A steel sundial stands in the courtyard of Pepper House, angled at exactly 32 degrees north. That's the latitude of Palestine. Here's what's inside Pepper House at the Kochi Biennale
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.
