for now (Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 6th Edition) — A Curatorial Overview by Salman B Baba

[et_pb_heading title="for now" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" title_font="||||||||" title_text_align="center" title_font_size="45px" custom_margin="||5px|||" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_heading][et_pb_heading title="Curator's Note" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" title_font="Montserrat|300||on|||||" title_text_align="center" title_text_color="#000000" title_font_size="20px" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_heading]

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]pace functions not merely as a backdrop for narrative events but as a dynamic system that recreates emotional and temporal experience. In what ways can the space be understood as a narrative agent rather than a mute container for artistic expressions, and how does this conceptualization allow us to understand the layered temporalities embodied in works of art?

The exhibition explores these questions by foregrounding the Western Himalayan atlas of emotions - Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Ladakh, and Jammu & Kashmir- and gathers stories that reflect on what it means to live, see, feel, and create within its spatial folds, shaped by layered memories, fragile eco-systems, and the precarious horizons of its mountain ranges. The glimpses into the subtle intimacies of everyday life are explored through shifting axes of social, political, and ecological life, offering viewers textures of the space.

At an experiential pace, the students reflect upon the lived realities, everyday rituals, and embodied practices, documenting space as speculation, perception, and interpretation. for now holds a quiet insistence on the provisional, the partial, and the present. It points to the temporary that refuses closure and is contingent, to an ongoing-ness that carries the weight of the passing instant. It does not seek to fix meanings or declare certainties. It stays with what is passing, with what can still be felt. It invites us to see the present as fragile and to recognize that presence itself may shift.

The drawings of women’s experiences from Bombay Local to the riverbanks of Roorkee, we encounter questions of femininity, mobility, and labour. A performance embodies ‘the eye’ that reverses the ethnographic gaze as objects of enquiry. A chair made from residual planks in front of a suspended window pane from a demolished house becomes a site of translation, charged with tension.

The fish swims both as myth and metaphor, an indigo sculpture, Thangka paintings and an assemblage of papier-mâché horns suspended over the amorphous sculptures carved out of clay blocks trace the links between shifting temporality, changing ecologies and historical narratives: each work reveals how conflict in these terrains folds into the quotidian and stage urgencies of ecology, displacement, and visibility. Each artist brings forth a way of knowing that locally grounds their practice in what is lived, not imagined from afar.

[et_pb_blurb title="Sacred Scapes" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" header_level="h1" header_font="Alata|--et_global_body_font_weight||on|||||" header_text_align="center" header_font_size="40px" header_letter_spacing="3px" header_line_height="1.6em" body_font="Montserrat|500|||||||" body_text_align="center" body_text_color="#000000" body_font_size="15px" body_line_height="1.5em" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

Urgain Zawa
Medium: Installation
Dimensions: Variable
College: Maharaja Sayajirao University Baroda

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[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n ‘Sacred Scapes,’ Urgain Zawa looks critically at brick as a material and its relationship with the idea of home. He traces this connection through architecture, ecology, culture, and landscape. Bricks form the base of expansive urbanisation and the shift towards it, yet in this work, the artist overturns this association into a symbol of frail and fragile landscapes. He dissects the contemporary tendency to link home with the idea of comfort and care architecturally where brick is the primary construction material. He then posits it against the understanding of fragile ecosystems as home in local communities, and the impact of brick as a material on it.

Coming from Ladakh, a place known for its sustainable practices and deep rooted ecological wisdom, this work addresses the fact that the region is facing the brunt of the climate crisis. Brick, according to the Urgain, carries ‘the weight of this loss and transition.’ The unprecedented transformations are causing increasing environmental disasters, cultural shifts, and unexpected greenery in a white desert by melting glaciers.

The chiseled marks on the brick blocks represent undulating contours of Ladakh. These markings become an allegory for the growing anthropocentrism shaping the region. The suspended paper-mache horns recall a remembered ritual to ward off evil and disasters from one’s home and brings the work to a poignant close—linking past practices, present anxieties, and an uncertain ecological future with subtle, resonant clarity.

