KMB-2025 artist Faiza Hasan narrates tales of her time in Kochi
Kochi / March 1, 2026
Kochi, Mar 01: A wave of memories and flood of emotions appear to be sweeping at the door of Faiza Hasan’s art. The sound of roller that roared its way to the floor is yet to recede. The light playing with the lace-like froth at the edges and viewers’ movements spur the imagination—personifying the sea, feeling the wind smelling of sea, spotting ships, listening to voices, and hearing sighs of relief of the ancient mariners on touching shore.
The water glistening through its dalliance with the sand has a stillness about it, yet moves with the light filtering inside, as the sea seems to flow in through the window, when the ripples cause movements on the floor.
Artist Faiza has laboriously drawn the last lap of the wave in a corner of the wooden floor. The life-size image juxtaposed with six charcoal self-portraits drawn from 2020 to 2025 hanging on the walls resonates with the sea outside and emotions inside.
Faiza explores time in different dimensions, of the changes happening with each passing wave or rather moment. Her work Kal (2025), exhibited on the first floor of the Director’s Bungalow, Aspinwall House, Fort Kochi, as part of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) 2025, provokes thoughts and dialogue on seeming dualities and individual perspectives of passage of time, identity, memories, and changes emerging over the past to future.
“My work responds to some of KMB 2025 curator Nikhil Chopra’s ideas of time, site, and the temporality, and of body and memory too. I have drawn a life-size drawing of water watching a shore; thinking about a precise moment before the wave breaks. It has a momentary characteristic to this work, but the self-portraits done from 2020 and 2025 stretch time in a very different way,” said the Hyderabad-based artist.
Each portrait depicts her moods and emotions— curious, watchful, dreaming, musing, pondering, enigmatic, despondent, meditative, resilient, bold and physical appearance, forever changing, like each wave and life outside. Through her personal idioms, Faiza speaks of the universal.
With an eye for detailing, Faiza drew the water with varakh (ultra-thin edible foil)-like strips laying them on the floor, lifting and scraping them to perfection. In a way it’s a tribute to the ancient varakh craft that’s fast fading from Hyderabad and the people who toil hard to make the delicate silver and gold foils topping sweet delicacies and nourishing them. The fragile material and art gel with the KMB 2025 theme, for the time being.
“Water is a recurring motif in my work, about my relationship with it, and Kochi and its histories. It reminds me of an image I shot some time ago here, but can no longer find it, may be owing to climate change,” she said.
The rhythms of the rollers go on, striking a chord in the heart that listens as it laps the shore laden with surprises and takes back whatever possible, layered with histories from time immemorial. Sometimes with intensity, full of sound and fury, turning realities into memories, even wiping out landscapes and changing histories as in Kochi-Muziris, or touching the shores gently, reminding one of varied emotions rolling inside in response to the outside world.
The work is a precise moment before wave break, between past and future, the water gazing at land or vice-versa opening out expansively to the vast possibilities, of travel, of landing, of sailing and life beyond, binding shores, bringing people together, sharing cultures and other exchanges.
Faiza is familiar with Kochi-Muziris Biennale. “I worked for the Foundation, was a curator for Students Biennale in 2014 and, 2016, and in 2018 and 2021, I led the programming. Now I have come a full circle. The work emerges from my relationship with Kochi,” she said.
ENDS
