ULFA ex-member's artist son turns Assam insurgency into disturbing landscape at Kochi Biennale

Kochi: Inside the Coir Godown at Aspinwall House, the main venue of Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Fort Kochi, the light shifts to an unsettling blue. A garden glows, seductive at first glance, almost ornamental. But as visitors move closer, beauty begins to unravel into discomfort. What looks like a decorative landscape slowly reveals itself as a trap. 

This is ‘The Quiet Weight of Shadows’, an immersive installation by Dhiraj Rabha, a 30-year-old artist from Assam whose work draws directly from lived memory, prolonged research, and the afterlives of conflict. Through installation, sound, film, and archival material, Rabha excavates the long, fraught history of insurgency in Assam, particularly the years shaped by the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA).

At the heart of the installation stands a disconcerting garden of enlarged carnivorous plants, glowing under ultraviolet light. Their sharp, white, tooth-like forms appear alluring from a distance. Up close, they reveal their true nature. 

From within the plants pours a dense, overlapping soundscape in the form of news broadcasts in Assamese, Hindi, and English from the 1990s to 2010, all centred on the ULFA movement and Assam’s insurgency. Headlines blur into static, voices collapse into one another and meaning is swallowed rather than clarified.

“The carnivorous plants represent power,” Rabha explained. “They represent the dominating news. It is actually about who holds power. News spreads from everywhere, and it consumes everything,” he said.

This act of consumption is central to the work. The plants become metaphors for how media narratives flatten complexity, reducing lived realities into digestible headlines. There is a deliberate visual contradiction at play.

“From a distance, the flowers look beautiful. But when you come closer, there are layered stories inside. Videos are playing, voices are speaking. It looks different from far away, but closer, the contradictions appear. I am trying to portray the duality of media narratives,” Rabha told Onmanorama.

Encircling this glowing garden are eight towering wooden structures, modelled on surveillance watchtowers commonly found in detention camps. From these elevated points, visitors are placed in an uneasy position, simultaneously watching and being watched, mirroring the constant state of surveillance that defined life in conflict zones. 

Inside each tower, small video screens play raw, understated interviews with former ULFA members who surrendered to the state. They speak quietly about fear, loss, violence, and their hopes for their children and families. These intimate reflections stand in sharp contrast to the aggressive noise of broadcast media below.

The tension is deliberate. Official narratives shout, lived memories whisper and between them lies the uneasy space Rabha wants viewers to inhabit.

In an adjoining space, Rabha reconstructs the image of a burnt house. Scattered across the floor are fragments of real archival material like newspapers, photographs, books, pamphlets, protest literature, and documents from the 1990s related to the ULFA movement and student activism.

“The house is a representation, but the archives are real. These are real documents. Burnt houses were common during that time, from the 1990s to around 2010,” Rabha said. 

Displayed photographs capture fleeting moments of everyday life - training sessions, weddings, soldiers posing for the camera, domestic scenes inside camps. “Many images are partially damaged, their details obscured, echoing how memory itself erodes under prolonged violence and fear. Many of these photographs were often burnt to destroy evidence,” he said.

The installation also includes a 35-minute experimental film, ‘Whispers Beneath the Ashes’, screened in a darkened room. Dreamlike and non-linear, the film follows a group of children wandering through a forest, encountering mysterious figures as they search for a sense of home. 

“The film is based on drama and performance. The children represent the people of Assam, and the only adult character represents the insurgency movement. He is trying to build a home, which is a metaphor for building the nation,” Rabha explained. 

The children imitate him. Together, they succeed in building the home only for it to be destroyed by those in power. “Home becomes a metaphor and the ambition to find one becomes the journey,” he said.

Growing up under watch
The emotional core of ‘The Quiet Weight of Shadows’ lies in Rabha’s own childhood. Born in 1995, his early life unfolded inside the structures of conflict. In 1999, when he was just four years old, his father, part of ULFA’s political wing, surrendered to the state. The family was uprooted from their village of Borali and relocated to a detention camp in Goalpara town.

“Back then, several families lived together and there were limits on going out. I didn’t really understand it at the time, but now things are better, and people have more freedom,” Rabha recalled.

Those years of communal yet restricted living, defined by surveillance, uncertainty, and displacement, continue to shape his artistic language.

Rabha initially studied BA Political Science in Assam before turning to art. His perspective shifted decisively when he moved to Santiniketan to pursue his BFA and MFA in painting at Visva-Bharati University. He also visited the Kochi Biennale in 2018 and 2022 as a student, experiences that left a lasting imprint. 

“But once I moved to Santiniketan, I realised how the ULFA movement and Assam’s insurgency were viewed by the outside world. That experience changed my perspective in so many different ways. It was there that I became acutely aware of how narratives are shaped, who controls them, and who is excluded,” Rabha said.

The Kochi Biennale installation is the result of four years of sustained research, drawing together personal memory, interviews, archival material, and fieldwork. 

“My father surrendered in 1999 when I was four. We moved from Borali to Goalpara. I am trying to portray how the media narratives of the ULFA movement and the Assamese insurgency were cushioning the power dynamics, and how those in power controlled the narratives,” Rabha said.

“The carnivorous flowers embody this duality. They look colourful. But once you get close, they grab you,” he added.

Rabha’s journey at the Biennale was briefly interrupted. On December 27, during his stay in Fort Kochi, he met with a bike accident and sustained head injuries. He returned to Assam to rest and recover and is expected to be back at the Biennale by February.

Yet even in his absence, ‘The Quiet Weight of Shadows’ continues to resonate. It does not offer closure or verdicts. Instead, it asks viewers to sit with discomfort and to listen to what is drowned out, to notice what is aestheticised, and to recognise how power often hides behind beauty. In transforming Assam’s insurgent history into an experiential landscape, Rabha creates a space where surveillance, silence, and storytelling coexist, and where the past continues to cast long, quiet shadows.