April 18, 2026

Mansi Kashatria: Reimagining Institutions

Yul Cho, Ifra Shariq, and Ruoxi Gao in conversations with Mansi Kashatria 

Conversations with Mansi Kashatria, a researcher and writer working between India and Sweden, on art institutions, reimagining society, caste, race, and the politics of cultural production. 

Mansi Kashatria is currently completing her PhD at Linköping University, focusing on contemporary art institutions and curatorial practices. Her research looks at Konsthall C in Stockholm and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, examining how institutions attempt to “reimagine” society while navigating structural inequalities. 

IFRA: Maybe we can start with your research?

MANSI: Yes. I’m close to finishing it. I’m looking at two art institutions: Konsthall C in Hökarängen, Stockholm, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, India. I had been reading a lot of artistic and curatorial practices and noticed a loose pattern: a call to “come together and imagine a new world,” to reimagine society. 

That made me curious: if we want a better, alternative world, how are institutions actually doing it? It began as an inquiry-based suspicion. Even after four years, I still have that suspicion, but I also had hopes of finding something fruitful, practices that can talk about the ills of society. 

I visited both places, stayed in Hökarängen and Kochi, and spoke to artists, curators, mediators and volunteers. In Kochi, the biennale edition 2022-23 employed 20 art mediators for four months to give guided tours. I walked with them to understand how they interpret the artistic and curatorial practices. 

They worked with limited information: copies of the curator’s call and short notes on artists. I write about this as it reveals the interaction between what the institution provides, what the art says, and what the curatorial practice does. The mediators sit in between, giving a new language, sometimes with questionable facts. I call it “guerrilla mediation” because they constructed this knowledge themselves. The institution failed to train them, so they approached the artists, gathered information, and pieced things together on their own.

I was also interested in the politics behind each institution: why Kerala wants this biennale and how this constructs their identity. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale has a hyphenated identity, reaching back to a contested, possibly mythological town. Historians don’t agree on what or where Muziris was. I read Kerala’s and Kochi’s culture through these narratives of mythic cosmopolitanism. Half of my research becomes a study of the biennale as a format: what it wants to do, why, and how it negotiates with Western aesthetics. The curator talks about going back to pre-colonial ways of relating, but what does that really mean? 

IFRA: That is very interesting especially in Kochi, where most of the biennale happens around the Fort area which was a port that exchanged hands between the Portuguese, Dutch, and British. The architecture there is very European. 

MANSI: Yes, the buildings are remnants of the spice trade, and some artists have worked with black pepper as the “gold” of the region. In the first edition (2012), there was a big conversation about “thinking from the sea,” what it means to think about our histories and futures from the sea rather than the land?

One chapter of my research looks closely at the biennale as a format. It takes place every two years, so I began thinking about the “memory” of a biennale. It’s seen as an event, a kind of frenzy for the new, but what happens when, every two years, it hires people, engages with the local politics, and uses a combination of public and private funding? The Kerala government has funded a large part of it, especially in the earlier editions, so it can’t simply be treated as a temporary event. It builds a long and deep memory in the place. 

From the second edition onward, engagement with the local schools began and since then, there has been a chain reaction. The biennale now has a permanent initiative called  “Art by Children” from that engagement and runs parallel to the main event. Similarly, there is the Students’ Biennale which also runs at the same time and is spread around many spaces in Fort Kochi. At the same time, the biennale only lasts about three and a half months. After that, many spaces fall inactive again. Still, some relationships continue, schools stay connected, and smaller artist initiatives and galleries gain visibility. These “new publics” emerge at the fringes, even as the biennale remains full of contradictions and problems.

To stay with these questions, I focused on one artistic practice within the biennale, Shubigi Rao’s edition, and looked closely at Amol K Patil’s The Politics of Skin and Movement, partly commissioned for it. His work allowed me to continue a dialogue with the biennale through a specific practice.

Then I began questioning the idea of “thinking from the sea.” Yes, relationships from the sea have been overlooked in post-colonial narratives, but what about the land? While many focused on the sea, I wanted to stay with the land.

Amol’s work talks about class and caste intersection. He’s from Maharashtra, so many references are from there, but his arguments extend across India and the diaspora. Caste is about land: land denied, rights denied, humanity denied. It’s a deep, historical system of discrimination and it became central to my research at the Biennale. I spoke to nearly 20-30 volunteers; almost all of them said, “You have to talk about caste.” They described what I was observing as a derivative of how caste functions, often invisible, yet clearly present. Amol’s work made this visible, in such a strong artistic practice. 

So, caste becomes one of the red threads in the book. When we talk about reimagining the world and society, caste and race cannot be left unaddressed. 

YUL: I read your article on No-Niin “Do We Know How to Read Contemporary Art Beyond the Binaries of Colonial Modernity?” and really liked how it critiques the global binary. It connects to my thesis on Asian representation and the East-West binary, a narrow view of what a non-Western culture should be.

MANSI: Absolutely. That creates a problem: how do we read our own history? Thinking from the sea was one thing, but I also found a conversation about regionality. What does regionality even mean? Shubigi had some inclination to talk about it. A biennale wants to claim the region. “We’re from Kochi, we think like this, we go back to Muziris.” Reaching into myths to claim authenticity and legitimacy is also a postcolonial gesture, skipping the 17th–18th centuries and going back to the 12th or 9th century to say, “We were here before the British, Dutch, and Portuguese came to colonise us.” Critical regionalism then becomes a suggestion, a way to read history. 

IFRA: I went to Kochi once right after the biennale, and I noticed that even local people not connected to art had adopted “biennale” as a local word. So I think, biennales seep into the culture, they’re not just taking from the culture but blending in.

