India, March 8 -- F our years after Dhiraj Rabha was born, his family fled their home in Baraligaon, Assam. His father, Dhananjay Rabha, had joined the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) as a student, in 1984. By 1999, convinced the rebellion had lost its way and keen to be part of promised peace talks with the government, he laid down arms. As a senior member of the political wing of ULFA, this meant he and his family were now under threat. Dhiraj Rabha, 30, still lives in the rehabilitation camp to which they moved. It sits in an abandoned cotton mill. Tall bamboo machans serve as watchtowers. Its architecture of surveillance has informed his art. His graduate degree presentation at Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan included a watchtower that led into a room covered in poems and drawings relating to former ULFA members, and songs of the Rabha tribe. In the coir godown at Fort Kochi's Aspinwall House, his exhibit, The Quiet Weight of Shadows, takes the viewer through a large installation of carnivorous plants, embedded with speakers blaring news about the northeast. Watchtowers play videos in which former ULFA members talk about their dreams, disappointments and fears. The juxtaposition of news broadcasts and personal narratives raises the question: What is the real narrative of a region? Who gets to speak it? And, what narrative will the distant viewer pay more attention to? "These individuals are neither heroes nor villains. They are people shaped by a particular historical moment, and long after the guns fell silent, they continue to live at the margins of society," Rabha says. A wooden room built on-site holds ephemera from a rebel's life: letters, photographs, writing; all charred. This is not the fate of Rabha and his two sisters. They have graduated and pursued careers. But this past is still part of our lives, Rabha says. "By revisiting these narratives, Dhiraj Rabha does more than just map the landscape; he offers a lens through which to reassess the region's majoritarian insurgency history," says Madhurjya De, who is part of the biennale's curatorial team and a member of HH Spaces, an artist's collective co-founded by Chopra....