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Kashi Hallegua House, Jew Town, Mattancherry
Mohamed Ali Warehouse, Mattancherry
DECEMBER 13, 2022 - APRIL 30, 2023
It was one of those seafarers - the manjukkars - who used the expression 'Sea, a boiling vessel' while describing the experience of sailing. The image of the boiling vessel is visceral, visual and deeply metaphorical.
AAZHI ARCHIVES
Aazhi Archives is a collective of artists, writers and scholars engaged in education and art projects through research, art-making, writing, curating, and publications. Aazhi Archives intends to bring them into creative conversations with each other to focus on Kerala's cosmopolitan pasts, pluralist cultures and political futures. It is conceived as a physical as well as a digital site of learning, an audio-visual and textual archive of Kerala’s history, culture, politics and society, that links knowledge creation, art making and the public through art and research projects and cultural events.
On the one hand, it evokes the infinite expanse and incessant flux of the ocean, the deep ambivalent feel of floating on the seething sea under the overwhelming sky, on the other, it conjures up the irrepressible urge for navigation and exploring unknown destinations. How else could one convey the enigmatic experience of the boundless sea glimmering and pulsating beneath the fragile boat that is fuelled by hopes and dreams of the future, and holds the seafarers aloft through the anguish and heat of the immediate present?
Such forays into endless expanses, unknown futures and unfamiliar terrains are also never- ending conversations or oscillations between settlers and nomads, land and sea, departures and destinations that in many ways constitute the very stuff of human civilization.
"Sea - A Boiling Vessel" looks at the sea as a constant reminder of histories of migration, lineages of cross-pollination and synthesis: of cultures, livelihoods and religions, settlements and segregations, also of colonial plunder and slave trade that have effectively shaped the long sea coast of what is now called Kerala.
This exhibition acknowledges new scholarship and art making in this area and relooks at long-forgotten maritime links and histories are being freshly excavated. This deep engagement with maritime history interrogates established cultural understandings and in a more profound manner, political imagination. This initiative intends to bring different practices of artmaking and research into creative conversation with each other to transform the sea into a site of learning and intellectual engagement through which new futures may be floated.
Aazhi Archives is a collective of artists, writers and scholars engaged in education and art projects through research, art making, writing, curating, and publications.
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