Capturing Slowness
In Mumbai’s frantic pace, women carve brief stillnesses in local train ladies’ coaches. Diya Joseph sketches these fleeting moments of rest across two cities, two rhythms.
Published 30 December 2025
This has finished
- On view
- 12 December 2025 – 31 March 2026
- Times
- 10AM to 6PM (Mon to Sunday) Till March 31st, 2026
- Part of
- Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025–26
Where
Vallabhdas Kanji Limited (VKL Warehouse)
Event venue · no 6/951, Bazaar Road, Mattancherry
You’ve just missed it — take it home anyway
The 2025–26 Biennale ended on 31 March 2026. The next is expected around December 2027. We made a book of all 72 exhibits, venue by venue, with the photographs — 76 pages, 9 MB.
In a city that is unapologetically fast-paced, slowness becomes a paradox. Diya Joseph finds it in the ladies’ coach of Mumbai local trains—brief stillnesses carved from chaos.
Artist
Diya Joseph (IIT Roorkee, Uttarakhand)
Medium
Watercolour on Paper
About
Diya Joseph’s work captures women in moments of rest and transit through her sketches. They are an archive of ordinary pauses in public spaces.
In Mumbai, a fast city, she travels in the ladies’ coach of dheemi (slow) local trains, where slowness becomes a paradox. She watches the brief moments of rest women take between different kinds of work. These become her own pause, and she sketches gestures that change even as she watches them.
In Roorkee, Uttarakhand where Diya is studying, she finds a different rhythm altogether, one where slowness belongs naturally to the place itself. Pauses are easily visible there: in the way people walk, in unhurried routines, in quiet moments spent contemplating at the Ganga Canal. She records these fleeting impressions with immediacy, across geographies.
Her work maps the aspects of slowness and moments of rest and traces how slowness appears, shifts, and settles in places moving at different speeds.
Two cities. Two speeds. One quiet attention to the pauses we almost miss.