Dima Srouji Presents a Body Of Work at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale

Dima Srouji presents a body of work in Kochi that unfolds across distinct institutional and exhibition contexts, bringing together solo and collaborative practices that engage with archaeology, sound, architecture, and material histories. Spanning Ishara House and multiple sites of the Kochi–Muziris Biennale, these projects reflect on what is preserved, erased, and reclaimed—foregrounding questions of land, memory, and survival across geographies shaped by colonial and ongoing violence.
 
Dima Srouji at Ishara House, Kochi
Foundations (2025)
 
At Ishara House, Kochi, Dima Srouji presents Foundations, a solo sonic and spatial installation developed specifically for the Ishara Foundation Programme. The work traces what remains and what has been erased from the ground in Palestine across time and place, engaging with archaeology, memory, and sound as tools of resistance.
 
The installation is structured around the plan of an exhumed tomb from Ancient Gaza, excavated in the 1930s by British archaeologists. This archaeological outline becomes a vessel through which displaced soil is reimagined as a returned monument—one that invites gathering and asserts a ground that refuses disappearance.
 
A layered sound composition unfolds within the space, combining archival audio recordings and news reels from the ongoing genocide in Gaza, all played in reverse. Rather than culminating on 7 October 2023, the sound moves beyond this moment to reveal the longer colonial continuum in Palestine as it extends across generations. The work concludes with a reversed personal recording of an interview with the artist’s grandfather, conducted shortly before his passing. As his memories of life during and prior to the Nakba of 1948 are played backwards, the narrative travels toward a time before rupture.
 
Accompanying the installation is a film composed of archival footage of Palestine from the past century, also played in reverse. Through this gesture, the work gradually peels away the accumulated layers of colonial history, exposing absence, continuity, and the fragility of memory embedded in the land.
 
Dima Srouji and Piero Tomassoni
Time Reclaiming Structures: Watchhouses (2025)
Air of Firozabad / Air of Palestine (2025)
 
In parallel, Srouji presents two collaborative installations with Piero Tomassoni as part of the Kochi–Muziris Biennale, where the artists were invited to conceive spatial projects across two heritage sites: Aspinwall House and the KVJ Rice Godown.
 
At Aspinwall House, the artists present Time Reclaiming Structures: Watchhouses (2025), a continuation of a series first introduced at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Installed throughout the outdoor courtyard, the miniature architectural forms are crafted from mild steel and elevated on stilts. Drawing inspiration from shelters, birdhouses, and defensive structures across cultures, the works function as sentinel-like forms that propose spaces of decompression—offering moments of pause amid accelerated life, socio-ecological crises, and disappearing habitats.
 
At the KVJ Rice Godown, a heritage structure repurposed for the first time as an exhibition venue, the artists present Air of Firozabad / Air of Palestine (2025). The suspended installation comprises hundreds of transparent hand-blown glass baubles hovering at the edge of perceptibility, registering their presence through subtle glints and shadows. One bauble is produced in Jaba’, Palestine, while the others are handcrafted in Firozabad, India—linking two regions with deep, generational histories of glassmaking.
 
As visual and sensorial extensions of laboured and illegible breath shaped by unquantifiable living and working conditions, the work speaks to persistence and precarity. Survival is rendered fragile and suspended, as fundamental rights to land, heritage, and life remain contested across geographies marked by displacement and violence. The installation is accompanied by a reading area conceived by the artists in an adjacent room, envisioned as an additional “space of decompression.”
December 16, 2025