Amphibian Aesthetics - Art in the Age of Precarity

a group exhibition
presented by Ishara Art Foundation
conceptualized and designed by Aazhi Archives
The Ishara House at Kashi Hallegua House, Kochi, Kerala

13 December 2025 to 31 March 2026

Amphibian Aesthetics emerges from the urgencies of precarity in the Anthropocene—climate collapse, displacement, extinction, and hyper-capital—where questions of survival and radicality become inseparable from artistic practice. The exhibition unsettles familiar binaries of East/West, tradition/modernity, embracing entangled, rhizomic ways of thinking that refuse fixed hierarchies. The ‘amphibian’ stands as a figure of adaptability and shared vulnerability, moving between land and water, past and future, human and more-than-human worlds. Building on earlier explorations of Kerala’s oceanic histories—of migration, trade, and climatic shifts—Amphibian Aesthetics presents these entanglements as sites of both crisis and possibility. In foregrounding water’s agency and multispecies coexistence, the exhibition invites multisited and multimodal ways of imagining collective futures. Here, art becomes not merely a mirror to the world but an amphibious gesture—fluid, resilient, and attuned to the fragile ecologies that shape our shared survival.

The exhibition brings together 12 artists and collectives from South Asia, the Middle East and Europe, who play with the emerging precarities of our planet, suggesting multiple modes of being. It explores the aspects of ‘amphibian’ as an artful way of mediating migrations and exile, memory and history, traditions and identities across time and space.

Participating Artists \ Appupen, CAAS Collective (Dr Susmita Mohanty, Rohini Devasher, Sue Fairburn and Barbara Imhof), Dima Srouji, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Midhun Mohan, Rami Farook, Ratheesh T, Kabir Project (Shabnam Virmani, Anisha Baid and Smriti Chanchani), Shanvin Sixtous, Shilpa Gupta, White Balance and Zahir Mirza.

Visit the Exhibition Website

Exhibition Plan

Four Motions in Freedom - Bangalore Hubba 2026

FOUR MOTIONS IN FREEDOM
A video art project for Bangalore Hubba, 16-25 Jan 2026
18 artists / 20 videos

Abeer Khan / Amol Patil / B V Suresh / Babu Eshwar Prasad / Bharati Kapadia / Gigi Scaria / Katyayini Gargi / L N Tallur / Mrudula Kunatharaju / Parul Gupta / Pragati Dalvi Jain / Sheeba Chhachhi / Shreya Menon / Soghra Khurasani / Sukanya Ghosh / Surekha / Swagata Bhattacharyya / Vidya Kamat


Curatorial Note

This project examines various aspects of freedom through experimental video art by Indian contemporary artists. How does the notion of freedom occur in the work of the visual artist? The proposition ‘Four Motions in Freedom’ alludes to the structure of the symphony in western classical orchestra that interprets “freedom” as both a compositional structure and a political condition. The motion clips structurally presented in four sections of this curatorial schema also reference the four pillars of democracy and the four seasons that broadly occur during the cyclic period of a year - both that see a wave of change in our present politics and climate. These four motions — fast and slow, balanced and improvisatory — create the polyphonic field in which democracy breathes. Freedom here is not a single melody but a composition in flux, sustained by dialogue, friction, and repetition. Like any living music, its power lies not in resolution but in the continual act of listening, responding, and renewal.

The four vectors of freedom, explored through four video-sets here are:

 
a. BODY
This set explores works that look at the body as the first site of negotiation of freedom. The artists explore gestures of vulnerability or pleasure within the gendered, ritualised or surveilled body. Largely speaking of the feminine struggles, the section brings voices that claim for presence or autonomy and ultimately agency for the suppressed body.

 
b. TENSION
Oscillating between danger and play, this section highlights the tensions of exercising freedom. The works present contrasting ways of staging and dealing with one’s internal conflict. Freedom here is demonstrated in acts of release and restraint. When restrained, the works offer us new questions in stretching further the geography of the trapped mind.

 
c. ROUTINE
The works in this set present histories and actions that are silenced in the everyday acts of repetition. Some not only reveal the routines in which our lives unendingly circulate, but also offer us alternative ways in which we (may) begin to creatively maneuver them. They settle and unsettle the timespaces we inhabit, ultimately hinting at the quiet subversion of the mundane everyday.

d. IDEOLOGY
In this section, artists pose questions to the actions of ideological regimes that have led us to reflect on the political landscapes that the world is confronted with. The works interrogate different aspects of the violence of data, democratic ideals and distilled ethics and its impact on communities and societies.


