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

 

Bharatesh GD at Fulcrum

 

Ramesh Nithiyendran at Jhaveri Contemporary

still (in parenthesis)

a note on exhibition of works by Prabodh Parikh

Parentheses are punctuation marks invented to denote supplemental, secondary or sidelined information in language and logic. Much of this supplemental information actually contains the “stuff” of life - that we try to make meaning of. Foregrounding these marginal gestures, this exhibition brackets a few sets of visual experiments by Prabodh Parikh crystallizing the inquisitive restlessness of a mind nourished amidst a fertile environment of artists, philosophers, poets, writers and architects over the last five decades. Working with lines and colour, mediums dry and wet, on canvases small and large, the artist generates uneven geographies of the mind within which quiet figures appear gently reposed. One sees the desire to anchor the anxiety of emergent formlessness of the drawn matter by discreet anthropomorphic punctuations that allude them as bodies or movements, made legible to the gestaltic eye. This compulsion to form an image within abstraction demonstrates the struggle to resolve (and yet remain with) the chaos of everyday life. 

The body in these abstractions traverse several states of existence - from elemental to elaborate. While loosely (dis)entangled lines sometimes themselves come together in entropic densities, at other times they sit quietly onto noisy backgrounds. Figures once alone/unattended slowly morph and coalesce into allied bodies, at other times, their communality awaits sublimation within the canvas. Through these  subtle distinctions and dissolutions, they invite the viewer into subtle acts of meditation. The drawings then are quiet interruptions, still in parentheses, that must be accommodated amid the rhythmic  choreography of a routined experience. These are conscious and subconscious states of being that map the  journey of the individual to belong to the community, and return back only to become an individual. What shapes does such travel morph us into?

The placement of a parenthesis can significantly alter the meaning of a proposition, revealing how peripheral thought comes to silently shape the centre. Parentheses hold implications, intonations, inflections, and the excesses of meaning without which the primary content is susceptible to lose its context. We often bracket aspects that are integral to life yet remain unspoken, treating them as provisional - information  that is essential but suspended. Having moved from doodles on the margins to drawings on canvases, the works in this exhibition suggest what is ostensibly marginal may be constitutive, and that meaning resides as much in the bracketed aside as in the main text. They preserve inner ideas as addenda, safeguarding what cannot be fully absorbed into the linear flow of literature or life. To engage with such subtleties requires not only seeing them with the inner eye, but learning to remain with them: the challenge is to be there, still.

Tyeb Mehta's retrospective at Mumbai Art Fair 2025