[et_pb_image src="https://inverse.azan-n.com/content/images/2026/04/for-now-kmb-01.jpg" title_text="For-Now-KMB-01" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_image] [et_pb_image src="https://inverse.azan-n.com/content/images/2026/04/for-now-kmb-02-scaled.jpg" title_text="For-Now-KMB-02" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_image]  [et_pb_gallery gallery_ids="21018,21019,21020,21022,21025,21026,21027" posts_number="12" show_title_and_caption="off" zoom_icon_color="RGBA(255,255,255,0)" hover_overlay_color="rgba(224,43,32,0.15)" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" custom_margin="0px||0px||true|false" custom_padding="0px||0px||false|false" border_color_all_image="#000000" box_shadow_style_image="preset2" box_shadow_blur_image="20px" box_shadow_spread_image="-10px" box_shadow_color_image="#000000" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_gallery]   [et_pb_blurb title="Untitled" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" header_level="h1" header_font="Alata|--et_global_body_font_weight||on|||||" header_text_align="center" header_font_size="40px" header_letter_spacing="3px" header_line_height="1.6em" body_font="Montserrat|500|||||||" body_text_align="center" body_text_color="#000000" body_font_size="15px" body_line_height="1.5em" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

Diya Joseph
Medium: Watercolor on Paper
Dimensions: Variable
College: IIT Roorkee

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[dropcap]D[/dropcap]iya Joseph’s work captures women in moments of rest and transit through her sketches. They are an archive of ordinary pauses in public spaces. In Mumbai, a city that is unapologetically fast-paced, travelling in the ladies’ coach of dheemi (slow) local trains, slowness becomes a paradox. She examines this by observing brief stillnesses that surface against the city’s relentless movement– the small moments of rest that women carve between different forms of labour becomes her own pause, prompting her to sketch gestures that shift even as she watches them.

In Roorkee, Uttarakhand where Diya is studying, she finds a different rhythm altogether, one where slowness belongs naturally to the place itself. Pauses are easily visible there: in the way people walk, in unhurried routines, in quiet moments spent contemplating at the Ganga Canal. She records these fleeting impressions with immediacy, across geographies. Her work maps the aspects of slowness and moments of rest and traces how women negotiate time differently, revealing how slowness appears, shifts, and settles in places moving at different speeds.

[et_pb_image src="https://inverse.azan-n.com/content/images/2026/04/for-now-kmb-03-scaled.jpg" title_text="For-Now-KMB-03" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_image]  [et_pb_gallery gallery_ids="21035,21033,21032,21034" posts_number="12" orientation="portrait" show_title_and_caption="off" zoom_icon_color="RGBA(255,255,255,0)" hover_overlay_color="rgba(224,43,32,0.15)" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" custom_margin="0px||0px||true|false" custom_padding="0px||0px||false|false" border_color_all_image="#000000" box_shadow_style_image="preset2" box_shadow_blur_image="20px" box_shadow_spread_image="-10px" box_shadow_color_image="#000000" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_gallery]   [et_pb_blurb title="Is it sunset in the Himalayas? " _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" header_level="h1" header_font="Alata|--et_global_body_font_weight||on|||||" header_text_align="center" header_font_size="40px" header_letter_spacing="3px" header_line_height="1.6em" body_font="Montserrat|500|||||||" body_text_align="center" body_text_color="#000000" body_font_size="15px" body_line_height="1.5em" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

Kundan Gyatso
Medium: Terracota
Dimensions: 3.4 ft x 1 ft x 2 ft
College: Govt College of Arts, Chandigarh

[/et_pb_blurb][dropcap]‘I[/dropcap]s it sunset in Himalayas?’ draws from the Indigenous knowledge and lived beliefs of the Ladakhi people. Its amorphous form echoes the visual language of traditional Thangkas, carrying memory through shape rather than image. The rising extensions gesture toward impermanence and the fleeting nature of life through swirling clouds. The deep blue surface holds the cold Himalayan sky: vast, still, and unbounded. The textures of the work borrow from the region’s rugged terrain which is wind-worn, enduring, and resilient. The central disc as a frozen moment poses a serious question that the region is facing currently: whether it is enlightenment’s dawning and transition towards clarity or fading light towards endless night.  [et_pb_image src="https://inverse.azan-n.com/content/images/2026/04/kundan-for-now-kmb-img_6539-scaled.webp" title_text="Kundan-For-Now-KMB-IMG_6539" align="center" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_image]  [et_pb_gallery gallery_ids="21038,21159,21160,21036" orientation="portrait" show_title_and_caption="off" zoom_icon_color="RGBA(255,255,255,0)" hover_overlay_color="rgba(224,43,32,0.15)" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" module_alignment="center" custom_margin="0px||0px||true|false" custom_padding="0px||0px||false|false" border_color_all_image="#000000" box_shadow_style_image="preset2" box_shadow_blur_image="20px" box_shadow_spread_image="-10px" box_shadow_color_image="#000000" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_gallery]   [et_pb_blurb title="Untitled" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" header_level="h1" header_font="Alata|--et_global_body_font_weight||on|||||" header_text_align="center" header_font_size="40px" header_letter_spacing="3px" header_line_height="1.6em" body_font="Montserrat|500|||||||" body_text_align="center" body_text_color="#000000" body_font_size="15px" body_line_height="1.5em" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

