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10 DECEMBER 2025 - 31 MARCH 2026
URU ART HARBOUR, MATTANCHERRY
Shilpi Rajan, one of the living legends from Kerala and a self-taught artist hailing from Thrissur, has worked organically in clay, cement, wood, bamboo, iron, laterite, and many more materials, with a spirit of making shapes, enduring life, and humour, layered with tragic marks. His works have been recognised as an ongoing resistance with a remarkable sense of revolting against the established notions of academic art, and that makes him an echoing presence in contemporary art. Now, he is proudly presented in front of a global audience.
Beginning his journey as a mechanic in pursuit of a livelihood, Rajan's natural affinity for art ultimately drew him into sculpting-an evolution shaped by instinct rather than formal training. Rajan has worked with an impressive range of materials, including newspaper, sheet metal, clay, cement, wood, bamboo, coconut and areca nut tree, iron, granite, and laterite.
His sculptures often reflect the moods and experiences he lived through at the time of their creation, rather than adhering to fixed expressions or academic conventions. He believes that sculpture, like life itself, cannot bear a permanent mood. The influence of Kerala's folk and tribal traditions is strongly visible in his human figures, which carry echoes of local deities and indigenous art forms.
URU ART HARBOUR
URU is envisioned as a vibrant and interactive hub for visual arts, literature, music, and philosophy. URU seeks to be a space for collaboration and a continual hub for artistic, cultural, and intellectual exploration to move the dialogue about (and of) local cultural specificities from the margins to the centre and to be a free space for artistic expression, critical inquiry, and creative disruption. URU’s activities include publications, exhibitions, residencies, screenings, music, design interventions, discourses, workshops, and educational initiatives. URU is situated in Mattancherry, Kochi.
AAZHI ARCHIVES
Aazhi Archives is a collective of artists, writers, and scholars, working at the intersection of art, knowledge, and community. Since 2022, we have explored Kerala’s oceanic histories and cultural networks through exhibitions, workshops, and collaborative research. Guided by the mission Art + Knowledge + People, we bring artists, historians, and local communities together to reimagine shared pasts and possible futures.
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Elemental, these rough-hewn, earthy figures stand resolutely and stare at us. They embrace different materials, stone, clay, wood, granite, laterite and paper. They embody different spirits and figures: forlorn and ferocious gods muses of art and poetry, tamed and wild animals, various figures of the foregone and yet-to-be.
A tangible, pulsating tension between figure, field and fact pervade them. The figures follow the material, the textures of granite, fault lines of laterite, plasticity of clay, fibres of wood pulpiness of paper But they seem to occupy the force fields - of the contradictory pulls of history and myth, action and contemplation. In their figural aspirations, these figures both obey and defy their materialities, resonating with the tension between being and becoming. Never enamoured of 'likeness' they are forms of spirit and spiritual forms of a different kind.
Rooted in their fields, their bodies carry the facts of lives lived histories witnessed, and the worlds that engulf them. In isolation, they stand majestically in a void hat they also confront Together, they climb and clamber, hug and huddle, trying to fuse into a unitary yet multitudinous whole yearning to be one, creating an "operative field" of resistance. This tension between rootedness and breaking away is what defines the factual field of Rajan's figures For these nodes in the web of becoming existence is persistence, survival is expression.
THE ART EXHIBITION IS PART OF THE PROJECT: SEA A BOILING VESSEL - CHAPTER 2
Sea A Boiling Vessel is a multi-chapter art project that explores the ocean as a site of memory, rupture, survival, and imagination. Moving through personal histories and collective ecological anxieties, each chapter unfolds a new layer of the relationship between bodies, borders, and watery worlds. Through installation, video, drawings, archival fragments, and sonic meditations, the project reflects on how the sea holds trauma and tenderness simultaneously - how it becomes both a boiling vessel and a breathing archive. Curated by Aazhi Archives and URU Art Harbour.
