I am Alleppey, food correspondent and café critic for Cats of Kochi, named after the picturesque Kerala town where my journey began.
A dot matrix printer screeches in the corner of a Mattancherry warehouse. Slowly, it spits out a long scroll of paper — observations, thoughts, fragments of conversation between artists who may never meet in person.
![Taala Tamate at Kochi Biennale: A Drum That Was Silenced Now Takes Centre Stage [Feb 15]](/content/images/size/w320/format/webp/2026/02/drum-svgrepo-com.svg)
A marginalized drum reclaims the stage. Taala Tamate brings rhythm, resistance, and joy to Aspinwall House in Fort kochi.
An old refrigerator hums in a dark room. Inside its freezer, frozen fish and fungi slowly decay behind glass. Walk through every room of Aspinwall House at the Kochi Biennale. Here's what you'll see
Aleppey's latest expedition — into the heart of Fort Kochi’s purrfound cultural relic: the Paradesi Synagogue.
Join Blaise Joseph and the ABC Art Room Team for rhythm activities and non-competitive games—a full-day workshop exploring play, movement, and collaborative creativity without winners or losers.
Drop in to the ABC Art Room for a day of creative exploration—work with natural materials, experiment freely, and make art in a non-competitive, fearless space open to all ages.
Experimental sound, noise, and multichannel sonic practices return to Mattancherry. Wetspace Noise Drips 4.0 brings DIY electronics, custom synthesizers, and cross-disciplinary performance across three days at Forplay Society.
The rug extends a muted invitation, asking the body to settle within its folds. Monika traces the quiet turbulence of everyday life—frictions, doubts, and the comforting panic of solitude.
The Peta (turban) and Mancha (rope bed)—two objects that carry a farmer's life. When the turban is placed on the bed, it signifies rest, grueling work completed, earned repose.
Phule-Ambedkarite sculpture, Mumbai housing installations, Manchester cloth histories—three artists uncover Maharashtra's intertwined histories of labour, community, and resistance.
Pork fat melts, echoing jhum traditions. Fabric clouds release crystal bead rain—tears. Two Arunachal Pradesh artists explore how time erodes memory and meaning, how relief and pain blend.
Touch grains. Smell straw. Witness cooking. Six Odisha artists reconstruct rural hearths, asking: what seeds of culture do we carry forward? A living archive of food sovereignty and ecological wisdom.
Dried leaves become cockroaches. Fish thorns transform into Venus flytraps. Sharan B works with overlooked materials to explore life, death, memory, and the beauty hidden in ordinary things.
The Jogappas of Northwest Karnataka—a transgender community devoted to Renuka Yellama—come alive in Banashree Vagga's acrylic paintings celebrating their music, dance, and miracles.
A National Highway cuts through Tripura's agrarian landscape. Priti Das and Bipasha Debnath document the dust, demolition, and topsy-turvy lives of Jirania's residents caught in years of transformation.
A Kashmiri fish swims through myth and militarization. Salman Khursheed Lone's animation intertwines folklore, sacred ponds, concertina wires, and the endurance of living under occupation.
Driftwood and palm leaf figures at windows, facing the sea—Raj Mahanand explores how identity is never fixed, always shifting between crowds, expectations, and desires.
Between despair and renewal: a charcoal self-portrait dissolving in loneliness, landscape paintings shifting toward light. Rakesh Y.M. holds both truths—isolation and resilience.
Time leaves traces in subtle ways—aging, dissolving, eroding. Krishna Murthy P S works with seeds, spines, and soil to explore cycles of growth, dissolution, and return.
Play with the dolls. Move them around. Three Kerala artists transform intimate spaces into sites of queer inquiry—fabric tents of chosen family, playgrounds beyond the binary, and self as subject.
Vivid palette, surreal dreamscapes, queer lovers in everyday moments—Shakibul Islam etches the portrait of the queer family into contemporary Indian life's visual language.
Termite traces, sawdust figures, cow dung and plastic—four artists gather what is often discarded, assembling a slow archive of impermanence that refuses disappearance.
Five artists from Santiniketan explore how 'shift' pushes all things into existence—the human desire to shape land, the resistance faced, and the traditions born of negotiation.
Through spectral architecture of transparent layers and shifting shadows, Honey Thomas makes visible the unseen nature of domestic life—the labour, presence, and time embedded in home.