MANSI: Absolutely, their anchor is in the location. That’s how society holds them accountable: “What are you doing for Kochi? For Kerala?” Since the government funds it, that question comes back every two years. These questions make you rethink: if we can’t care for people and their relations in a better way, what’s the idea behind mega art festivals? I try to stay with that question: we’re doing all this reimagining, but for whom? That question often goes unanswered in institutional practices. But then you look at artistic practices, like Amol K Patil’s, or Jithinlal N R, or Rajyashri Goody’s, or Ulrika Flink’s curatorial practice, as I do in my Swedish case study; and they tell you very clearly who we need to reimagine society for. Institutions sometimes stay away from answering that. I see that as a problem.

I work with a concept in my dissertation that also applies to the Swedish case study: a “deep trench” between artistic, curatorial, and institutional practices – three spaces with a gap in between. We need a lot of dialogue, adjustment, and compromise to speak across them.  

I started with an anti-comparative stance, but then I had to ask: how do you work with two case studies without comparing them? I kept falling into comparative modes because we're trained in a binary mode of thinking, in Western methodologies. I tried to unlearn each location’s specificities while still talking about the global. Then I noticed: the West sees the Global South as a “site of futurity” – the world’s problems will be solved by looking there. Part of that is true: the global majority lives in the South, and people there face environmental collapse more starkly. So I understand why talk of resilience comes from the South. But I still question placing the South as the answer to all problems. That’s connected to imagination: where do we look to imagine new futures?

I repeated the same way of working with Sweden: getting into the specificities of an art institution in a suburb of Stockholm, the relationship of that suburb to the city, and how that has impacted Konsthall C. Race became the red thread for the Swedish case study. Deep fissures in society, caste on one hand, race on the other, started to hold the research together. For the Swedish case, I focused on curator Ulrika Flink’s program, which was running when I visited. I picked an exhibition called Under Another Sun, which was installed during the Afro-Swedish History Week (5th-12th October 2020). The essence was of reimagining and living in another world under another sun. That fits perfectly with my search for reimaginations in contemporary art, its practices, and institutions. I looked at her curatorial practice as a whole and narrowed it down to some of the artistic practices that she had invited.

YUL: I’m curious about how you maintained your research system.

MANSI: “Reimaginations” was my guiding thread, but there’s a middle ground. I don’t experience caste directly – I’m an upper-caste woman – but I grew up in a society that practices it every minute. Race in Sweden is similar: some experience, lots unknown. I acknowledge what I know and don’t know. Then people in the field show the way. Curatorial texts asked: what are “knowledge commons?” Amol Patil showed commons divided by hierarchies. The mediators showed a different kind of commons working on the biennale grounds through their storytelling and interpretations. That layered understanding became my method. A central understanding on which the research rests is also that the contemporary that we presumably share and live in at the same time is in fact hierarchical. We could be in the same room together, but the claim over the present is not shared equally; some are assumed to have it, and others have to fight for it. 

A feeling of negotiation ran through my research – that’s where the “deep trench” concept came from. Amol Patil is an “insurgent from within”: he uses contemporary art’s tools and language but says something that is threatening to the value systems of contemporary art as we know it right now. If you highlight that Indian contemporary art is built on caste, the system collapses. Same with Ulrika Flink: she talks about race from inside an institution, not outside. That’s my dissertation title, A Radical Nuisance – subtle but insistent. It threatens the foundations of hierarchies but is insistent, a nuisance that keeps nagging us but refuses to die. 

IFRA: I think in India, only upper-caste people get the privilege to criticise it and be accepted. If someone from a lower caste criticises it, it becomes a threat. 

That same pattern shows up in art institutions with self-critique. They can critique their own practices, history, and collection, as long as the criticism doesn’t come from outside. It’s about maintaining power: who gets to talk about the powerless. 

MANSI: That’s why the deep trench remains and you have to keep negotiating. These little insurgencies made me realise that certain artistic and curatorial practices are likely to be misread, unheard, and denied validity. And most of the time, those are the practices we need to listen to. That ties back to reimagining the world and our relations with each other.

I also got feedback asking what I am actually studying. Is it the institution or an artistic practice? My main supervisor, Madina Tlostanova (a decolonial feminist thinker), encouraged me to think with multiplicity. 

Also, if you create signposting in the work, telling the reader, “Now I’m only looking at the curatorial practice,” it helps. The reader is capable of understanding multiplicity because we live in them every day, and the research highlights those relations. Caste is about relations, labour, and land; race is about relations. When we talk about relations, we have to talk about everything affecting an artistic practice. You can’t read it in singularity. It takes a lot of work. Maybe by my tenth book I’ll crack it.

The conversation then turned to how institutions resist “messy” research, how people chase whiteness by distancing themselves from each other, and the stigma placed on immigrant neighbourhoods even when they hold more life. The question was raised. How do we build solidarity?

MANSI: Ulrika Flink once said something I quote in my research: “If I want someone else to fight for my rights, I’ll have to fight for theirs.” That statement holds action, hope, and reimagination. When I feel despair after hearing comments like that, I go back to it. I need to go out and extend a hand. The ground of building a relationship is that you can’t expect solidarity if you’re not ready to be there.

YUL: It reminds me of a line in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, something like, “We need you to see it’s killing you as well.” You can’t think you’re not part of it. It’s about mutual recognition.

MANSI: In the Swedish case, I study this as a “non-relational way of being.” Swedish exceptionalism, colonial complicity, neutrality, bad things happen elsewhere. White Swedes don’t see themselves as an ethnic group; others are ethnic.