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Shilpi Rajan, one of the living legends from Kerala, a self taught artist who hails from Thrissur, creates his sculptures from natural materials in the spirit of making shapes, enduring life, and humor, layered with tragic marks.
URU art harbour is a cultural hub situated at Kochi. URU seeks to be a space for collaboration and a continual hub for artistic, cultural, and intellectual exploration. Founded by Riyas Komu and Zoya Riyas.
Aazhi Archives is a collective of artists, writers and scholars engaged in education and art projects through research, art making, writing, curating, and publications.
SHILPI RAJAN: FIGURE, FIELD & FACT
Aazhi Archives and Uru Art Harbour are proud to present Shilpi Rajan, one of the living legends from Kerala, a self-taught artist hails from Thrissur, create his sculptures from natural materials in spirit of making shapes, enduring life and humour layered with tragic marks.
Theyyam is a vibrant and colourful form of ritualistic worship that is deeply rooted in the culture and traditions of Kerala, India. This living tradition involves elaborate rituals, music, dance, and vibrant costumes that bring to life the divine spirits being invoked.
What if precarity is the condition of our time or, to put it an other way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity? What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek?
INDIA IN STYLE: 100 DAYS OF ART
India in Style, was created as part of Ayurveda Trails & Journals. During the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025-26, our founder Zuzana Zwiebel introduces one artist, event, or organisation every day, Here are the first 25 days. Let us inspire you!
Can prehistoric artifacts be art? Come see for yourself at Kara in Fort Cochin! Mohamed A’s photographic images of excavations and the excavated - real, yet mysterious and enigmatic - take us on a journey into Kerala’s prehistoric past.
KOCHI-MUZIRIS BIENNALE 2025-26
The 6th edition of the KMB 2025 is curated by Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces, an artist led organisation based in Goa. Chopra is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice interweaves performance, drawing, photography, sculpture, and installation.
Ganesha is not for the artist a religious figure, it is a very personal almost incomprehensible connection, which has become a relationship that he commonly describes as being a mirror to the soul. Ganesha, in this case, is about portraying the image of a formless energy.
Chilean poet and featuring artist at the Kochi Muziris Biennale 2016 on the possibility of an artistic response to the human crises of our time, including the refugee crisis surrounding the conflict in Syria. The sea, which became a grave for hundreds of people, including children.
INTERNATIONAL SPICE ROUTE CONFERENCE 2026
Welcome to the First Edition of the Spice Routes Conference organized by the Muziris Heritage Project, Government of Kerala January 6-8, 2026 in Bolgatty Palace, Kochi. Step into a world where history, culture, and global connections converge.
A new beginning is always infused with hope. Life is full of moments that we believe to be beginnings only because of the presence of hope. A physical symbol of these moments of hope is the flower. The films attempts to capture the emotion of these beginnings.
Dravidian Catharsis is the fruit of this deep immersion in the culture, the theatre, the traditions, and the soul of this mythological universe of the Tamil people. The powerful presences of spirits and living gods are embodied under masks.
Legend says that somewhere deep in the forest of the Himalayas is a strange bird that lays psychedelic eggs. Eating them will give you highly vivid hallucinations. The indigenous shamans believe that these visions are from your past life.
Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away this year on 28th March leaving behind a legacy of innumerable musical compositions that'll keep him alive in countless hearts across the world. However, I'll always be haunted by the fact that I couldn't let him know that I'm still alive because of his music along with many more.
Search for the questions to the answers written on the skin...and i asked. am i connected to the deep inside you? with the invisible roots from the layered skin of you? all the energy you transfer to the heart of your thoughts?i asked again am i still connected?
01: Ayurveda in Travancore Kingdom
If you expect stories which starts: Once upon a time, there was a princess... stop reading. Her Highness Princess Gouri Parvathi Bayi of the Travancore Royal Family will introduce us very modern and open minded view on today's Kerala society and ayurveda.
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.
