When ‘Amphibian Aesthetics’ opens at the newly launched Ishara House in Kochi on December 13, it will mark not only the first major exhibition of the space but also an ambitious artistic inquiry into the urgent ecological and political crises of our time.
Bringing together 12 artists and collectives from South Asia, the Middle East and Europe, the exhibition probes the idea of the “amphibian” as a metaphor for adaptability, migration, memory, and shared vulnerability.
Guided by Artistic Director and conceptual artist Riyas Komu, the exhibition extends long-term research shaped by Kerala’s oceanic histories—trade, migration, extraction, and climate precarity while imagining multispecies futures beyond the familiar binaries of tradition and modernity.
In an e-mail interview with The Statesman, Komu states Amphibian Aesthetics within a decade-long intellectual and artistic arc. The concept, he says, grew out of work carried out over 12 to 15 years across Kochi, including projects like the Mattancherry Project (2016) and Sea a Boiling Vessel (2022).
“These earlier explorations dug into Kerala’s oceanic histories. They showed us how maritime flows have shaped cultural and political life. When the Ishara Art Foundation approached me to lead their India extension, it felt like a natural progression of these inquiries,” he said.
At its core, the exhibition employs the amphibian as a figure that moves between land and water, past and future symbolising a way of thinking suited to an era marked by climate collapse, forced displacement, extinction, and hyper-capitalist acceleration.
“The amphibian becomes a metaphor for adaptability and shared vulnerability,” Komu says. “It is an invitation to inhabit uncertainty and craft new imaginaries for a future shaped by contradiction.”
Kochi, historically shaped by travellers, traders, and layered diasporas, offers a site where cultural intermixing has always been fluid. “The city forces you to confront turbulence and transition,” Komu notes. “Our task was to draw voices that align us to the shifting conditions of today.”
Thus, the exhibition features diverse artists such as Michelangelo Pistoletto, whose works dissolve the boundary between viewer and artwork; Palestinian artist Dima Srouji, who reflects on displacement and dispossession; and the CAAS Collective, which speculates on future habitats through remote environments.
The show embraces multiple modes textual, visual, oral, digital, and virtual each functioning as a sensor attuned to the layered ecologies of the present. Public programmes, including panels and performances, further extend these conversations, placing the exhibition within a larger intellectual ecosystem cultivated by Komu’s Aazhi Archives.
The Archives, co-founded by Komu in 2022, brings together artists, historians, sociologists, journalists, and craftspeople under the guiding principle of Art + Knowledge + People. “Our work has always been about entangled pasts and potential futures,” he says. “Amphibian Aesthetics grows directly from that commitment. It brings communities not just as audiences but as custodians of memory and co-authors of knowledge.”
The exhibition’s location, Kashi Hallegua House in Mattancherry, a 200-year-old architectural landmark in the historic Jewish quarter, adds another layer of resonance. For Komu, Kochi’s dense coexistence of more than 30 communities within a small geography is itself an amphibious model. “Kochi teaches us that survival has always depended on inhabiting thresholds,” he reflects.
“We hope visitors see the exhibition as a space to understand how vulnerability can become common ground for solidarity.”
The interview also touches on Komu’s own practice rooted in the political turbulence of the early 1990s when he moved from Kerala to Mumbai. “Mumbai became my true university,” he recalls.
“The city’s tensions, migrations, and the rise of fundamentalism compelled me to look closely at fragile urban lives.” His hyper-realistic portraiture, often mistaken for traditional realism, emerged from this period as “mediatic realism” thin, fragile layers of pigment reflecting precarious lives.
“As a conceptual artist working within a political framework, the journey has no fixed destination,” he says. “It is an ongoing process that adapts to the world as it unfolds.”
As Amphibian Aesthetics prepares to welcome audiences from December 13, Komu sees it as both the culmination and beginning of an evolving, hydrosocial framework for thinking with water, with histories, and with fragile futures.
“The exhibition is a gesture toward living together differently,” he says. “A reminder that our survival depends on our ability to stay porous, adaptive, and attentive to the world’s changing tides.”