October 2025: Ishara Art Foundation is pleased to announce the opening of Amphibian Aesthetics, the inaugural exhibition of the Ishara House at Kashi Hallegua House in Kochi, Kerala on 13 December 2025.
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 Middle East and Europe, 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, CAAS Collective (Dr Susmita Mohanty, Rohini Devasher, Sue Fairburn and Barbara Imhof), Dima Srouji, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Midhun Mohan, Rami Farook, Ratheesh T, Kabir Project (Shabnam Virmani, Anisha Baid and Smriti Chanchani), Shanvin Sixtous, Shilpa Gupta,
White Balance and Zahir Mirza.
The Ishara House is led by Artistic Director Riyas Komu, co-founder of Aazhi Archives, ideator of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and co-founder of the Kochi Biennale Foundation. Commenting on the exhibition, Komu says: “Amphibian Aesthetics continues the long-term inquiries by the artists,
curators, writers, critics and scholars at Aazhi Archives (AA), exploring the metaphors and movements along and across the sea. The exhibition offers frames to think through the promises of the planet towards imagining ecologies that demand amphibious modes of thinking and being. Emerging from specific interest in Kerala and the Indian Ocean region, AA converges academic research with contemporary art practice, to develop art projects and knowledge missions that flow towards people. Amphibian Aesthetics is an attempt to contemplate upon new space-times in art
and research collaboratively to survive our fluid futures.”
Smita Prabhakar, Founder and Chairperson of the Ishara Art Foundation, says: “The Ishara House and its inaugural exhibition, Amphibian Aesthetics, represent a significant step forward in the Foundation’s journey to expand its scope geographically and curatorially. These projects solidify the Foundation’s standing as a truly global institution that creates generative dialogues between South Asian and international contemporary art.”
Kashi Hallegua House, the main site of the Ishara House project, was built more than 200 years ago in the historic Jewish quarter of Mattancherry, Kochi, Kerala. Once serving the town’s Jewish community, the building has since become a cultural and architectural landmark.
To deepen visitor engagement with the exhibition’s themes, Amphibian Aesthetics is accompanied by a series of public programmes, the first of which is a panel discussion entitled ‘Amphibian Aesthetics – Art in the Age of Precarity: Ecology, Migration and Spirituality’ on 14 December 2025.
Amphibian Aesthetics – Art in the Age of Precarity: Ecology, Migration, and Spirituality
14 December, 2025
● Panel discussion with Dr James Onley, Dr. Varuni Bhatia and Dr Susmita Mohanty,
moderated by Professor MH Ilias
● Performance by Shabnam Virmani
A complete list of programmes will be announced in due course.
The Ishara House is supported by Alserkal Avenue, in association with Galleria Continua.
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