The Book Ensemble
Review
Where Archives Breathe: Self-Narration and Oceanic Memory in AUTOPOIESIS
The exhibition stages a structural intervention within a region long shaped by layered violences and oceanic crossings, treating the body as a relational field. Mahbubani, whose great-grandparents were forced to migrate from Sindh following Partition, places her own body within this terrain. Her video Rituals for a Displaced Land-Body, positioned as a curatorial footnote, renders self-making as lived practice, her body functioning as an intergenerational vessel. In foregrounding her displacement, she shifts the traditional notion of the curator. By reframing herself as organizer, she diffuses curatorial authority while holding space for vulnerability to circulate. The stakes of auto-narration return to her own body. The curator becomes an implicated presence rather than an external mediator.
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Take Pick
Living Between Tides: Amphibian Aesthetics and the Question of How We Inhabit the Present
In an era when the climate crisis is no longer an abstract future but a daily condition of life, the question confronting contemporary art is not simply what it represents, but how it thinks. How does art hold contradiction, vulnerability, and survival at once? How does it remain porous to history while alert to planetary urgency? Amphibian Aesthetics, the inaugural exhibition at Ishara House in Kochi, enters this question not as metaphor alone, but as method.
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