We live in a time when voices are being silenced, people are being displaced, and the right to exist freely is increasingly fragile for so many across the world. Art cannot fix this, but it can refuse to look away.
From March 14 to 30, we open our doors at Forplay Society, Kochi, during the Kochi Muziris Biennale. What awaits is not a finished statement but a living conversation through artworks, performances, screenings, workshops, and moments of genuine exchange. We would love for you to be part of it.
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ശബ്ദങ്ങൾ നിശബ്ദമാക്കുകയും, ആളുകൾ പലായനം ചെയ്യപ്പെടുകയും, സ്വതന്ത്രമായി ജീവിക്കാനുള്ള അവകാശം ലോകമെമ്പാടുമുള്ള പലർക്കും കൂടുതൽ ദുർബലമാകുകയും ചെയ്യുന്ന ഒരു കാലഘട്ടത്തിലാണ് നാം ജീവിക്കുന്നത്. കലയ്ക്ക് ഇത് പരിഹരിക്കാൻ സാധിക്കില്ല, എന്നാൽ മുഖം തിരിച്ചു കളയുന്നത് വിസമ്മതിക്കാൻ കഴിയും.
മാർച്ച് 14 മുതൽ 30 വരെ കൊച്ചി മുസിരിസ് ബിനാലെ വേളയിൽ കൊച്ചിയിലെ ഫോർപ്ലേ സൊസൈറ്റിയിൽ ഞങ്ങൾ ഞങ്ങളുടെ വാതിലുകൾ തുറക്കുന്നു. കാത്തിരിക്കുന്നത് ഒരു പൂർത്തിയായ പ്രസ്താവനയല്ല, മറിച്ച് കലാസൃഷ്ടികൾ, പ്രകടനങ്ങൾ, പ്രദർശനങ്ങൾ, വർക്ക്ഷോപ്പുകൾ, കലർപ്പില്ലാത്ത കൈമാറ്റത്തിന്റെ നിമിഷങ്ങൾ എന്നിവയിലൂടെ ഒരു ജീവനുള്ള സംഭാഷണമാണ്. നിങ്ങളും അതിൻ്റെ ഭാഗമാകാൻ ഞങ്ങൾ ആഗ്രഹിക്കുന്നു.
Jees Rajan
(1991-2017)
1.
Gospels. Two men meet, each believing the other to be of higher rank
Size: 33 × 50 inches
2.
Gospels.
Size: 33 × 50 inches
3.
Gospels. The Fall
Size: 33 × 50 inches
4.
Gospels. Archival of a Theologist
Size: 33 × 50 inches
For Jees, painting was a ‘continuous utterance’- a restless effort to translate shattering life experiences into a personal sign system. Rejecting stylistic clarity, he focused on the process of linguistic signification, often grappling with “embarrassing” religious imagery from his youth.
His method was an intimate struggle of erasure and masking, moving images beyond a world of duality. He engaged in a’mad’ dialogue with art history- morphing Magritte’s symbols, Klee’s subtleties, and Van Gogh’s figures into unconventional mediums Ultimately, he viewed painting as a fragmented, unfinished critique of power, refusing to let meaning ever fully settle.
Artist: Ragesh S @ragesh_vadakkumpattu
Title: Remnants of Intervention
Medium: Paper mache, Clay
This work emerges from the realization that history is often written by the hunters. The narratives we inherit are not always truths, but constructions-carefully shaped stories that continue to influence and control human consciousness.
This artwork investigates how an artificially constructed history can reshape memory, identity, and culture, quietly governing the way societies understand themselves.
Until around the ninth century, Kerala carried traces of a Buddhist and ecologically rooted way of life. Through processes that resemble social engineering, this landscape of thought and living was gradually infiltrated and transformed. Cultures were controlled, identities were severed, and symbolic “heads” were removed and replaced with fabricated ones. New narratives were then written to legitimize these transformations.
The work reflects on how such mechanisms are not confined to the past. Even today, similar forms of social engineering continue to operate-some visible, many hidden. Certain truths remain obscured until time allows the fragments to assemble and the larger image to emerge.
This artwork is an attempt to question those constructed histories and to confront the silent mechanisms that shape what we remember, what we believe, and who we become.
@react.space@forplaysociety
Artist: Preeti Singh @preetis1109
Title: It’s was not his sky
Year:2025
Preeti Singh completed her BFA in Painting from the College of Art, Delhi, and an MA in Visual Art from Ambedkar University Delhi. Her work engages with lived experience and the social structures that frame it, moving across painting, installation, moving image, and participatory formats to explore memory, power, identity, and belonging.
Alongside her artistic practice, Singh holds a postgraduate degree in Management and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, and brings experience across corporate and museum contexts, informing a practice that integrates creative thinking, systems knowledge, and cultural insight.
@react.space@forplaysociety
Artist: Sandeep TK. @t.k.sandeep
Why did the Mallu cross the road?
I was not born into the language that now pays my bills or opened doors to new circles of friends and opportunities.
I confronted English the way many of us did, through borrowed textbooks and four-line notebooks.
My father was a rickshaw driver. One evening he returned home with shame in his eyes and told me “Learn English well. If you speak English, people will respect you.” A passenger had scolded him in English for asking a little extra fare beyond the meter. He could not
respond. As I grew older, I realized he was right. Pronunciation and vocabulary can rearrange a person’s social fate.
I have moved from the back benches of small classrooms to clean white exhibition spaces. Along the way, I became sensitive to the humour that circulates around language, the jokes that seem harmless, Why did the
Mallu cross the road? Or the WhatsApp forwards of misspelled signboards from small towns, captioned Only in India! or English died here.
A hand-painted signboard in a tier-3 town is rarely an artistic choice.
When English-fluent, middle-class groups circulate these images, there is an unspoken message, we know better.
Here, struggle becomes entertainment and effort becomes spectacle.
Some of us climbed the class ladder through this same language, and we know how closely language shapes opportunity. Many of us search for better synonyms before submitting a grant proposal. Some of us reshape
our accents in group discussions.
The difference between me/you and the tea-stall signboard is not intelligence. It is access.
The works here speaks the aesthetics of aspiration, the efforts of belonging, and the quiet struggles for a better tomorrow.
@forplaysociety@react.space
Artist JITHIN KRISHNA VM @jk_meethal
Title : Domastic Blueprint of Self
Artist Statement Domestic Blueprints of Self functions as a spatial retrospective, inviting the viewer to navigate the environmental layers that shape human perspective. By recontextualizing the installation as a “home,” Jithin Krishna explores how the structures we inhabit act as the silent architects of our personal history. The work serves as a physical inquiry into the spaces that breathe life into our memories and provide the framework for our understanding of the world.
The installation challenges us to consider how the walls we live within ultimately define the windows through which we view the world.
@forplaysociety@react.space
Artist: @sebin.joseph.palanilkumkalayil
Land, The Palimpsest, Spine to Skin, and The Other Side of Truth - a series construct a visual field of fragmentation, memory, and the unstable condition of the human and its surroundings. The land appears not as passive territory but as a wounded body, marked by violence and borders, where punctured iron and burned surfaces hold traces of conflict and silent testimony. Within this terrain, the human figure emerges as a palimpsest—an erased yet persistent presence, embodying those unrecorded and unacknowledged in history, where identity dissolves into layered traces. This condition turns inward in Spine to Skin, where the body confronts itself, exposing its inner structure and collapsing the boundary between inter and intra through an act of self-interrogation. Finally, The Other Side of Truth disperses meaning into a surreal constellation of fragments, where truth is no longer singular or stable but exists as a shifting, fractured visual field dependent on perception.
@forplaysociety@react.space
