NAMASTE!

KASHI HALLEGUA HOUSE, JEW TOWN, MATTANCHERRY
MOHAMED ALI WAREHOUSE, MATTANCHERRY
DECEMBER 13, 2022 - APRIL 30, 2023

Stories of communities about origin, spread and apocalypse being presented through episodic memories, narrative and visual texts, travel writings, murals, divine objects, church paintings, and songs provide a dense and myriad repository of historical and artistic imagination. Stories that often seem so widely divergent and originated from far flung places are, in fact, merged with each other in shaping the narratives of communities in Kerala.

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.

Integrating art, aesthetics and academics, this segment spans themes such as creation and origin stories, collective remembrances of past, episodic and fragmented narratives of communities, shared concerns over apocalypse, contested spaces of divinity, oral and visual texts of travel, travel of texts, performative occasions etc.

With  cross-regional and cultural imaginations, these  stories  also allude to a fracturing of historical reality that, for many, has deeply impacted upon how we understand the relative relationship of the subject to both time and space. 'Community narratives' in the context of Kerala act not just as collective rendering of a particular community 's past but as key interlocutors in explaining certain cosmopolitan moments in Kerala's history, in which  people, ideas, arts and goods were in constant motion and exchange.

Grand in scale and narrative strategies, community narratives push boundaries of spatial and temporal imaginations combining cross-cultural themes with local artistic resources. Conceptualised in different medium of display- artwork, musical performance and academic presentation, this segment explores the relations hip between Experience, Information, Image and Sound, a quadrilateral relationship that is proposed to fully comprehend the fa bulbous nature of community narratives. Each set of oral narratives, songs, texts, visuals and performances, used in this context, positions itself as a key interlocutor in, as a productive field of enquiry and as an interesting interface between art and academics.

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ART ORGANISATION

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.

PHOTOGRAPHER

ZUZANA ZWIEBEL

Founder & Director of Ayurveda Trails, healing collection of (extra)ordinary people and their stories, whose experiences are transferred into various trails shared by travelers.

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