal landscape of Alang alive. “I have been drawing, sketching and painting ships since I left art school. In my understanding, the ship is a metaphor for the self. We search for ourselves all our lives, just like a ship searches for the beacon. In my canvases, I wanted to show views of these landscapes that most people never get to see,” he says.
In the two series on display, Retrieve (ongoing since 2016) and Seedbed (2025), we see sections and parts of decommissioned ships hoisted on sandpits; as well as ships’ internal architecture. Jamod uses oil paint on canvas and tarpaulin as his medium, in a continuation of his theme.
The Alang shipyard, of course, is no longer the place Jamod grew up seeing. There is more automation now, and fewer jobs.
“Jamod addresses the yard’s complex economic contribution; however precarious, the industry provides a vital livelihood for locals along the Alang coast. Alongside this daunting display, the work maps the global configurations of maritime resource management through the lens of recycled material cultures,” says Madhurjya De, who is part of the biennale’s curatorial team.