Yangchen Dolker
Medium: Emulsion on Cotton
Dimensions: 18 in x 22 in
College: Govt College of Arts, Chandigarh

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[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]angchen Dolker’s work arrives from the traditional lineage of Thangka. Though the form of Thankga has a sacred and strict grammar often inseparable from the spiritual and meditative realm, her vision is not confined: she draws inspiration from local language and traditions and she, at times, brings a contemporary touch to her work.

Yangchen presents the images of female deities, Dolkar (White Tara) and Jamyang (Manjushree). Her practise is reflective of her rootedness in her traditions and confronts the fast paced urbanisation that is unsettling the region. Her perseverance becomes a quiet resistance by choosing an artform that takes time and demands slowness.

[et_pb_image src="https://inverse.azan-n.com/content/images/2026/04/dolker-img_20251227_175359-scaled-jpeg.jpg" title_text="Oplus_0" align="center" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" custom_margin="||3px|||" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_image] [et_pb_image src="https://inverse.azan-n.com/content/images/2026/04/dolker-img_20251227_175416-scaled-jpeg.jpg" title_text="Oplus_131072" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_image]  [et_pb_gallery gallery_ids="21039,21036" posts_number="12" orientation="portrait" show_title_and_caption="off" zoom_icon_color="RGBA(255,255,255,0)" hover_overlay_color="rgba(224,43,32,0.15)" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" custom_margin="0px||0px||true|false" custom_padding="0px||0px||false|false" border_color_all_image="#000000" box_shadow_style_image="preset2" box_shadow_blur_image="20px" box_shadow_spread_image="-10px" box_shadow_color_image="#000000" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_gallery]   [et_pb_blurb title="Through their eyes" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" header_level="h1" header_font="Alata|--et_global_body_font_weight||on|||||" header_text_align="center" header_font_size="40px" header_letter_spacing="3px" header_line_height="1.6em" body_font="Montserrat|500|||||||" body_text_align="center" body_text_color="#000000" body_font_size="15px" body_line_height="1.5em" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

Vikas Kumar
Medium: Performance Prints and Video
Dimensions: Accordion: 144 in x14 in X 21 in
College: JLN Govt. College of Art, Shimla

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[dropcap]‘T[/dropcap]hrough their eyes’ is a performance presented through video, accordion book, and graphic prints. Through imagery and performative gestures Vikas Kumar examines how the gaze influences behaviour and self-perception. Being watched creates a continuous negotiation between what we are, who we want to be, and how we are seen. The action of, literally, embodying the eye to return the gaze becomes a recurring motif across the various manifestations of this work. While it confronts the viewer, it also reveals the vulnerabilities of the artist. It exposes patterns of observation, judgement, and self-perception.

Vikas’s project invites viewers to cultivate an active gaze. His experiences of living in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, which was the summer capital for British rule in India, has made him critical of the colonial gaze and its residues on local people and the landscape.

