Speakers: Riyas Komu, Prof. CS, Prof. Ilias, Amrith Lal; 

Moderated by Sabih Ahmed

Venue: Mehaboob John Talkies (URU)     

The opening panel sets the stage for Amphibian Aesthetics, a philosophical proposition by the artistic directors and curators of the Ishara House project. Born from an understanding of the world as a continuous, interwoven process, amphibian aesthetics calls for a renewed paradigm, one attuned to fluidity, adaptability, and the thresholds between states. This session traces the many pathways through which the idea has emerged: how it surfaced, the conceptual and material grounds that nourished it and the futures it anticipates towards an evolving framework for thinking, making, and sensing amid a rapidly transforming world.

Riyas Komu is an artist and curator whose multidisciplinary practice explores war, migration, memory, and social conflict. Co-founder of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and URU Art Harbour, he has curated major cultural initiatives and exhibitions. 

Dr. C. S. Venkiteswaran is a Kerala-based film critic, documentary filmmaker, curator, and translator who writes in English and Malayalam. Author of several books on cinema and media, he has contributed widely to journals and served on juries and curatorial teams at major film festivals across India.

Prof. M. H. Ilias is a scholar of migration, the Indian Ocean world, and Islam in South Asia. Formerly at Southern Denmark University and Jamia Millia Islamia, he has held prestigious fellowships at Oxford, Berlin, and Temple University, contributing extensively to Middle Eastern and South Asian studies.

Amrith Lal is a senior journalist and commentator known for incisive analyses of politics, culture, and society in India. Former Senior Editor at The Indian Express, he brings literary training and historical insight to questions of democracy, identity, and public life, shaping national discourse through reflective, intellectually grounded writing.

Sabih Ahmed is a curator and cultural theorist currently serving as a Projects Advisor to the Ishara Art Foundation. He is the co-artistic director of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2026 and co-author of ‘Mass Traffic’ (Mousse, 2023).

Speaker: Dima Srouji

Moderated by Anuj Daga

Venue: Mehaboob John Talkies (URU)     

This session explores how art and architectural practices mould, morph, and move through historical exigencies. Amidst the ongoing ecological precarity, cultural erasures and unstable futures, the session asks if a new spatial thinking is possible, one that is capable of inhabiting multiple worlds, temporalities, and material states at once. How do memory and material get encoded in space, and how does architecture reorder the passages of time we inhabit? 'Amphibian Aesthetics – Architectural Imaginaries' invites participants to rethink architecture as a practice that both absorbs and reshapes the contradictions of the present, opening new grounds for the future.

Dima Srouji is a Palestinian architect and visual artist whose practice approaches the ground as a living archive. She uses collaborative craft to restitch endangered histories towards cultural repair.

Anuj Daga is an architect, writer and curator, as well as a collegial associate to the exhibition team of ‘Amphibian Aesthetics’. 

How do we sense, narrate, and imagine life in a time of climate collapse, migratory displacement, and spiritual search? This conference furnaces an understanding of art in the age of precarity through the relationship between ecology, migration and spirituality - a triadic relationship that speaks eloquently of  evanescent ecologies, forgotten histories, travels and transformations and unique forms of spiritual explorations. The panel assembles a diverse group of thinkers to explore amphibian aesthetics—a frame that can precisely make sense of hybridity, adaptation, and fragility across environments, histories, and belief systems.  

James Onley, historian of South Asian diasporas, examines the early migrations of Indian communities and their aesthetic legacies—especially in music and visual culture—across two centuries of movement, labor, and transformation.

Dr. Varuni Bhatia is a scholar of South Asian studies whose research explores the intersections of religion, politics, and history in colonial and postcolonial India. She is the author of Unforgetting Chaitanya: Vaishnavism and Cultures of Devotion in Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2017), and her work engages deeply with questions of memory, identity, and nationalism.

Dr. Susmita Mohanty is a spaceship designer, entrepreneur, and cultural collaborator whose work spans space architecture, climate advocacy, and art–science engagements. Her works link the precarity of planetary life with speculative imaginaries of living beyond Earth, bridging ecological, technological, and artistic futures.

Moderated by M.H. Ilias, the discussion will traverse shifting landscapes—biological, historical, and spiritual—inviting us to consider art and thought as amphibious acts of survival, memory, and reinvention.

The panel discussion will be followed with a performance by Shabnam Virmani.

A concert by Shabnam Virmani 

accompanied by Shreeparna Mitra

Weaving together poems and insights from Kabir and Sufi wisdom traditions, Shabnam evokes the 'akath' or the 'ineffable' that the mystics point us to. Moods and metaphors, fragments and fables wend their way in song across endless borders to appear again and again... each time marked afresh by a new language, territory, author. And yet tirelessly they escape all these markers, bringing us to the untellable place beyond the tale - a place the mystics call Love.

Speaker: Michelangelo Pistoletto

Moderated by Grazina Subelyte

Venue: Uru Pavilion + Online

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s conversation with curator Grazina Subelyte marks the first major presentation of his works in South Asia. The dialogue revisits the two series featured in the exhibition: The Free Space, first conceived in his 1976 book One Hundred Exhibitions in the Month of October and later realised in 1999 with inmates at Milan’s San Vittore prison, and Division and Multiplication of the Mirror (1978), where reflection becomes a metaphor for growth, exchange, and collective experience. Tracing the motif of the cage and its counterpoints in openness and participation, the conversation, framed within Amphibian Aesthetics, will engage Pistoletto’s current thinking on climate justice and the role of art in society today.

Michelangelo Pistoletto is an influential Italian artist and a central figure of the Arte Povera movement, renowned for his mirror paintings that collapse the boundaries between artwork, viewer, and environment. His practice extends into social sculpture, using art as a catalyst for collective reflection and civic transformation.

Gražina Subelytė is an art historian and curator at Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, known for curating exhibitions that explore the intersections of Surrealism, magic, occultism and 20th-century art. 

Details to be decided.