Kabir Project (est. 2002) was initiated by Shabnam Virmani, a filmmaker, writer, and artist based in Bangalore, while at the Srishti Institute in Bangalore. Virmani’s work traces the philosophical and social resonances of Bhakti, Sufi, and Baul poetry, and how they persist through oral traditions, music, and community practice. Over two decades, the Kabir Project has generated documentary films, books, rural yatras, urban festivals, and the web archive ‘Ajab Shahar’, cultivating spaces where spiritual and political domains meet. At its heart is the ‘taana-baana’, the living social weave connecting singers, scholars, activists, students, and audiences. Supported today by the Shabad Dhun Foundation, Virmani and her team continue to sustain these networks, using song and dialogue to probe identity, division, and inner awakening.
This installation is an immersive dive into ‘Ajab Shahar’, a web archive of oral mystic song traditions. It draws inspiration from the iconic phrase ‘akath katha’ (the untellable tale) coined by the 15th century poet, Kabir. He and other mystics would often insist on an indescribable, ephemeral truth accessed only in the moment and lost to language afterwards. And yet, they sought to say the unsayable. Their words, like rivers flowing across space and time, have reached into our present and continue to move us. Exploring this play between the ‘akath’ (the unsayable) and the ‘katha’ (the said), the installation brings the viewer into an encounter with singers, scholars and village elders holding the threads of potent mystic ideas on the Ajab Shahar archive, now 23 years in the making. This work is an invitation to be personally addressed, here and now, by a ceaselessly evolving 600-years old wisdom tradition.
Image: Kabir Project, Akath Katha: the Untellable Tale (2025). Exhibition conceived by Anisha Baid, Smriti Chanchani and Shabnam Virmani. Multimedia installation, dimensions variable. Installation view of Amphibian Aesthetics at the Ishara House, Kochi, Kerala, 2025-26. Photography by Anuj Daga
