Community project and workshops ‘Fire Drawing’ as part of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kochi, India. 2026
Selected photos (photo courtesy of the Biennale’s official photographer).
Project execution: March 13-14
On display: March 14-31
Fire Drawing is a community-based participatory project and workshop series that engages art as a tool for collective learning and social activation. Presented as part of the ABC Programme, a core educational and public engagement component of the 6th edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the project took place on 13–14 March 2026 in Art Room venue, Fort Kochi, Kerala, India.
As per the curatorial note, The Art Room, a project by the official Kochi-Muziris ABC Programme, is a space that embodies the idea that learning is both an individual and collective process, best nurtured in environments that are non-competitive, non-judgmental, fearless, and creative. It invites learners of all ages to access their innate creative potential as a foundation for being-in-the-world as an act of knowing. Here, learning is not instruction but an attunement - to self, to others and the world. The Art Room project has evolved over 8 years at the Biennale.
Through Fire Drawing, the artist introduced participants to key methodologies and material processes central to her practice, facilitating an open-ended space for embodied learning and collaborative knowledge production, with over 60 participants in total. The workshops form part of an ongoing project that the artist has developed over the past four years, engaging diverse participants across generations, cultural backgrounds, geographical contexts.
Emphasizing the process as much as the outcome, the project culminated in the collective creation of a large-scale artwork responding to the theme Ecosystem. Developed through movement and overlapping mark-making, the work reflected on the Fort Kochi port area and its surrounding environments. The resulting co-created piece remained on view in the Art Room throughout the Biennale, extending the workshop process into the exhibition space and foregrounding the notion of shared authorship.
