Flowers symbolise commencements and conclusions. From a bouquet shared with loved ones to display affection meant to last longer than its fragrance or form, to a wreath placed on a limp corpse before burial or cremation, flowers remind us of beginnings, transience, and mortality.
Flower Show, an art exhibition, currently on at Neighbour Gallery in Kesavadasapuram, Thiruvananthapuram, explores this existence, which transcends class, caste and gender markers. Featuring 32 artists, the showcase uses blossoms as a motif to navigate themes such as love, loss, pain, prejudice and memory, among others, across formats.
The idea for the exhibition occurred to the founders of Neighbour Gallery, artists Joe Paul Cyriac, Valentina Abenavoli, and Anand Rajan, when they came across the work of Rishma Mariya, a Malayali queer art practitioner based in Kolkata. Titled Portrait of a Landscape, the acrylic painting reflects a “sanctuary”, where different beings coexist “without the fear of judgment or discrimination.” The elements melt and meld into each other, even beyond the canvas, calling for a celebration of diversity and not mere acceptance.
Art on display at Flower Show
| Photo Credit:
SPECIAL ARRANGMENT
“Soon, we started researching on flowers and ecology. Various topics which looked at flowers through an intersectional lens came up. The exhibition was conceived as a garden, where nothing stands in isolation,” says Joe.
On one side of the gallery, a photo series titled Home by Bengaluru-based Kritika Sriram, inspired by Karukku, an autobiographical novel by the Tamil Dalit feminist writer Bama, and Aswathy GS’s oil painting, reminiscent of a marriage photo featuring women of different ages, with jasmine on their hair, interact with each other. The photos also feature the photographer’s mother combing her hair and decorating it with flowers.
Aswathy says, “My work is based on a family photograph at a marriage. I often find inspiration from pictures. Over time, I have realised most of the photos I have collected feature women in everyday settings. There is a lot of beauty and emotion in the mundane images, like the small conversations or gestures like holding hands in my painting.”
Art on display at Flower Show
| Photo Credit:
SPECIAL ARRANGMENT
Mrudula Bhavani’s The plant/that is/cut off from/the flower, an embroidery on a pillow cover and writings, is the artist’s testimony of surviving domestic violence throughout childhood and teenage years. It also interacts with the other artworks in that section, which portrays marriages and families.
Devi Seetharam’s acrylic painting explores masculinity and how its certain performances reinforce patriarchy. Goan artist Osheen Siva’s Valarchchi looks at water hyacinth, planted in South India during the colonial rule as decorative flora and the ecological damage it inflicted on water bodies. She further questions how the responsibility to remove it has fallen on landless agricultural labourers, predominantly from Dalit communities.
Osheen Siva’s Valarchchi
| Photo Credit:
SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
Sanath Sugathan’s In Times of Absence is a fabric scrim, which locks in a thread used to weave jasmine flowers together. “It is from when I went to visit my partner in Calicut [Kozhikode]. We bought the flowers in the morning, but they dried up in the evening. However, I kept the yarn, which carried the fragrance of flowers, while heading back to Thiruvananthapuram,” says Sanath.
Tree Walk Archive’s photo album traces the collective’s journey through “photographs, memories, encounters, and moments of action.” The work looks at the efforts by the citizens’ collective, which has spent fourteen years advocating trees in Thiruvananthapuram.
Unnikrishnan C’s I Remember the Day is a wooden pookkalam painted with watercolour and natural pigments, alluding to a custom of laying “eighteen concentric rings of flowers created to welcome eighteen successive spells of rain and shine,” prevalent in rural Palakkad, during the Malayalam month of Karkkadakam.
Bengaluru-based Riya Bhartia’s Mutualism pays homage to the artist’s relationship with flowers and how they restored her connection to the world. Amiya J Hisham’s Annual Honesty is a two-part work about her time in the French countryside and her encounter with the eponymous plant, which becomes a “ghostly” looking object after it dies.
Flowers by Chennai-based Aishwarya Arumbakkam is a series of 86 drawings made from photographs of her mother during her last days. The pencil inscriptions around the drawings narrate how Aishwarya navigated her emotions through this time and her experience while anticipating loss.
Works by Akhiljith, Ali Monis Naqvi, Avnit Singh, Anitha TK, Devi Seetharam, Editions JOJO, Jerome K Johnson, Jithin Krishna, Kaanchi Chopra, Koyal Raheja, Krithik, Meera Ganapathi, Priyadarshini R, Mohit Mahato, Nabyl Gasim, Percy Kaki, Rini Alphonsa Joseph, Rithun Volga, Sreelekshmi KG, Venus Paul and Vipin Dhanurdharan are also included in the lineup.
Outside the gallery, Meera KM’s I’m No Longer is a garden featuring flowering plants from neighbourhoods and those gifted by her loved ones. “It was created to fight a human-centric tendency in architecture. I wanted a space for the other. It’s part of a gallery space, where I am trying to say, art doesn’t have to be rigid.”
Flower Show is on at Neighbour Gallery in Kesavadasapuram, Thiruvananthapuram till September 30. Time: 11am to 7pm. Closed on Mondays
Published – September 04, 2026 11:00 am IST
