Ashes of Assam’s insurgency haunt Kochi Biennale in Dhiraj Rabha’s searing work

Kochi, Dec 29: Fragments of an Assamese household are alive within artiste Dhiraj Rabha's installation at Kochi-Muziris Biennale, only covered in soot, partially burnt and carrying a fragile memory of the state's troubled past during the insurgency of the 1990s.

A deeply immersive installation by Rabha titled, "The Quiet Weight of Shadows", excavates the long and fraught history of insurgency in Assam under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act.

Rabha, who was born in Borali Gaon in 1995, was raised in a former United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) detention camp in Goalpara after his father, an ex-militia, surrendered his arms.

"I spent my entire childhood and youth inside the camp, that was normal for me. It was only when I came out of the camp to study at Shantiniketan I realised that our way of living was not normal. The rest of the world wasn't living inside tall bamboo walls secured by taller watchtowers," Rabha told PTI.

Rabha's practice draws from installations, photography, film, and archival documentation to reflect on displacement, surveillance, and resilience within communities shaped by the insurgency, as he looks back and attempts to distinguish his lived experiences from those presented "to the world outside those camps".

The 30-year-old started working on the project in 2021, primarily to listen to the stories of people who had lived inside camps, ex-ULFA members and their kins to make a record of lives that were different from the state and media narratives.

The household installation comes alive in a solemn light with fragments of real archival materials, newspapers, books, pamphlets, and documents related to the ULFA movement and student protests from the 1990s.

Photographs displayed here depict everyday life in camps: training sessions, weddings, soldiers, and fleeting domestic moments. At the heart of the installation is a luminous but disconcerting garden of carnivorous plants glowing under blue UV light.

The brightly coloured plants, with small speakers emitting broadcasts from the 1990s to 2010 related to the ULFA movement in Assamese, Hindi and English, project the duality of lives inside the detention camps.

"The carnivorous plants represent power. They represent the dominating news. It is actually about who holds power. News spreads from everywhere, and it consumes everything," Rabha said.

The garden of the ominous plants is surrounded by eight watchtowers, modelled on surveillance structures commonly found in detention camps. The watchtowers invite visitors to peek inside where video interviews with former ULFA members play on loop.

"When I lived inside the detention camp, I would often look at the guards inside these watchtowers. They could look at the outside world and inside the camp at the same time. Now I feel I am playing the role of a watchtower," Rabha said.

The installation also includes Rabha's film "Whispers Beneath the Ashes" (2025), a poetic and surreal work that departs from linear storytelling.

The sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which formally opened here on December 12, is running across 22 venues in Fort Kochi, Mattancherry, Willingdon Island, and Ernakulam with 66 artists and collectives from more than 25 countries.

PTI