The 5th edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, curated by Singaporean artist Shubigi Rao and titled In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, will bring together 80 artists and collectives with over 45 new commissions.

In her curatorial framework, Rao notes, “A biennale can be so much more than a mere accumulation of coincidental collisions. As a bulwark against despair, the biennale as commons may seem an impossible idea. But we remember the ability of our species, our communities, to flourish artistically even in fraught and dire situations, with a refusal in the face of disillusionment to disavow our poetry, our languages, our art and music, our optimism and humour. To envision this biennale as a persistent yet unpredictable murmuration in the face of capriciousness and volatility comes from my unshakeable conviction in the power of storytelling as strategy, of the transgressive potency of ink, and transformative fire of satire and humour”.

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Cities speak to us in infinite ways. Notes from a City Unknown is a portfolio of thirty-two screen prints on paper, exploring the city through sites of fissure, complexity and contradiction. Through poetic notations composed alongside architectural forms, the Notes draw on observations and reflections, both historic and personal, written from 2014 to 2021.

‘Over the course of several years, I have written small notes on a city. Unfinished stories through moments of connection and distance. Writing these notes has felt like a concealment in the open light; a sharing of private thoughts. Within this landscape, forms and structures become markers of time and memory. Notes from a City Unknown are compositions on paper of these collected moments through relationships between form and language. Set against a backdrop of a brutal nationalism and pervasive surveillance, these notes are a record of my time in a city that is distant and familiar. There are cities within a city. And an unknowable measure of distance between things.’

Seher Shah
New Delhi, 2021

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