[et_pb_image src="https://inverse.azan-n.com/content/images/2026/04/for-now-kmb-05-scaled.jpg" title_text="For-Now-KMB-05" align="center" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_image]  [et_pb_gallery gallery_ids="21046,21044,21043" posts_number="12" show_title_and_caption="off" zoom_icon_color="RGBA(255,255,255,0)" hover_overlay_color="rgba(224,43,32,0.15)" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" custom_margin="0px||0px||true|false" custom_padding="0px||0px||false|false" border_color_all_image="#000000" box_shadow_style_image="preset2" box_shadow_blur_image="20px" box_shadow_spread_image="-10px" box_shadow_color_image="#000000" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_gallery]   [et_pb_blurb title="Remains of a home" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" header_level="h1" header_font="Alata|--et_global_body_font_weight||on|||||" header_text_align="center" header_font_size="40px" header_letter_spacing="3px" header_line_height="1.6em" body_font="Montserrat|500|||||||" body_text_align="center" body_text_color="#000000" body_font_size="15px" body_line_height="1.5em" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

Aadil Farooq Malik
Medium: Mixed Media
Dimensions: Variable
College: Institute of Music & Fine Arts, University of Kashmir

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[dropcap]‘R[/dropcap]emains of a home’ explores the interrelations between memory, identity, and the materiality of space in a context of rapid urban transformation. The work confronts the tension between ever growing cities, infrastructure projects, and the intimate, often invisible, losses experienced by individuals and communities in the name of progress. It reveals the tensions between systemic powers and the people who live within its structures.

Drawing from his own experience of losing a home to a road expansion project, Adil explores how objects, architectural remnants, and everyday structures hold memory. This personal rupture becomes a lens through which broader questions of displacement and land rights emerge. It critically explores the shifting meanings of belonging: what remains when a home is taken away, and how we can claim our belonging then, in an ever-changing world?

[et_pb_image src="https://inverse.azan-n.com/content/images/2026/04/for-now-kmb-06-scaled.jpg" title_text="For-Now-KMB-06" align="center" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_image]  [et_pb_gallery gallery_ids="21052,21051,21050" posts_number="12" show_title_and_caption="off" zoom_icon_color="RGBA(255,255,255,0)" hover_overlay_color="rgba(224,43,32,0.15)" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" custom_margin="0px||0px||true|false" custom_padding="0px||0px||false|false" border_color_all_image="#000000" box_shadow_style_image="preset2" box_shadow_blur_image="20px" box_shadow_spread_image="-10px" box_shadow_color_image="#000000" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_gallery]   [et_pb_blurb title="Fish" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" header_level="h1" header_font="Alata|--et_global_body_font_weight||on|||||" header_text_align="center" header_font_size="40px" header_letter_spacing="3px" header_line_height="1.6em" body_font="Montserrat|500|||||||" body_text_align="center" body_text_color="#000000" body_font_size="15px" body_line_height="1.5em" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

Salman Khursheed Lone
Medium: Animation
Duration: 6 min 46 sec
College: Institute of Music & Fine Arts, University of Kashmir

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[dropcap]S[/dropcap]alman Khursheed Lone’s work draws inspiration from everyday experiences of life in Kashmir and its political implications. He intertwines myth, folklore, childhood games, and his own lived experiences into a visual diary and creates continual dialogue between them. At its centre is a Kashmiri fish that floats both as a myth and a metaphor. Salman recalls a story of Naag Gaade (Fish) which preserves the communal sensitivity and syncreticism of human and other-than-human relation where the fish takes the role of a protector of sacred water bodies in Kashmir. He connects this with a personal anecdote of seeing an army personnel violating this belief by catching the fish from a sacred pond and eating it. This experience became a point of departure for him to understand the larger socio-political and cultural impositions in the context of growing military presence and paraphernalia in Kashmir.

‘Fish’ then sees and exists beyond language, time, and death. It swims through space, jumps on fields, plays in concertina wires, and in army camps. It embodies endurance and resilience amid the invasions on its presence, history, and environment. Then, Fish swims again.

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[/et_pb_code]  [et_pb_gallery gallery_ids="21060,21058,21057,21054" posts_number="12" show_title_and_caption="off" zoom_icon_color="RGBA(255,255,255,0)" hover_overlay_color="rgba(224,43,32,0.15)" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" custom_margin="0px||0px||true|false" custom_padding="0px||0px||false|false" border_color_all_image="#000000" box_shadow_style_image="preset2" box_shadow_blur_image="20px" box_shadow_spread_image="-10px" box_shadow_color_image="#000000" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_gallery]   [et_pb_blurb title="The Conference of Anti-Apocryphal Beings" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" header_level="h1" header_font="Alata|--et_global_body_font_weight||on|||||" header_text_align="center" header_font_size="40px" header_letter_spacing="3px" header_line_height="1.6em" body_font="Montserrat|500|||||||" body_text_align="center" body_text_color="#000000" body_font_size="15px" body_line_height="1.5em" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