VIDEO LIST

SCREEN – I BODY 5 videos Total: 14 mins 19 secs

1. Mrudula Kunatharaju TRY TRY TRY 2.30

2. Mrudula Kunatharaju STILL SMALL VOICE 1.40

3. Soghra Khurasani I WANT TO LIVE 1.01

4. Soghra Khurasani DO THIS, DO THAT 3.18

5. Vidya Kamat WISH I HAD STAYED HOME 5.50

SCREEN – II TENSION 5 videos Total: 20 mins 30 secs

1. Parul Gupta HAIRFALL 5.48

2. Surekha LOC 2.31

3. Pragati Dalvi Jain BREAKING THE IMAGE 6.59

4. Bharati Kapadia PLAYING WITH DANGER 2.12

5. Sukanya Ghosh ISOSCELES FOREST 03.00

SCREEN – III ROUTINE 5 videos Total: 17 mins 46 secs

1. Abeer Khan CHILD LOCK 2.12

2. Sheba Chhachhi MOVING THE CITY 6.58

3. Katyayini Gargi THE REITERATORS 2.05

4. L N Tallur INTERFERENCE 4.00

5. Amol Patil REST 02.31

SCREEN – IV IDEOLOGY 5 videos Total: 21 mins 19 secs

1. Shreya Menon RABBIT HOLE 1.41

2. Gigi Scaria POLITICAL FREEDOM 3.31

3. B. V. Suresh CANES OF WRATH 3.17

4. Swagata Bhattacharyya ROAD SCENE 4.18

5. Babu Eshwar Prasad WALK 8.32

Read full descriptions here

epilogue

As we complete fifty years since the Emergency of 1975, and while the world sways to the extreme political currents across the world, to ask about freedom is more pertinent now than ever. The global reconfigurations around us affect us at various scales of existence - both the self and the world, the body and action. How does the notion of freedom occur in the work of the visual artist? Through what routes does the artist lead us into thinking about our social, political and historical entrappings? Lastly, how could these be mobilised into ways of imagining and actioning for a more agile everyday?

Located in the Central Business district of the city of Bengaluru, the erstwhile Bangalore Central Jail, now the Freedom Park becomes a historical and phenomenological condition for this artistic intersection. The site has held several opposition leaders including poet prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L K Advani when the state of emergency was proclaimed in India in 1975. More recently, it was the ground for hosting the India Against Corruption campaign supporting Anna Hazare’s indefinite fast for governmental action that led to the enactment of the Lok Pal Bill that extended the people of India, the will to ask questions freely to power. Opened in 2008, a part of this site has also been allotted for public protests and free political expression. As viewers encounter the show in the prison cells of the Freedom Park in Bangalore, ‘Four motions in Freedom’ invites contemplation on the histories and futures of our very artistic and collective freedom.

Figure, Field and Fact - Shilpi Rajan Retrospective

 

New Year - Art in the age of Precarity

Inspired from the wall text installation of Shilpi Rajan's show curated by Aazhi Archives at the Uru Art Harbour in Mattancherry, Fort Kochi, this graphic was developed to suggest foraying our entry into a new year of precarity. 

As Dhruv tried to install the vinyl text onto the freshly dried white painted wall of the recently acquired space of Uru Art Harbour, the surface and the text behaved rather unruly producing an even geography of pasts and presents. Sitting uncomfortably, each layer seemed equally precarious, struggling to exist and yet not. 

The next morning, Dhruv and his team came up with a unique way to repair the introduction wall text. The older letters were removed, the wall was repainted, the vinyl text was reprinted. Yet, the problem persisted. This time, they printed out missing parts of the text on white paper and patched it up onto the wall with glue. The recalcitrant moisture in the walls, the peeling paint and the rough surface - all struggled to support each other. Could this be what we might understand as the essential difficulty of co-existence?

