Writing Initiatives

The fire died down. People moved on. Benefitting from the social popularity of the themes of ‘Dada’ and ‘Animal farm’4, the exhibition note wants to access the political weightage of these words without actually practicing them. As Neofetou notes, political art criticism that restricts itself to formal or thematic analysis tends to dissolve the particularities of how works are produced and circulated, turning politics into content rather than relation (Neofetou 2021). When dealing with artworks which are termed ‘political’, we often feel the violence is always what the piece is talking about and not what it itself has been perpetuating. The usage of Aziz’s poem without giving him the credit was an issue, but the material of the artworks and the space they were displayed in were for a certain class and not for the marginalised for whom Aziz writes (Bhasthi 2025). This is not an isolated tension. Writing on Dalit art in Indian exhibitions, Aarushi Punia shows how institutions often celebrate “marginalised” work while quietly stripping it of its political and caste‑marked force, keeping structural hierarchies intact (Punia 2025). The questions asked by him should belong in the criticism of an exhibition reviewer. By not addressing these issues, the writer and the publications both become irrelevant in the larger scheme of art world. From the captions of the artworks to the gallery’s response, every layer worked as a gateway into a system well known for representing marginalised voices while excluding them structurally. To understand that system, we cannot look at artwork, artist and institution separately; criticism has to hold them together if it wants to engage incidents like this critically.

“Me Too” at the Biennale

In January this year, Bose Krishnamachari, co-founder of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, resigned from his roles as president and member of the board of trustees of the Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF)5. It later emerged that his resignation came in light of a sexual harassment complaint filed against him by one of the female employees6. This was not the first time the biennale had faced such allegations: in 2018, another co‑founder, Riyas Komu, stepped down from all organisational roles after accusations of sexual misconduct during the #MeToo moment7. The repetition is telling. An institution celebrated for progressive programming and public discourse around rights has, more than once, had to reckon with allegations of gendered violence from within its own workforce. Writing on the scale and significance of “India’s first and only biennale”, some coverage mentions these allegations only in passing, folded into a celebratory narrative of the institution8. McCartney shows how institutions often sustain the fiction that art and artists can be separated, even while relying on progressive rhetoric about rights and representation (McCartney 2022). In Kochi’s case, public programming around women’s rights sat uneasily alongside allegations by women workers within the same institution.