Dear Friends and Supporters,

We had a packed yet pleasant January.

A great deal of writing and visual material on the Kochi-Muziris Biennale exhibitions is now available online; we’re grateful for the nods, appreciations, analyses, and criticism. As for art, sustained engagement remains its best mode of preservation. 

The Students’ Biennale exhibition, by student-artists from over 150 public art institutes, curated by a group of curators/collectives representing seven zones across the country, has been receiving exceptional reviews. It’s our pleasure to inform you that Nikhil Chavan and Abhishek Kolapudi, two of our Students’ Biennale participating artists, have been conferred with the inaugural Ardee Legacy Award 2026. They were selected by a distinguished jury comprising Prayag Shukla, Jayasri Burman, Ina Puri, Samit Das, Manisha Parekh, and Reha Sodhi. Their works are on view at the Ardee Foundation booth (05) in the Institutions section at India Art Fair 2026, from 5–8 February. 

At the KMB Pavilion housed inside the Bastion Bungalow in Fort Kochi, lectures and conferences flowed into screenings, concerts and performances, until the month felt like one single conversation stretching into a thoughtful night. 

From a conference on Tamil histories and futures, led by Dr. Nimmi Gowrinathan and Dr Meena Kandasamy with artists, poets, singers and writers whose work navigates memory and displacement, to a theatre performance titled “Bye Bye Bypass”, directed by Roshan Mathew, which dwells on the nostalgic yearning for an ancestral home lost to a new bypass, the programmes traversed diverse mediums and grounds. One Way or Another, a film package presented by Experimenta India Edition, brought together some of the most powerful feminist voices from across the globe whose images record and re-tell women’s political life, such as the Yugantar Film Collective, co-led by Deepa Dhanraj, Nalini Malani, India’s pioneering video artist, Lebanon’s Jocelyn Saab, and Kunjila Mascillamani, a young filmmaker from Kerala whose film humorously recalls a landmark protest act by a group of working-class women from Kozhikode. 

Click here to read the complete newsletter