In the courtyard of Gallery OED in Mattancherry, time does not tick - it suspends.
Malayalam letters hang mid-air, casting fractured shadows against brick walls. Neon light slices through the dusk, shifting as evening deepens.
Shadows splinter and reform, so that each visitor’s movement alters the installation’s rhythm. Graffiti interrupts stillness, while the faint hum of neon makes the courtyard pulse with suspended energy. Kaalam is not a spectacle to be watched from afar. It is a space to move through.
Conceived by the #hashtag collective - a group of artists and architects founded by Biju Kuriakose, Abin Chaudhuri, Parvathi Nayar and Saira Biju - together with mural artist Apoorv Dutt, Kaalam transforms the exterior of Gallery OED into a meditation on time. The installation opened on December 10 with a press preview and runs from December 11, 2025 to March 30, 2026. The courtyard remains open at all times - an encounter with time itself.
The word kaalam carries layered meanings in Malayalam - time, era, destiny, decay. Here, it stretches across space in neon, suspended acrylic lettering, mural and graffiti. A three-dimensional anamorphic structure shifts depending on where one stands, making movement essential to meaning.
At its heart lies Parvathi Nayar’s poem, Kaalam: Time’s ferocious timeline, translated into Malayalam by Saira Biju. The text frames time as both impassive and intimate - a force that produces urgency and exhaustion, yet also wonder and longing. “Time is Violent. Rupturing the nothingness to create that ‘now’ we struggle to define.”
Parvathi describes the installation as “a temporal field the viewer moves through,” where suspended elements shift perspectives and walking beneath becomes a way of moving through time itself. For her, the poem rests in duality: time as a force that shapes us, and something we instinctively resist.
Saira sees the work as “a layered and lived experience” that examines cycles of urgency, repetition, fatigue and renewal. She notes that the courtyard itself is integral: “Being outdoors introduces natural light, movement, weather, and the surrounding urban rhythms of Kochi, allowing time to be experienced physically and sensorially.”
Architect Biju Kuriakose emphasises how Kaalam engages with space differently: “not as a container, but as something shaped by time, memory, and instability.” He adds that the gallery becomes immersive and disorienting, with language floating and shadows shifting so that meaning reveals itself only from certain positions.
For Apoorv Dutt, the collaboration is a chance to interrogate time’s agency. “The work deliberately critiques the notion of time, treating it as a raw, self-aware narrative subject. It asserts time as something that actively shapes, fractures and reforms us.”
The experience is interactive but quiet. Visitors may walk under the hanging letters, tilt their heads to catch splintered silhouettes, or pause to leave reflections in response books. Some linger, tracing the neon outlines with their eyes; others move quickly, letting the installation shift around them. Volunteers guide or offer walkthroughs, keeping the atmosphere intimate and community-oriented. The absence of spectacle is deliberate: the installation invites slowing down, resisting the acceleration that defines much of contemporary life.
There is no entry fee. No fixed route. No prescribed way to engage.
Set within Mattancherry’s layered landscape - a neighbourhood shaped by trade, migration and memory - Kaalam feels particularly resonant. “The courtyard becomes less a venue than a threshold, where the past presses against the present.”
The installation does not offer easy answers. Instead, it echoes the poem’s final provocation: “If nothing changes, can Time exist? If we don’t change, will we exist?”