Rabia Mohi-ud-din, Basit Qadir, Mansha Bari, Rahil Sajad, Razwan Ahad Lone, Rayees, Saroosh Khan, Sahil Manzoor, Suhail Mohd Khan, Lubna Bashir, Zainab Bashir Mir
Medium: Sculptures (Mix-Media)
Dimensions: Variable
College: Institute of Music & Fine Arts, University of Kashmir

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[dropcap]‘T[/dropcap]he Conference of Anti-Apocryphal Beings,’ a group project created by students at the University of Kashmir, gathers various figures from local mythology, such as Rantas, Dyev, Yachh, Agar Pachin, Atid, Bram Bram Chok and other half heard whispers, warnings, and doubtful tremors of mis-remembered presences. They arrive from Kashmiri folklore, mythology, rumor and contemporary anxieties that travel across mountains and checkpoints refusing every category meant to contain them. These beings inhabit the unstable borderland between memory and imagination, myth and history, fear and play; and they claim space not through verification, but through presence. Each holds a truth that cannot be archived, fear that cannot be contested, memories that cannot be contained, and experience that cannot be spoken of, to refuse erasure, apprise of collective unease and survival of a people.

Rantas eludes being merely a winter demon haunting snowbound villages; she turns into an archive of fear, gendered labour, silence, and survival, carrying generations of unrecorded women’s stories on her back. The Dyev presents a slip between a deity and demon, sacred and profane, and turns into a reminder of blur in lived cosmologies. The Braid-Chopper– a recent apparition born from panic, gossip, and fractured political reality– stands as a contemporary myth embodying how trauma mutates into creaturehood when documentation is impossible. The Yacchh with its forested presence carries ecological knowledge that has been erased or muted by modern beliefs. The Bram Bram mutters the incoherences of fractured lives in spaces where meanings are constantly re-written.

Placed together, these sculptural figures do not offer a catalogue of folklore, but step out of the periphery and into a space of deliberation. Each figure asks what truths lie veiled beneath the un-speakable stories and fears at the margins. Their presence draws attention to how precariousness is narrated, how a culture absorbs violence, how it names danger, how it encodes care, how it transforms anxiety into shared stories in the quiet nights when imagination becomes a survival instinct. This ‘conference’ is therefore not fictional; it is forensic. It is political. It continues its watching, quietly and attentively, playfully and uncannily in ways that hover just beyond doubtful and authentic, well within the pulse of collective memory.

[et_pb_image src="https://inverse.azan-n.com/content/images/2026/04/for-now-kmb-08.jpg" title_text="For-Now-KMB-08" align="center" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_image] [et_pb_image src="https://inverse.azan-n.com/content/images/2026/04/for-now-kmb-09.jpg" title_text="For-Now-KMB-09" align="center" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_image]  [et_pb_gallery gallery_ids="21110,21109,21106,21104,21098,21096,21091,21087,21084,21083,21081,21078,21075,21073,21069,21068,21064,21063,21061" posts_number="25" show_title_and_caption="off" zoom_icon_color="RGBA(255,255,255,0)" hover_overlay_color="rgba(224,43,32,0.15)" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" custom_margin="0px||0px||true|false" custom_padding="0px||0px||false|false" border_color_all_image="#000000" box_shadow_style_image="preset2" box_shadow_blur_image="20px" box_shadow_spread_image="-10px" box_shadow_color_image="#000000" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_gallery]   [et_pb_blurb title="To be who? & not to be who? " _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" header_level="h1" header_font="Alata|--et_global_body_font_weight||on|||||" header_text_align="center" header_font_size="40px" header_letter_spacing="3px" header_line_height="1.6em" body_font="Montserrat|500|||||||" body_text_align="center" body_text_color="#000000" body_font_size="15px" body_line_height="1.5em" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

Amita Kumari, Garima, Jasmeen, Katyayni, Rahul, Shyamli Nandini, Sita, Vishali Bhandari
Medium: Videos and Cyanotypes
Dimensions: Variable
College: JLN Govt. College of Art, Shimla

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his collective project begins with a simple yet impossible question:

“To be who?” and “not to be who?” What starts as one of the most personal, and universal, inquiries gradually unravels through the works, the question loosens, stretches, melts at its edges. It becomes a horizon that keeps widening as the artists touch it. Each gesture, each symbol, each thought multiplies the question into many, unsettled, questions. In this widening field, the works embrace the stories we inherit— myths, histories, and communal narratives that quietly script how identity is imagined. They examine how belief clings to bodies, how belonging is told and retold, and how we take shape through narratives older than our own memory.

