The quiet beneath the rubble
Nights in a crumbling hostel, weak staircases, constant vigilance—Pratik Khurkutiya’s sculptures and paintings trace how fear embeds itself in the body long after we’ve left dangerous spaces.
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
Free
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.
How much farther before I can leave this place behind? Pratik Khurkutiya traces the lingering terrain of fear, embedded in the body long after escape.
Artist
Pratik Khurkutiya (MSU, Baroda)
Medium
Acrylic on Canvas, Mixed Media on Canvas, Letterpress Ink on Canvas, Collograph Print, Fevicol and ink on OHP sheet, Ink on paper, Etching (aquatint), scrap metal and copper wires on wooden boards
About
The quiet beneath the rubble expands internal imagery into physical space. Painted and printed lines slip past usual boundaries, taking sculptural form. Wire structures emerge from nights spent in a government hostel—weak staircases, cracked plaster, an ever-shifting building producing constant bodily vigilance.
Each ascent carried intrusive questions: what if the rubble falls? What if the stairs give way? These impressions settled into memory before returning as images suspended between enclosure and exposure.
The resulting forms evoke claustrophobia—inhabiting spaces one step from collapse. Moving away from flat representation becomes quiet refusal, letting experience escape the limits of what can be pictured.
