What Absence Carries: Memory, Grief & Body at Biennale Kochi

Some things cannot be spoken. They can only be stitched, drawn, or felt through the body's quiet knowing.

Artists

Ananya Gautam (National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad), Annanya Dhanda (MSU, Baroda), Jyotismriti Bordoloi (MSU, Baroda)

Medium

Prints on fabric, video, fabric soft sculptures, fibre, mixed media drawings on Nepali paper

Venue

Vallabhdas Kanji Limited (VKL) Warehouse

Landmark: Opposite Canara Bank, Near Mattancherry Government Hospital

Maps >

Timings

10AM to 6PM (Monday to Sunday)

Till March 31st, 2026

About

What absence carries traces the quiet terrain where memory, grief, and body entwine. Through soft sculptures, fluid drawings, tender photographs, and stitched traces, the work attends to forms that hover between presence and disappearance. The pieces gather gestures and stains that echo cellular growths, matrilineal rhythms, and the residues the body carries without speech.

Working intuitively, the sculptures, drawings, photographs, and moving body register what lingers after rupture: textures of care, pressure, hesitation, and loss. The stitched scars, layered pages, and residual images ask how memory persists through matter and whether something can be considered absent if it continues to live through touch, form, and feeling.

Some things cannot be spoken. They can only be stitched, drawn, or felt through the body's quiet knowing.

*What absence carries* is a collaborative installation by three young artists—Ananya Gautam, Annanya Dhanda, and Jyotismriti Bordoloi—that traces the quiet terrain where memory, grief, and body entwine.

Through soft sculptures in fabric and fibre, fluid drawings on Nepali paper, tender photographs, and stitched traces, this work attends to forms that hover between presence and disappearance. Emerging from a subconscious current that precedes language, the pieces gather gestures and stains that echo cellular growths, matrilineal rhythms, and residues the body carries without speech.

Each form reveals how value, grief, and inherited memory are tethered to roles and absences that remain unfulfilled, withheld, or imposed. The work moves between stillness and motion, expanding into elliptical pathways that trace the imperfect orbits of growth, inheritance, and becoming.

The stitched scars, layered pages, and residual images pose a question that lingers: can something be considered absent if it continues to live through touch, form, and feeling?

Kochi Biennale 2025

The Students' Biennale, running alongside the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, has always been a space where tomorrow's artistic giants take their first bold leaps.

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