By French artist Philippe Calia helms the workshop
Ahead of the sixth edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale commencing on December 12, Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF) organised a workshop here this weekend on how people from different backgrounds portray the idea of the state capital as a city using their own medium.
The two-day workshop was led by French born India-based artist Philippe Calia at Neighbour, an art space at Kesavadasapuram, bringing together eleven selected participants, including researchers, photographers and writers who are in some way related to the city to look at “the idea of a city.”
“The goal of this workshop was to bring together people from different backgrounds who are someway related to Thiruvananthapuram and use their specific skills to produce knowledge and works about the city and how we can imagine this city using interdisciplinary narrative techniques, including photographs, texts and even poetry,” said Calia.
Working primarily with photography, video and text, Calia uses a conceptual approach to engage with notions of time and memory, often traversing between the personal and the collective, poetics and politics.
The workshop, which started on Saturday with Calia discussing his body of work and his recent exhibition conducted at TARQ, Mumbai titled ‘The Second Law’.
All participants were given an assignment to work on a set of motifs representative of Thiruvananthapuram, which they identified through fieldwork and group discussions over the weekend. The resulting images/works will be submitted within a week and once put together they will form a collective portrait of the city.
The workshop aligns perfectly with the curatorial vision of Nikhil Chopra, the curator of the upcoming edition of Biennale, who envisions the event as a continuous, process driven practice.
“At the workshop, we were exchanging our respective processes, and also bifurcating our practices and encouraged to bifurcate from our usual practices, which is what makes art precious as it helps us create new forms of thinking, said Calia.
Kochi Biennale has really engaged the public over the years as people from all walks of life visit Asia’s largest art event and engage with it as a democratic exercise, and that’s valuable, he added.
Influenced by a dual training in photography and social sciences, Calia finds his inspiration in the everyday, putting it in perspective with an eclectic array of disciplines and references, from modern literature and anthropology to geology or theoretical physics.
His work has received several awards and has been exhibited in various museums, galleries and festivals across Europe and Asia, including Serendipity Arts Festival (India, 2025); Jimei x Arles (China, 2024); Les Rencontres d’Arles (France, 2023); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Germany, 2023); SIPF (Singapore, 2022) and UP Gallery (Taïwan, 2021).
The sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), organised by KBF, will be titled ‘For the Time Being’. Curated by renowned artist Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces, an artist-led organisation based out of Goa, the Biennale will run for 110 days, from December 12, 2025, through March 31, 2026.
