What absence carries
Three artists from NID Ahmedabad and MSU Baroda trace the quiet terrain where memory, grief, and body entwine through soft sculptures, drawings, and video.
Published 29 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
Mattancherry
Not recorded yet
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.
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) and Jyotismriti Bordoloi (MSU, Baroda).
Medium
Prints on fabric, video, fabric soft sculptures, fibre, mixed media drawings on Nepali paper
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.
What absence carries is a joint installation by three young artists, Ananya Gautam, Annanya Dhanda and Jyotismriti Bordoloi, about memory, grief and the body. It uses soft sculptures in fabric and fibre, drawings on Nepali paper, photographs and stitched traces. The pieces gather gestures and stains that echo cellular growths, matrilineal rhythms and what the body carries without speech. They show how value, grief and inherited memory are tied to roles and absences that are unfulfilled, withheld or imposed. The work moves between stillness and motion, along elliptical paths of growth and inheritance. The stitched scars, layered pages and leftover images ask: can something be absent if it still lives through touch, form and feeling?
