'Amphibian Aesthetics', the inaugural exhibition at Ishara House in Kochi, probes the double lives demanded by the Anthropocene — between land and sea, past and future, memory and migration. Works by 12 contemporary artists and collectives from India, Italy, Palestine and the UAE, including Appupen, Midhun Mohan, Shilpa Gupta, and Dima Srouji, unravel Kerala’s long histories of maritime exchange, refuge, and cultural entanglement.
“Let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of imagination.”
— Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement
The contemporary is never a fixed category. It is constantly emerging, merging, and slipping between the temporal threads of past and future. In our present moment, shaped by glacial melting, climate collapse, and wars of attrition without end, instability has become an existential condition of the contemporary. The Anthropocene has proven to be an epoch of profound precarity, not confined to the realm of ecology alone, but ever-expanding across politics, economics, culture, and even our cognitive abilities. Conflicts in Palestine, Ukraine, and Kashmir flash in and out of the global attention economy; capital accelerates at surreal speed, while labour’s movement is surveilled, restricted, and disciplined at every possible junction. The digital world — once held as a harbinger of new, equitable, intersectional solidarities — has instead enabled and consolidated architectures of mass surveillance and disinformation.
Contemporary art, too, has been swept into this vortex. Even as biennales multiply like funghi and markets thrive, truly radical practices feel increasingly rare — often watered down into aestheticised gestures that leave little trace in the world beyond the white cube exhibition hall. How, then, do we inhabit this churn of survival and extinction, labour and capital, information and truth, and ultimately commerce and art? What does it mean to be radical when dissent is silenced before it can take shape? How does an artist address and express the deep derangements of our times?
‘Amphibian Aesthetics’, presented by Ishara Art Foundation and Aazhi Archives, proposes a porous, mobile, depth-sensitive line of thinking for art and academia, one that moves like water, listens like a frog, and connects like a fungal web. The exhibition draws inspiration from the term ‘amphibian’, which refers to animals that spend part of their lives in water and part on land. The word comes from the Greek ‘amphibios’, from the roots ‘amphi’, meaning “of both kinds”, and ‘bios’, meaning “life”. According to the 13th-century Italian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, human beings are metaphysical amphibians: they live both in the corporeal world of rocks and trees and in the immaterial world of the intellect.
Set within the Kashi Hallegua House, a 200-year-old building in Mattancherry’s historic Jewish quarter, the exhibition explores “amphibious” modes of existence — lives lived across borders of land and water, certainty and vulnerability, memory and upheaval. The artists assembled here work with the idea of the double life not as duplicity but as endurance: the quiet skill of living between worlds.
George Mathen, better known as Appupen, extends his long-running cosmology of Halahala into new terrain, imagining societies mutating under ecological stress, authoritarian drift, and fractured communication. His graphic and painterly worlds — at once satirical and prophetic — offer a speculative anatomy of the Anthropocene, where survival requires constant shapeshifting. Amphibiousness, for Appupen, is a mode of resistance: a way of outliving the systems that seek to flatten imagination.
The late Midhun Mohan (Lathika) appears like a voice carried in from another shore. His earlier works, including the Flotsam series, are haunted by drift — objects and spirits washed ashore from centuries of trade, colonisation, and displacement along Kerala’s coastline. In this exhibition, his practice stands as testimony to the fragile equilibrium between belonging and erasure, echoing the Jewish, Arab, African, and Malayali entanglements that once animated Mattancherry’s waterfront.
Shilpa Gupta’s intervention reframes amphibiousness as a psychological and political condition. Her work insists on the porousness of borders — national, linguistic, emotional — and on the quotidian violence of systems that attempt to fix, categorise, or contain identity. In the context of Kochi’s layered histories, her practice resonates as an articulation of exile, return, and the uneasy spaces in between.
Palestinian artist Dima Srouji approaches amphibious existence through archaeology and craft. Working with glass, ruins, and reconstructed artefacts, she maps the double life of objects displaced across museums, borders, and empires. Her pieces evoke the survival strategies of cultures forced to live between visibility and erasure, much like amphibians slipping between terrains.
Across these works, ‘Amphibian Aesthetics’ positions maritime exchange as both history and an ongoing process of making, remembering, and imagining the world. In a world increasingly shaped by climate displacement and political fracture, the exhibition suggests that the amphibian is not a metaphor but a contemporary condition: a way of staying alive while the ground and the water keep moving.
Amphibian Aesthetics, presented by Ishara Art Foundation and Aazhi Archives, will be on view from 13 December 2025 to 31 March 2026 at Kashi Hallegua House in Kochi. Learn more here.
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