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.

Volumes Exhibition

Volumes

Annual Exhibition, 2022-23 / February 8-11, 2023, 1000-1900 hrs IST 

How much space does architecture occupy? 

To be sure, the question of “how much,”  “space” and “architecture” are hinged around the conception of “volumes” - which one may consider as the fundamental act of composing architecture. The exhibition Volumes interrogates these three dimensions of quantities, enclosures and practice, at once, in different measures by indexing the  key ideas that emerged in the pedagogic experiments at the School of Environment & Architecture (SEA) during 2021-22.  

“How much” opens the question of measure through the drawing of phenomena and experience. ‘Volume’ as a vibrating sonic entity suggests the surpassing of the cartographic length, breadth and height towards the mapping of densities, intensities, closeness, sparseness as much as temporal expansions and contractions. These are some of the first impressions through which we begin to appreciate and assimilate space – those that otherwise remain folded into the pleats of memory. “How much” is a call to consider relativity, relook at standards, and formulate new methods of representing architecture through perceived phenomenon.

Moving beyond the ‘container’ logic of space has been one of the key concerns of spatial pedagogy at SEA. Speaking of ‘volume’ rather than a ‘building’ allows us to dwell upon programmatic mixings, power hierarchies, pressure and temperatures, forces and flows that lend the rhythms, frequencies, remixes and beats of everyday life within our built environment. While these are values that architects inevitably orchestrate through design processes, they seldom surface in architectural discourses. Typological rethinking, genealogical retracings, ontological projections, environmental interconnectedness, technological sensoriums result in new forms of inhabitation through pedagogical experimentations at SEA.

The question of architecture, the identity of the architect, is constantly under transformation. To ask ‘how much space does architecture occupy’ calls for an interrogation of the place of the discipline in our societal consciousness. At SEA, we maintain the relevance of contemporary architectural practice by reconceptualising the objects/tools we produce to engage and intervene into the society. Within the rubric of Noise Fields, the exhibition Volumes lays out alternative voices, the differential decibels through which forms of practicing space may be possibly presenced. The exhibition embraces the inherent reworkings of the post-pandemic modality of architectural engagement within its curatorial strategy. Viewers are invited to straddle between the digital and the physical while immersing into the volume of student work produced during the last year. 

Poster: Long Questions

VAICA 2 - Video Art by Indian Contemporary Artists

VAICA is a public platform that looks closely at artful and critical engagements in video and moving images by Indian contemporary artists. It brings video practitioners of Indian origin from various backgrounds who have found themselves experimenting with the medium. This edition of the VAICA festival, FIELDS OF VISION, brings together 79 artists with 121 video works.

Fields of Vision

Screen spaces define and describe new geographies of inhabitation in contemporary times. ‘Fields of Vision’ presents an array of visual experiments by contemporary video practitioners of Indian origin that expand our imaginative geography through four interpolated fields: art-science, body-desire, real-imagined and hetero-urban. The pluralising of the singular ‘field’ into the multiple ‘fields’ proposes widening of perspectives, multiplying vectors of viewing, and discovering new directions for inhabitation and wandering. 121 videos by 78 artists, distributed into four chapters over four weeks of the VAICA festival will delve closely into charting new coordinates through which videographies rephrase, re-engineer and perhaps puncture our normalised field of vision.


Week 1
Cartographies of Sensation

The first set of videos under ‘Fields of Vision’ attempt to locate the cartographies of sensation – those that attempt to map the coordinates of experience, observation, perception and artistic production. In these mappings, moving images play closely between the dialectics of science and fiction. They become poetries of thought and speculation. Much like the make-up of the cartesian cross-grid, they interweave worlds of science and art – both that relocate the boundaries of awareness of the self and the surroundings. The moving images slow down time, make us pause, repeat and reconsider, or suspend us in limbo towards opening new ways to sense the world. Through such awareness, one may begin to demarcate a space of expanded consciousness.


Week 2
Orbits of Desire

‘Orbits of Desire’ brings together video works that explore subjects of gender, sexuality, relationships and performance that are circumscribed by bodily acts. Body is the medium through which we make memories or perform inner desire. What fragments of time become worthy of preserving, to what extent does one stretch limits of performativity, how do we inhabit memory and what are our limits of retention? These are questions that the videos in this section address. Videos become sites of retention and release and effectively preserve temporal bodies as archives. They allow us to rediscover our desires in orchestrating strategic encounters with time, accumulated into their visual orbits.


Week 3
Peripheries of the Real

This segment puts together video experiments that explore environmental aspects that remain unattended or obviated due to excessive immersion or inadvertent neglect. Such conditions highlight instances of not only parallel reals but also the surreal, hyperreal, para-real or unreal. The digital space today extends our present lives into the netherworld of the virtual. The pandemic inverted humanity’s sense of reality by locking us within our homes or producing the fear of the outside. Absences and presences interchange their roles in our everyday keeping us within the peripheries of the real. The videos here attempt to come to terms with, or even expose us to a sense that field of reality that we encounter seems to be bounded merely by a mythical horizon.


Week 4
Urban Heterotopias

Urban heterotopias make themselves apparent most vividly through videoscapes. These other spaces create their own psycho-geographies within the shared space of the city. The city inevitably is the most charged site for the performance of politics. It is the ground where multiple ideologies dance with each other. What forms of co-habitations and contestations take place within the city? What rhythms do conflicting ideologies produce and how do they negotiate power? The videos in the concluding session closely contemplate upon the urban condition as well as political actions that consistently rework our landscapes of everyday encounters. Can these revelations readdress our equation with the urban space thereby altering our fields of vision?

Curatorial Actions and Outcomes

 

Sourced from:

Jansson, Johan. “The Online Forum as a Digital Space of Curation.” Geoforum 106 (November 1, 2019): 115–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.08.008.