The Ultimate Guide to Pepper House

A steel sundial stands in the courtyard of Pepper House, angled at exactly 32 degrees north, the latitude of Palestine. Walk around it and you see the Kochi waterfront reflected in its mirror panels. Two geographies meet at this angle.

Ghost clothes play stringed instruments. A typewriter types dead names on loop. At Pepper House, five artists work across painting, installation, sound, video and sculpture. Each room shows distinct work. The show makes this 16th-century spice warehouse one of the most layered venues at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

If you are short on time, Pepper House is the venue you should not skip. Start in the courtyard and work your way inward. Here is what you will find.

Utsa Hazarika, where protest meets astronomy

New York-based artist Utsa Hazarika has the most ambitious spread at Pepper House. Her work fills the courtyard, the gallery rooms and an adjacent wall. The thread connecting all of it is the Jantar Mantar observatory in Delhi.

Builders raised Jantar Mantar in the 1700s as a set of massive instruments for reading the sky. Over the past century, it became India’s most famous protest site. Hazarika treats these two identities as inseparable.

Yantra (32°N/Horizon), the courtyard sculpture

The outdoor sculpture “Yantra (32°N/Horizon)” (2025) has the shape of the Samrat Yantra, the giant sundial at Jantar Mantar. Hazarika angled the gnomon at 32 degrees north, the latitude of Palestine. Mirror panels in the steel structure reflect the horizon line of Kochi. You can climb on it or sit on it. You can walk through it too.

The sculpture first appeared at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. The Kochi version invites direct physical contact. This is interactive political art done well.

Arc/Anchor, inside the gallery

Step inside and you find “Arc/Anchor” (2025), a curved band of polished steel that cuts through the room. It takes the shape of the measuring scale of the Samrat Yantra. The original scale marks hours and minutes. This one has holes in the shape of the names of political prisoners in India, written in morse code. Spotlights travel along the surface, mimicking sunlight.

When the beams meet, they light the iridescent lines of the anchor piece. To decode the names, you must look closely and know morse. The work asks you to take part in an act of reading that governments have tried to hide.

Bloom (10°N/28°N), the growing jasmine

“Bloom (10°N/28°N)” (2021-ongoing) is a glass case holding two raat ki rani (night-blooming jasmine) plants. The original version was enclosed. This time, the case has no top. Over the Biennale’s 110 days, the jasmine will grow past the container’s boundaries. The pedestal is angled at 10 degrees (Kochi’s latitude) and the plexiglass at 28.7 degrees (Delhi’s latitude, matching the Samrat Yantra).

Borders cannot stop the scent of jasmine, Hazarika points out. It is a small, stubborn metaphor for what nation-states cannot contain.

We Cannot Let Go of This Earth

On an adjacent wall, the video “We Cannot Let Go of This Earth” (2025) documents indigenous communities in Eastern India defending their sacred lands from mining. The subtitles appear separately on a panel beside the screen, not overlaid on the footage. This is a deliberate choice to preserve the community’s own linguistic world within the film.

India, 1492

“India, 1492” (2021-ongoing) is a 12-minute video installation on accordion-style archival display. It brings together colonial maps of India drawn by European authorities and medieval European maps that placed the Garden of Eden in India. Columbus carried a map influenced by these Eden-locating charts when he sailed west and accidentally reached the Americas. The work traces how the search for paradise shaped colonial expansion in both directions.

Moonis Ahmad Shah, what disappearance sounds like

Moonis Ahmad Shah (b. 1992, Kashmir) works across installation, video, sound, sculpture and programming. His room at Pepper House is one of the most unsettling spaces in the Biennale.

The centrepiece is “Almost Entirely Sisyphus” (2021). The room holds a typewriter without paper. It types the names of Kashmiri people who disappeared during different periods of colonial and military control. Without paper, it produces only sound and faint marks on the platen. It types the names in an infinite loop.

The typewriter, a bureaucratic tool designed for documentation, becomes an instrument of haunting.

Next to it, “All That You Make Disappear in my Fret is but Immortal” (2023-ongoing) presents assembled figures made from the debris of explosions and demolitions in Kashmir. Projectile fragments and rubble form mutant shapes that refuse the linear timeline of siege and occupation.

