At Flower Show art exhibition in Thiruvananthapuram flowers are more than just an ornament
Flower Show at Neighbour Gallery in Kesavadasapuram transforms the gallery into a garden of 32 artists, each using blossoms to navigate love, loss, prejudice and memory. The show treats flowers not merely as decoration but as a language that cuts across class, caste and gender, inviting viewers to linger in the scent of transience and renewal.
The founders—Joe Paul Cyriac, Valentina Abenavoli and Anand Rajan—were sparked by Rishma Mariya’s Portrait of a Landscape, a canvas that imagined a sanctuary of coexistence. Their research into ecology and intersectionality shaped the exhibition into a living ecosystem where no work stands alone.
Highlights include Kritika Sriram’s photo series Home, which dialogues with Aswathy GS’s oil painting of a multi‑generational wedding scene, and Mrudula Bhavani’s embroidered pillow The plant/that is/cut off from/the flower, a testimony of surviving domestic violence. Devi Seetharam confronts patriarchal masculinity, while Osheen Siva’s Valarchchi interrogates the invasive water‑hyacinth and its burden on Dalit labourers. A tactile thread in Sanath Sugathan’s In Times of Absence captures the fleeting fragrance of jasmine, and Unnikrishnan C’s wooden pookkalam I Remember the Day evokes rural rain‑calling rituals.
Beyond the walls, Meera KM’s garden I’m No Longer plants community‑sourced blooms, challenging the human‑centric rigidity of architecture. Together, the works weave a garden of resistance and remembrance, reminding that flowers can be both fragile symbols and sturdy agents of social critique.