The resultant aesthetic, probably resonant with Shilpi's own trajectory, played a persistent poetry of fracture. Simultaneously suggesting a fracture of language, art and the world, this emergent expression of the wall text framed a metaphorical prelude to the show, that itself was placed in a broader thematic of art in the age of precarity.

With appendages, supplements, affixtures, work still goes on. Yet, this is not to valorize precarity of infrastructure or delay as design. This is to highlight how fugitive feelings of materials can produce fractures that cannot be mended easily, and perhaps there are longer histories that need to be addressed while curating for art in the age of precarity.

Look at the images of Shilpi Rajan's show here.

Matrix of Spatial Concepts / Architectural Representation Studio

 

In 2019, the focus of the second semester Architectural Representation studio at SEA was to introduce hybrid drawing, i.e blending hand-drawing and digital techniques of image making. Rather than maintaining it as a passive skill-building studio, our attempt was to push students to find their own ways of creating an imagery for a given provocation. 

Two aspects were mobilized simultaneously: 

1. Basic introduction to key softwares (AutoCAD, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign and Google Sketchup) 

2. A provocation, where each student was asked to select from a matrix of words, resulting in a phrase that would become their brief for representation. 

The matrix for the provocation is as shown above. Students were asked to pick one word from each column to arrive at their "brief". Individual selections from the columns of the table resulted into unexpected, but imaginative propositions like: “Room of crowded ghosts” or “Pavilion above dark trees”. Through referencing artists, architects and graphic designers, the studio worked out possibilities of visually representing each of the phrases, in order to open up image-making in architectural representation as an important tool towards argumentation, evocation and imagination of space.

Artful Mergings: Print and Place / London Original Print Fair 2025

 

Tracing Roots Through Prints: India Printmaker House at London Original Print Fair 2025
by Anuj Daga
April 25, 2025

published in India Art Review online journal

Link: https://indiaartreview.com/stories/tracing-roots-through-prints-india-printmaker-house-at-london-original-print-fair-2025/

ORIGINAL TEXT

Artful Mergings: Print and Place
Anuj Daga

(How) do traces of one’s roots find their way in one’s artistic work? This is the question that prompted India Printmaker House to bring together a group of seven artists at the London Original Print Fair 2025 from India and the UK Indian diaspora. The tightly curated show featuring prints by artist Shivangi Ladha, Ian Malhotra, Mahima Kapoor, Avni Bansal, Rewati Shahani, Saruha Kilaru, and Jaimini Jariwala at the Somerset House between 20-23 March 2025 opened up a host of means and methods through which questions of identity, belonging and memory of cultural past may be gestured in artistic practice. In creating such a landscape, this exhibition not only foregrounded contemporary experiments in printmaking by young artists but also strategized a channel for cross-border connections and collaborative exchanges.

Born to a family that fled from Pakistan to Mumbai during partition, Rewati Shahani continued to live in London after studying Fine Art at the Central St. Martins. She expresses the shift in her own space-time coordinates in her minimalist screen prints that impress translucent maplike cut out forms on solid rectangular opaque bases. At once, these appear like irregular stones placed on a planar surface. In overlapping these, she mixes up their characteristic values of the heavy and light, organic and geometric, natural and manmade, alluding the sedimented geography of a location to leak into a distant ephemerality of the horizon. In counter positioning the land and the sea thus, her works ask if horizons are mere imaginary datums or places may find their real geographies ever? In doing so, the work begins to speak of the location of culture as it moves through bodies and borders. 

London-based artist Ian Malhotra plays with the real and virtual in his ‘Monday-Sunday’ series where he etches videogame midnight skies onto paper. He explains, ‘[q]uite a lot of open world video games have diurnal cycles for realism, so the light and weather changes throughout the day as the character walks through the landscape…When the game's diurnal cycle arrived at exactly midnight, I took a picture of this sky.’ Referencing these frames in his sketches, Malhotra makes his canvas black, converting it into a digital screen, further marking white luminous lines to render the cloudy skies. The folding of the past over the present occurs in Malhotra’s works at multiple registers. The mass circulating virtual images are etched exactly in the manner of the imaginary landscapes etched by noted Western artists, eventually reproduced by print for mass consumption - highlighting the fundamental space-time dichotomy of engaging with images. Moreover, the endlessness of the sky and the screen - the two infinities that have united humanity historically as well as in contemporary times - find a common ground in Malhotra’s canvas.