“Accidentally Miraculous Everyday from That Heaven” (2021) looks at the 2019 communications blackout in Kashmir after the abrogation of Article 370. Images project onto a cube suspended in the room. They stitch together, then fragment and break up, mimicking the fractured experience of time under internet shutdowns.

And then there is “Dilli ke paani se Kashmiri paani banane ki machine” (2025). The title translates roughly to “a machine for making Kashmiri water from Delhi water.” It is an absurd apparatus that tries to move water between glasses while leaking and spilling everywhere. The work treats the colonial desire to control landscapes with dark humour. The leaks and spills are the idea.

Nityan Unnikrishnan, paintings that refuse a focal point

Nityan Unnikrishnan trained in ceramics at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and made pots for a decade before turning to painting. He now works in acrylic on canvas, building dense compositions crammed with figures, furniture and micro-stories that bleed into one another.

His series “All of Us” (2025) consists of four large paintings hung so they flow into each other. No part of any painting is the focus. Your eye drifts across human bodies and gestures that overlap but never quite settle. The wall text says they show “the lexicons of existence in landscapes of devastation.” The paintings are crowded scenes of ordinary life where something has gone wrong, but nobody has stopped to notice.

Look for these works too. “Hymns For The Drowning” (2025) is a six-panel painting that mixes text with images of crumbling urban scenes and carnivalesque crowds. “Sing You To Sleep” (2025) shows a domestic bedroom where violence presses against the walls and windows while a child sleeps on a cot. The scale shifts between the intimate and the apocalyptic without warning.

Unnikrishnan’s gallery at Chatterjee & Lal in Mumbai has represented him for over a decade. A recent Aspinwall House guide on catsofkochi.com covers the other main venue. Pair both for a complete Fort Kochi Biennale circuit.

Jompet Kuswidananto, ghost clothes that play music

Indonesian artist Jompet Kuswidananto has spent years working with Teater Garasi, a contemporary theatre group. His installations blend light, sound, found objects, costumes and stage design. At Pepper House, he presents “Ghost Ballad” (2025).

The installation is a crowd of ghost figures made from used everyday clothing and shoes collected from people in Kochi and Yogyakarta. Small portable automated instruments hang on the bodiless forms. They play stringed music on their own. A soundscape fills the room with layered recordings of Fado, Keroncong and other musical forms.

Fado songs are Portuguese melancholic sea songs still sung in Goa and Kerala. Keroncong is Javanese music brought by Portuguese sailors in the 16th century. The connection between Kerala and Indonesia runs through Portuguese colonialism. Both coastlines absorbed and changed Portuguese musical traditions. Kuswidananto traces how the experience of colonial trauma has been preserved through these songs.

The voices of Goan singer Nadia Rebelo and Indonesian singer Giwang Topo anchor the soundscape. If you visited Devassy Jose & Sons in Mattancherry, you will recognise a recurring Biennale theme. Colonial trade routes shaped culture. “Ghost Ballad” makes that theme audible.

Minam Apang, charcoal forests and a river’s score

Goa-based artist Minam Apang works primarily with charcoal on cloth. Her practice draws from the indigenous folklore and oral traditions of her home region in northeast India.

At Pepper House, she shows “Spectre of War: Big Thief” (2025), a two-part installation. The first part consists of large charcoal drawings on cloth. The drawings show military figures entering a forest. These evolved from an earlier series, “War on War” (2022), which was based on transparency sheets sourced from war propaganda comics. Translated into charcoal, the forest takes on an eerie energy.

The forms look wispy and spectral, as if the land moves and pushes back. This is not abstract. In Apang’s home region, one of India’s largest proposed dams threatens to submerge the Siang Gorge, the homeland of the Adi people. The Siang River is sacred to the Adi community. Its name means “heart of all rivers” in the Adi language.

The proposed dam would destroy flora, fauna, river systems and generations of cultural history.

The second part, “Ma” (2025), is an abstract drawing score. The title refers both to “mother” (the Siang is sometimes called Siang Anne) and to the Japanese concept of “ma.” “Ma” is the charged interval or pause that gives form to what surrounds it. “Ma” works as a graphic score for a sound piece.

The sound piece builds from two layers. One layer is an old Adi song called “Yatem,” where a lead voice is answered by a chorus. The other layer is field recordings made during a residency at the Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation in Leh.