Seeds, flowers, gazes, games, small actions, each element becomes an instrument. They hold the instability of identity, its constant motion between becoming and unbecoming. Femininity surfaces as root and residue, a reminder of how bodies are read through myths that precede them.

At times the work takes the form of a cyclical sense of identity looping back on itself, belonging turning in circles, femininity refusing to collapse into binaries. The works do not illustrate the self; they test its boundaries, press against its inherited contours, question the frames that claim to define it.

Eventually the question that begins the project begins to erode. It blurs, frays, and becomes porous. What remains is not an answer but a movement— a continuous reimagining of what it means to be, and what it means to refuse the forms we are given.

Identity appears not as essence but as performance of repeated acts through which the self is produced, surveilled, and sometimes resisted.

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[/et_pb_code][et_pb_heading title="to be who? & not to be who? || Shyamli Nandani" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" title_font="Montserrat||||||||" title_text_align="center" title_font_size="18px" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_heading] [et_pb_code _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

[/et_pb_code][et_pb_heading title="to be who? & not to be who? || Garima" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" title_font="Montserrat||||||||" title_text_align="center" title_font_size="18px" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_heading]  [et_pb_code _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

[/et_pb_code][et_pb_heading title="to be who? & not to be who? || Katyayni" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" title_font="Montserrat||||||||" title_text_align="center" title_font_size="18px" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_heading] [et_pb_code _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

[/et_pb_code][et_pb_heading title="to be who? & not to be who? || Katyayni 2" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" title_font="Montserrat||||||||" title_text_align="center" title_font_size="18px" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_heading]  [et_pb_code _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" max_width="800px" module_alignment="center" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

[/et_pb_code][et_pb_heading title="to be who? & not to be who? || Jasmeen" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" title_font="Montserrat||||||||" title_text_align="center" title_font_size="18px" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_heading]  [et_pb_gallery gallery_ids="21132,21127,21118,21117" posts_number="12" show_title_and_caption="off" zoom_icon_color="RGBA(255,255,255,0)" hover_overlay_color="rgba(224,43,32,0.15)" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" custom_margin="0px||0px||true|false" custom_padding="0px||0px||false|false" border_color_all_image="#000000" box_shadow_style_image="preset2" box_shadow_blur_image="20px" box_shadow_spread_image="-10px" box_shadow_color_image="#000000" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_gallery]   [et_pb_blurb title="The River that Remembers" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" header_level="h1" header_font="Alata|--et_global_body_font_weight||on|||||" header_text_align="center" header_font_size="40px" header_letter_spacing="3px" header_line_height="1.6em" body_font="Montserrat|500|||||||" body_text_align="center" body_text_color="#000000" body_font_size="15px" body_line_height="1.5em" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

Shahid Wani, Mohmmed Umer Bhat, Basharat Bashir
Medium: Installation
Dimensions: Variable
College: Institute Of Music & Fine Arts, University of Kashmir

[/et_pb_blurb]

A river rushes through nostalgia.
It holds memories of childhood,
of family picnics. Its sweet water
passes through orchards of our heart.

A river carried water once;
It homes thirst and sorrow now.

A river drifts through waterswept forests.
It shouts grief and anger, for being ignored.
It flows wood, stone and weight
of naked mountains and lost landscape.

A river finds itself in burning coal?