Mixing of forms occurs through the deployment of transparency in Saruha Kilaru’s non-figurative  prints on a variety of  surfaces such as glass, ceramics, fabrics, sequins and paper. Kilaru carries forward the aesthetics of watercolour renderings in print, wherein colour-forms get defined by material textures. Her works invite us to enjoy the shapes that liquids take in resisting external forces, in turn acting like a stretched elastic membrane themselves due to the cohesive forces between fluid particles. The glimmering surfaces of Kilaru’s prints attract the viewer's attention to the constant slippage between light and colour, animating surface tension as impressionistic work of art itself. 

Mahima Kapoor’s prints allude to magnified images of environmental contamination as seen under a microscope. Strains of entropic bodies - those that appear foreign to each other - coexist within a single frame in her artworks. Her series ‘A Place of Oasis’ seems to be a snapshot of polluted wasteland that holds organic and inorganic matter decaying together, making us consider discordant colours and temporalities in simultaneity. In making the viewer stare at these, Kapoor discomforts the onlooker while surfacing the unwelcome chemistry of decomposition. She thus charts a map of pollution at different scales, inducing an affectual response to the chemical, biological and allergenic processes that are byproducts of human action.

Avni Bansal orchestrates the coming together of shapes into indigenous mythical patterns in her ‘Phallic Series’. Celebrating the unison of male and female sexes in her bilaterally symmetric block printed compositions, Bansal depicts sexual interplay with splendour and adornment. Bansal seems to expand the repertoire of ancient tantric symbols in her monochromatic crimson red prints that tell a tale of biological transformation and spiritual transcendence. In these compact prints, one observes a grammar of shape fractals that hold the energy of life in an androgynous balance. As one looks at her other prints, the orientalist gaze begins to dissolve into a more rational one, reminding the imaging of the world in print by naturalists and botanists when these very mythical forms begin to appear as cellular and scientific. 

The relationship between the self and the world is further explored in the prints of Shivangi Ladha. Through an iterative process of printmaking, Ladha overlaps multiple states of being, within which a female body realises its existence within the world. Rigorously repeated sleepacts soon transport the viewer into a dreamlike space of the subconscious, evoked in the graded application of colour on or off the individually impressed bodies. Should her works ‘LightWeaver’ or ‘Rise I’ be mounted vertically, they shall begin to index the performative embodiment of her print practice itself. Ladha’s prints demonstrate the everyday rhythms through which one reconciles the inner self with the external reality. The viewer is invited to participate in the process of collective awakening in Ladha’s artworks - one that shall truly allow us to make the world one’s home.  

Jaimini Jariwala explores the question of home through the materiality of fabric that she has been surrounded with since her childhood. The historic port town of Surat, where Jariwala grew up emerged as a major textile industrial hub after independence. By using the cyanotype and stitch on paper, the artist at once brings the warps and wefts of the textile to dialogue with the oceao-mercantile ecology of her place. The figure of the home is held in tension between land and sea, recalling the life of sea-farers along the coast of Surat for whom much life is lived on the sail. The semi solid, skeletal, amphibian homes normalise transient living in a world that itself is on the move. 

The seven artists presented in this unique show have been brought together through the various programmes of the India Printmaker House, which is a platform dedicated to cultivating a vibrant art community united by a passion for printmaking. India Printmaker House (IPMH) believes in bridging cultures and expanding the global dialogue of art. The works presented by the IPMH at the LOPF 2025 have demonstrated a range of ways in which the question of place and belonging surfaces in the thinking and practice of the participating artists. Here, the medium of print begins to reveal the dualism of stabilization and destabilization, also reflective of the nature of lives that the artists who imagine homes within or outside borders constantly traverse, and effectually merge in their works of art. 

***

Rohini Devasher at Bhau Daji Lad