Beyond the Biennale: How murals are rewriting Kochi’s streets

Explore how murals in Kochi transform streets into vibrant canvases reflecting community, politics, and art beyond the Biennale.

Walk through Fort Kochi and Mattancherry to watch art, history and politics intersect on its walls.

“That is the unique nature of public art — the impermanence of it combined with the interventions of public interactions with a painting. It gives the painting another, different  life,” says Jinil Manikandan, artist and member of the Trespassers. His response to the question about the ephemerality of murals in public places — their vulnerablity to heat, dust, and rain. And of course the scope for destruction which makes one wonder if the effort is worth it.  

He illustrates his point with a previous work, a mural the collective painted in Copra Market in Kozhikode in 2021, where they drew the processes that brought a coconut to the market. “When we revisted the site some time later we noticed that coconuts were stacked against the wall we had painted, which we felt gave it a ‘lived/live’ kind of feeling,” he says.  

The Fearless Collective mural in Fort Kochi. | Photo Credit: THULASI KAKKAT

Coming to the present, Jinil references the mural on a wall in the compound of Cube Art Space in Mattancherry, a venue for Edam, where one of the collateral events of the Kochi Muziris Biennale is on.

The work in question by Trespassers, the Kerala-based collective of eight artists — Jinil, Vishnupriyan, Sreerag P, Ambady Kannan, Arjun Gopi, Pranav Pranav Prabhakaran, Bashar UK, and Jatin Latha Shaji. All Fine Arts students of Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady – is on a 20x35-foot wall and bright with details. In vivid shades of pink, green, blue and yellow, it is essentially a picture of life in the area with a dash of the surreal. Cue a cable of an airconditioner, which becomes a tightrope with a ropewalker on it, which turns into a sleeping tiger’s tail.