— Poem by Salman

[et_pb_gallery gallery_ids="21145,21146,21147,21148,21150" posts_number="12" show_title_and_caption="off" zoom_icon_color="RGBA(255,255,255,0)" hover_overlay_color="rgba(224,43,32,0.15)" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" custom_margin="0px||0px||true|false" custom_padding="0px||0px||false|false" border_color_all_image="#000000" box_shadow_style_image="preset2" box_shadow_blur_image="20px" box_shadow_spread_image="-10px" box_shadow_color_image="#000000" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_gallery]   [et_pb_blurb title="Migration" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" header_level="h1" header_font="Alata|--et_global_body_font_weight||on|||||" header_text_align="center" header_font_size="40px" header_letter_spacing="3px" header_line_height="1.6em" body_font="Montserrat|500|||||||" body_text_align="center" body_text_color="#000000" body_font_size="15px" body_line_height="1.5em" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"]

Stanzin Samphel
Medium: Sculptures
Dimensions: Variable
College: College of Art Delhi

[/et_pb_blurb][dropcap]S[/dropcap]tanzin Samphel’s work ‘Migration’ carries the slow, patient movements caused by harsh climatic conditions faced by pastoral communities in Changthang, Ladakh for centuries. They have long moved with seasons, snow, and the invisible maps of weather and water. Migration is a necessity. It is breath. It is a way of living in conversation with land that is never still. It is listening to wind and the mountains. The quiet companion in the journey is Yak. It carries memories and home. It endures the stories of survival across wind-swept silences.

Seasons migrate too. Snow arrives late or not at all. Water thins. Pastures vanish. Precariousness appears. Migration becomes an unfamiliar future, shrinking horizon & towns.  [et_pb_image src="https://inverse.azan-n.com/content/images/2026/04/for-now-kmb-12-scaled.jpg" title_text="For-Now-KMB-12" align="center" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" custom_margin="||18px|||" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_image]  [et_pb_gallery gallery_ids="21151,21154,21155" posts_number="12" show_title_and_caption="off" zoom_icon_color="RGBA(255,255,255,0)" hover_overlay_color="rgba(224,43,32,0.15)" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" custom_margin="0px||0px||true|false" custom_padding="0px||0px||false|false" border_color_all_image="#000000" box_shadow_style_image="preset2" box_shadow_blur_image="20px" box_shadow_spread_image="-10px" box_shadow_color_image="#000000" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_gallery]  [et_pb_heading title="Gratiarum Declaratio" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" title_font="Alata||||||||" title_text_align="center" title_font_size="35px" hover_enabled="0" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content" sticky_enabled="0"][/et_pb_heading][et_pb_image src="https://inverse.azan-n.com/content/images/2026/04/salman-kochi-6th-feature-scaled.jpg" title_text="Salman-Kochi-6th-Feature" _builder_version="4.27.5" _module_preset="default" custom_margin="||80px|||" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_image][dropcap]G[/dropcap]ratitude for all the hands, hearts, and quiet gestures that carried this exhibition at Kochi into being. It would not have been possible without the generosity, patience, and quiet labour of many people who stood by the process in ways both visible and invisible; who offered their time, energy, care, and trust, often without expectation and in moments of uncertainty.

Deeply grateful to Khursheed Ahmad, my co-curator; Ifra Jan Shan, our assistant Curator; Josephine Simone; JLN Govt. College of Arts Shimla and IMFA, University of Kashmir for allowing us to conduct workshops; Amen Negi & her partner; Showkat Kathjoo; Gowhar Yakoob; Naushad Gayoor; Dr. Habib Ullah Shah; Dr. Sajjad Ahmad Wani; Syed Hafsa; Monisha Ahmad and Tashi Morup from LAMO; Abeer Gupta, Achi Association India; Rahul and Surjit at Palay House, Phey for hosting and feeding us during our research trip; Munshi Aijaz Bhat from Munshi Aziz Bhat Museum, Kargil, Zara, Anayat and Rohullaha from Kargil; Tsering Motup, Chosgon, Tenzin, Tsering Dorje, Central Institute of Buddhist Studies; Gaekhir Republik; Mashoor, Rebecca, Harshida, Hiran, Amritha, David Vargese, Nikita and Mario D’souza from KBF team; Volunteers: Aashiq, Shabeeha, Gloria, Tania, Ajmal, Ajsel, Anushree, Esha Paul, Leema, Shane Moris and many more friends.

To the student artists whose work are presented in the exhibition and to those who applied, collaborators, technicians, and guards who helped think, build, carry, install, translate, listen. To those who opened conversations, shared resources, solved problems at the last minute, and stayed through exhaustion and doubt. This work carries your imprints.

Thank you for holding it with me.