Inside the Viewing Room at Muziris Contemporary, Mattancherry

I visited Muziris Contemporary a few days ago for their much appreciated main show. Then I find the second room - The Viewing Room.

The Viewing Room sits inside the Mattancherry gallery on AB Salem Road, a short walk from the Paradesi Synagogue. Its is smaller, set gently apart from the main gallery, and it shows you what the gallery is doing next. Some of the artists are part of upcoming exhibitions in Kochi and Mumbai. Others are artists the gallery represents whose work is not currently on the main walls. Six names, six very different styles, all in one small room in Jew Town. Delightful isn't it?

Six artists in the Viewing Room in May, June 2026

Kapil Jangid

Concrete. Metal. Terrazzo. Oxides. These are not the usual materials of a contemporary gallery, and Kapil Jangid uses them on purpose. His practice moves across sculpture, drawing, assemblage, and photography. The subject is what cities are built from and what gets buried under them: migration, architecture, memory, and the political weight of the spaces we live in. His work feels like a building site that has been thinking about itself.

K.G. Babu

K.G. Babu paints jungles you can almost step into.

The Kerala artist grew up in forested, tribal areas, and his canvases show hyper-realistic human figures tangled inside lush foliage, animals, and dragonflies. He works in oil and acrylic, often at mural scale. The work reads as environmental memory: what was here, what is fading, what we carry from it. He has shown in India, Sweden, the United States, and South Korea.

Arieno Kera

Stone is heavy. Paper is fragile. Arieno Kera pairs them on purpose.

The contemporary artist from Nagaland works across painting and installation, retelling Naga folklore and Indigenous knowledge through a process-led, materials-first practice. She graduated from Visva Bharati University, has been an artist-in-residence at Hampi Art Labs, was a fellow of IMMERSE 4.0, and won a 2024 FICA grant. If you want to follow Indian contemporary art coming out of the northeast, her name is one to remember.

Mansoor Mansoori

Mansoor Mansoori paints cities after dark.

His work captures urban scenes lit by streetlamps, neon signs, and the small glow of windows.

Divya Pamnani

Divya Pamnani is a Bombay-based miniature painter and a certified scuba diver, and both worlds show up in her work. Trained in traditional Indian miniature painting, she has spent the last few years building a contemporary visual language out of that legacy. One ongoing series re-imagines ancient Indian games (think pachisi, snakes and ladders, the old dice and board games from temple murals and palm-leaf manuscripts) as new compositions. She paints on wasli paper with stone pigments and gouache.

Kuber Shah

Bombay has the world's second-largest concentration of Art Deco buildings after Miami. Most of them are disappearing. Kuber Shah is a Bombay-based photographer documenting that heritage before it goes, with a particular focus on Art Deco cinemas like Liberty. His photographs go inside the cinema halls and pull out the architectural details (curved fascias, terrazzo floors, geometric grilles, hand-painted signage) that make these buildings worth saving.