Photography by Rakesh Anand and Biju Ibrahim
Dates: 13 December 2025 – 31 March 2026
Venue:
Kashi Hallegua House
Synagogue Road, Jew Town, Mattancherry
Kochi, Kerala 682002
Timings: Monday-Sunday, 10:30 AM – 7 PM
Ishara Art Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of the Ishara House in Kochi with its inaugural exhibition, Amphibian Aesthetics. Located within the historic Kashi Hallegua House and designed by the artists and scholars of the Aazhi Archives, the Ishara House is conceived as a dynamic site for contemporary art, research and exchange. Under the artistic direction of Riyas Komu, this new initiative unfolds through a curated exhibition, public programmes and collaborative projects that deepen Ishara’s commitment to cross-cultural dialogue.
Amphibian Aesthetics emerges from the urgencies of precarity in the Anthropocene – climate collapse, displacement, extinction and hyper-capital – where questions of survival and radicality become inseparable from artistic practice. The exhibition unsettles familiar binaries of East/West, tradition/modernity, embracing entangled, rhizomic ways of thinking that refuse fixed hierarchies. The ‘amphibian’ stands as a figure of adaptability and shared vulnerability, moving between land and water, past and future, human and more-than-human worlds. Building on earlier explorations of Kerala’s oceanic histories – of migration, trade and climatic shifts – Amphibian Aesthetics presents these entanglements as sites of both crisis and possibility. In foregrounding water’s agency and multispecies coexistence, the exhibition invites multisited and multimodal ways of imagining collective futures. Here, art becomes not merely a mirror to the world but an amphibious gesture – fluid, resilient and attuned to the fragile ecologies that shape our shared survival.
The exhibition brings together 12 artists and collectives from South Asia, the Gulf and other regions, who play with the emerging precarities of our planet, suggesting multiple modes of being. It explores the aspects of ‘amphibian’ as an artful way of mediating migrations and exile, memory and history, traditions and identities across time and space.
Artist List
Appupen, Rami Farook, Shilpa Gupta, Zahir Mirza, Midhun Mohan, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Shanvin Sixtous, Dima Srouji, Ratheesh T., Kabir Project, White Balance and City As A Spaceship (CAAS)
Works in the exhibition have been loaned from Lathika N. Padmanabhan, Shilpa Gupta’s work has been supported and facilitated by neugerriemschneider, and Dima Srouji’s artwork production is partially supported by Lawrie Shabibi.
The Ishara House is supported by Alserkal Avenue, in association with Galleria Continua. Project Partners include Aazhi Archives and URU Art Harbour, and media partners include Canvas Magazine and TAKE On Art.
