The Paradesi Synagogue: 450 Years of Spice, Prayer, and Hand-Painted Tiles in Mattancherry
Chinese tiles, Ethiopian rugs, a Malayalam clock tower. What if I told you that Kochi's oldest synagogue is a world in one room?
Group 7+1 Collective presents "Wor(l)d Building Exercise" at Students’ Biennale Kochi 2024. This interactive installation invites visitors to build metaphorical cities with inscribed wooden blocks, highlighting workers and narratives often made invisible by progress.
Pick up a block. Stack it. Build a world.
Sonu P, Abhay Pratap Singh, Surojit Kar, Detsung Daimary, Samarpan Thapa, Pronay Sutradhar, Rohit Sen, Pranto K. Sarkar (Visva-Bharathi University, Rabindra Bharati University, Biswa Bangla Biswabidyalay)
Wooden blocks, video projection, prints
Artshila, Near Parade Ground
This beautiful Kochi Biennale Venue presented by Arthshila is part of their multi-art curations projects across India.
Address: Opposite Parade Ground, Next to entrance of Lily Street
10AM to 6PM (Monday to Sunday)
Till March 31st, 2026
This nine-member collective transforms wooden blocks inscribed with words into an interactive meditation on landscape, power, and progress. Visitors become participants, constructing their own metaphorical cities while questioning who shapes the real ones.
The work foregrounds those often made invisible within development narratives—the workers, the displaced, the overlooked. As you arrange these blocks, you're invited to ask: Who decides what gets built? And who remains unseen?
The Students' Biennale, running alongside the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, has always been a space where tomorrow's artistic giants take their first bold leaps. This year's edition brings together young artists from art schools across India—each with stories that demand to be heard.
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