KMB 2025: Pipio Exhibition – Raising Questions on Violence, Silence, and Complicity

KOCHI:
On entering the room, the viewer is struck by the stone-pelting images from the video installation on the wall, whether to step back or go ahead. After one group throws, the images blur with another set of pelters as if blurring responsibility and challenging fixed positions of power.

The pelting continues, portraying performers oscillating from perpetrators to witnesses, to victims. Even the viewers become participants, raising questions about violence, silence, and complicity.

The exhibition, Pipio: A Bird Flies, A Stone Is Thrown, is a multi-channel installation by artists Aditi Kulkarni and Payal Arya; a collateral show opened recently in Forplay Society, Bazaar Road, Mattancherry, running parallel to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025 through this month-end.

Performers appear suspended in time, caught in slow, repeating gestures that refuse to move forward. It reminds one of warring factions, supporters, opposers and mute, guilty or not-so guilty, witnesses from time immemorial till date. It questions the viewers whether this has led anywhere.

The answer seems to lie in the huge stone oscillating in the next room, and the pendulum moving back and forth against the backdrop of the characters vandalising a stone sculpture in the video installation. The words, ‘a bullet travelling through the air creates a vacuum in its trajectory…much like the silence that follows it’ are loud on a wall.

“The stone is a metaphor, a perpetrator, a victim and witness,” said Arya, a lecturer in Jindal Global University, Pune.

Papier-mâché distorted and broken sculptures narrate stories of the past and present. They are made from the shredded pieces of acceptance forms in a shredding machine in the next room where one must move through the fragile transparent curtains, made from debris. Layered with meaning, they speak of shredded histories, violence, shame, and guilt.

“Most participants have been filling the acceptance forms and shredding them in the machine as if to rid the guilt,” she said. Aare we free of guilt? This is the question that lingers.

Each image and symbol implicate the viewer at every turn. On one side of the room, the door opens to three TV sets relaying events, remnants of the past, human, and natural calamities and on the other side into a dining hall where hierarchy still rules the roost.

With images of a chandelier, a lavish dining table laid with delicacies, the have-nots are seen stealing, hiding and partaking of leftover food despite resistance from those at the table, even at knifepoint. At the exit, papier-mâché pieces—a broken pillar, distorted bust and broken frame on the walls—relive broken memories. The words, above the clouds, freedom is boundless, reverberate.

Conceived as a series of living tableaux in six sections, the installation features characters in slow motion suspended in time exploring hierarchy, equality, geopolitics and the politics of the body, fragility, vulnerability, and conformity.

“It is an attempt to question the roles we play as ‘silent watchers’ in today’s global political landscape. The sculptural debris stands as scattered fragments, the residue of collective guilt and shame,” said Kulkarni, a Pune-based multimedia artist.

The duo said, “It is an adaptation from the film Pipio, developed during our residency in Film Academy Baden-Württemberg, where we were invited in 2019-2020 and the narrative was premiered at India Art Fair in 2023.

“It traces its origin to Rubble Hill in Stuggart, a hill created by piling the debris of the past. The movement in slow motion is our endeavour to stretch time through the staged scenes, each a recurrence of what cannot be forgotten. It contemplates the weight of individual and collective guilt and the cyclical patterns through which our histories persist, overlap, and repeat.”