New Delhi, Feb. 27 -- At the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025-26 last weekend, a group of young people stepped out of the late Vivan Sundaram's darkly autobiographical exhibit, Six Stations of a Life Pursued, into the late-afternoon sun and gathered on top of a flight of stairs at Cube artSpace on Mattancherry Road in Fort Kochi.

Minutes before, we had walked past a series of staged photographs of a man trapped in an iron cage, exuding helplessness and claustrophobia. Some of us had lowered our eyes as we were confronted by another sequence of images, of the artist's back, scarred after a surgery. Stitched with pins, metal bits sticking out of the flesh, these photographs look back at the viewer boldly, like defiant self-portraits.

This isn'...