Dhiraj Rabha on The Quiet Weight of Shadows, an installation at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale that turns the lived history of the ULFA years in Assam into an immersive meditation on memory, media, and power
At first glance, it looks almost serene. Under blue ultraviolet light, a garden of carnivorous plants glows softly at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Their tooth-like forms appear ornamental, even inviting. Only when visitors move closer does the installation begin to unsettle.
Encircling this garden are eight watchtowers, modelled on surveillance structures seen in detention camps. From these elevated spaces, visitors are placed in the position of both observer and observed. Inside the towers, video interviews with former United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) members play quietly. The speakers reflect on fear, loss, violence, and family via voices that are restrained and introspective, standing in stark contrast to the aggressive news audio below.
A burnt house
For artist Dhiraj Rabha, this shift from beauty to unease is deliberate. Titled The Quiet Weight of Shadows (2025), Rabha’s installation revisits the long and violent history of the ULFA insurgency in Assam. But it does not unfold like an archive or a timeline. Instead, it works through atmosphere, sound, surveillance and fragmentation forcing viewers to experience how power, media, and memory operate together.
Nearby, Rabha reconstructs a burnt house. The structure itself is symbolic, but the materials scattered inside it are not. Newspapers, pamphlets, books, and documents from the 1990s which are linked to the ULFA movement and student protests are all real. Burnt houses, Rabha notes, were common during those years. Here, the archive appears damaged, incomplete, and vulnerable, much like memory itself.
Watch: Inside the Quiet Weight of Shadows: Dhiraj Rabha on ULFA, Media Power, and Memory at KMB
The domestic installation is illuminated in a subdued, almost reverential light. Photographs displayed in the space capture ordinary moments from camp life, such as training sessions, weddings, the presence of armed men, and brief glimpses of domestic routine.
The Burnt House
“The contrast between the lighting and colour scheme of the carnivorous plants and the documents kept in the burnt house was deliberate,” Rabha told The Federal. “I wanted the plants to look beautiful, but when approached, they consume you.”
That shift in perspective shapes the Biennale installation. The glowing carnivorous plants emit overlapping news broadcasts in Assamese, Hindi, and English from the 1990s to around 2010 relating to ULFA. The voices pile up, dissolve into noise, and overwhelm meaning. Headlines replace nuance. Experience is swallowed by repetition.
Insurgency as an experiential landscape
Rabha’s relationship to this history is not distant. Born in 1995 in Borali Gaon, he grew up in Goalpara within the grounds of a ULFA detention camp after his father, a former militia member, surrendered his weapons. This setting, marked by the lingering presence of insurgency and surveillance, shaped his early years before he later began to understand its wider political and historical implications. It was only later, after leaving for art studies in Kolkata, that the conflict revealed itself to him in a broader frame.
“I grew up in an atmosphere after the ULFA activists’ surrender, and all of it was normal for me,” he said. “But once I came to Kolkata for my studies, I started looking at it differently. All of that had a larger setting. The picture was even larger.” For Rabha, the plants stand in for dominant media power. They consume everything in their reach.
Watch Tower and carnivorous plants at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale
The 30-year-old artist began working on the project in 2021 during the COVID lockdown, driven by a desire to listen closely to those who had lived inside the camps. He engaged with former ULFA members and their families to document lives and experiences that rarely find space within state accounts or dominant media narratives.
Also read: Kochi-Muziris Biennale’s sixth edition set to begin from December 12
The installation also includes Whispers Beneath the Ashes (2025), a film that follows children wandering through a forest in search of home. Rabha describes the video as a standalone work, but one that changes meaning when absorbed into the larger installation. “The video I have included is also a standalone work,” he said. “When placed in this whole context, it has a different meaning. As a standalone video, it might convey a different idea.”
Despite years of documentary research, Rabha resists presenting the work as a conventional archive. He chooses surrealism over explanation, fragments over conclusions. “There is a lot of data, a lot of documents,” he said. “But I didn’t want to present it in a straightforward exhibition format.”
The Quiet Weight of Shadows offers no closure. Instead, it asks viewers to sit with discomfort to notice how beauty masks threat, how sound overwhelms sense, and how some voices are amplified while others remain almost inaudible. In doing so, Rabha turns the history of insurgency into an experiential landscape, where surveillance, silence, and storytelling continue to coexist and where the past still casts its long, quiet shadow.
