Biraaj Dodiya’s DOOM ORGAN: Where memory, violence, and silence collide

At the newest edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), Mumbai-based artist Biraaj Dodiya’s installation DOOM ORGAN unfolds as a charged, unsettling meditation on how contemporary life processes violence, loss, and remembrance.

Concept & Themes
- Meditation on violence, loss, and remembrance: The work explores how contemporary life processes trauma and memory.
- Dual atmospheres: It oscillates between the heightened drama of a sports arena and the hushed stillness of a mortuary, symbolizing spectacle versus silence.
- Metaphor of the “doom organ”: An imagined ancient instrument that absorbs and releases collective grief, refusing erasure and amnesia.

Materials & Structure
- Assemblage of forms: Painted steel sculptures, intimate linen paintings, and photographs.
- Motifs:
- Medical stretchers & autopsy tables → evoke care and finality.
- Basketball posts → symbolize competition, triumph, and defeat.
- Paintings & photographs: Hover between body and landscape, with earthy pigments that crack and erode, resembling excavation and buried histories.

Inspirations & References
- Historical rupture: The 1341 Kerala deluge that collapsed Muziris and gave rise to Kochi.
- Local geography: Ocean horizons, textured walls of the Kappiri shrine, and violent floods shaping the region.
- Global resonance: Circulation of bruised and broken bodies across digital media, consumed and discarded at speed.

Artist’s Voice
- Dodiya reflects: “The medical stretcher and basketball backboards, two opposing motifs that evoke very different relationships to our physicality, anchor the installation. Together they make a fictional space, one symbolizing stillness and loss, the other winning, movement, power.”

Impact
- Raises questions: Who is seen, who is remembered, and who disappears without trace?
- Positions art as resistance against erasure, insisting that fractured memory still demands to be heard.
- Offers no resolution—only a haunting reminder that silence and spectacle coexist in our present moment.