Things That Don’t Quite Become Objects | Alice Yard ‘Lime’ in Kochi

Fort Kochi is not an impartial location for exhibitions. The port town has been shaped by migration, trade, and layered colonial histories. People, objects, and images have moved through it without settling into a single narrative.

The Biennale is often approached as a site for reflection, a space where questions accumulate without being resolved. It spreads across streets, warehouses, and former trading buildings, so each encounter happens within an already unstable context. Different practices and histories are placed alongside each other without being reduced to a single narrative. Answers do emerge, but they remain provisional, shaped by the conditions in which the work is encountered rather than standing as final statements.

Alice Yard enters this environment without attempting to consolidate itself into a conventional exhibition format. Its presence at the Biennale is part of the Invitations programme, which brings artist-run initiatives into contact through shared activity rather than finished works. Instead of presenting discrete objects for interpretation, it introduces working conditions that extend beyond the gallery space.

Alice Yard began in a backyard in Port of Spain in 2006, initiated by Sean Leonard, Christopher Cozier, Nicholas Laughlin, and later Kriston Chen. The yard is not just where the project started. It shapes how the work takes place.

People gather there to talk, test ideas, and spend time together. Work develops through these interactions rather than being produced elsewhere and then brought in.

This relates to Caribbean yard culture and Carnival, where people come together to build and prepare collectively. Costumes are made, worn, and then taken into the street.

At Simi Warehouse, Alice Yard presents itself through a lime. The evening brings together film, performance, and conversation, but it does not follow a fixed sequence. People move in and out. It is not always clear at first what is taking place.

A lime does not operate like an exhibition or a scheduled event. It holds through people gathering rather than through a set programme. Film, performance, and conversation happen in the same space without being separated, and no single work or artist takes priority. The warehouse functions temporarily as a yard, shaped by how people use it.

Conversations between artists carry as much weight as the work itself. I did not come here only to see installations. I came to meet the people around them, to understand how the work continues beyond what is on display.

Alice Yard’s invitation does not stop at the exhibition. It creates a space to live, to move, and to become part of Caribbean life. I was invited into that environment, where food, music, and conversation sit alongside the work without being separated from it.

These moments do not feel like additions to the exhibition. They are part of how it operates. They are shaped by shared memory, by histories that are not always spoken directly but are carried through interaction.

It is here that I encountered the works of Blue Curry and Robert Young. Their practices do not stand apart from the environment created by Alice Yard. They operate within it, extending its logic in different directions, through objects that repeat and shift, and through bodies that carry and disperse form.

Blue Curry’s work does not establish itself through scale or immediate impact. The comb structures are made from a familiar object that initially resists being read as significant. At first glance, they risk being dismissed, and that hesitation becomes part of how the work functions.

Robert Young’s work shifts this condition into the body. His use of costume draws from Carnival practices, where form is constructed, worn, and then dispersed. The costume does not remain as an object. It exists through movement and disappears once the performance ends.

In a postcolonial landscape like India, the work of Alice Yard opens new lines of enquiry into our own lost heritage, and into conversations that no longer take place but still linger in the shadows of our architecture. Within this context, Blue asks questions about how tourist behavior clashes with the way people actually live within tourist economies.

Blue Curry’s comb structures are made from a familiar object that initially resists being read as significant. His work shifts how we look at commodified objects. It moves them away from their fixed use and into a process of accumulation, where repetition begins to change how they are read.

Blues’ sculptures themselves is not fixed. It shifts each day. Visitors take it apart throughout the day and leave something new by the end of it. By evening, the sculptures begin to settle again. It continues to change and evolve over the course of the day and this process goes on.

Placed within Kochi, this repetition connects to a long history of objects moving through trade and being turned into cultural signs. Things that once had a clear use often end up being sold, displayed, or recognised as symbols of a place, or transformed into commodities for tourists.

Curry’s work approaches this threshold. The combs begin to resemble cultural artefacts, but they do not settle into that role. Their meaning does not stay fixed, as visitors keep taking the work apart and putting it back together. Blue allows for this change. The configuration of the sculptures shifts through the participation of the visitors.

Robert Young is a Trinidadian designer and artist best known for The Cloth, a clothing label that treats garments as sculptural and political storytelling, and for Vulgar Fraction, a small independent mas band where masqueraders design and build their own costumes. His work moves between fashion, mas, and street processions, using fabric, wire, and found materials to work through labor, spirituality, aesthetics, grief, and resistance in Trinidad.

Within Alice Yard, Young’s practice extends the yard from a space of discussion and exhibition into a Carnival-making space, where people gather, build late into the night, and work collectively. The yard is not only a place to talk about Carnival, but a place where bodies, costumes, and processions begin to take shape.

Through costume and mas-making, he keeps Carnival present within Alice Yard, not as a reference, but as an ongoing practice that runs from the yard into the street.

What becomes clear through this is not just how the work is made, but how it is held. It does not remain with the artist alone. It moves through the people who gather around it, through the conversations that continue after the event, and through the way it is taken apart and reassembled.

In this sense, the work is not something that can be fully seen at one moment. It depends on time, on presence, and on participation. What is built during the day does not remain the same by evening. What begins in the yard does not stay there. It continues into the street, into other spaces, and into other contexts.

This also changes how one relates to it. It is not something to be resolved or fully understood in a single encounter. It asks for return, for staying, and for a willingness to see it shift.

Sean Leonard is the architect behind Alice Yard, based in his great-grandmother Alice Gittens’s house and backyard at 80 Roberts Street in Woodbrook. The space includes a small concrete and glass gallery built within the yard, along with an open area used for different activities.

The yard comes from a domestic setting shaped by family history and everyday use. Leonard recalls it as a place where generations lived and spent time. He also speaks about the generosity of his great-grandmother, who fed neighbours from the house. This carries into how the yard functions now, as a space that remains open to others.

From this space, and later from Granderson Lab in Belmont, he makes the yard available to others. Screenings, mas-camp work, residencies, limes, and everyday activity take place there. The setup is not fixed. It changes depending on what people bring into the space and how it is used.

Christopher Cozier’s work operates differently. As a Trinidadian artist and writer, his practice takes post‑independence Trinidad and the wider Caribbean as its starting point, tracing how colonial and new‑colonial enterprises, commercial expansion, and political opportunism continue to shape everyday life. Working across drawing, print, video, and installation, he often enlists mundane objects and recurring motifs, treating them as signs that expose how power circulates through documents, symbols, and gestures, while remaining rooted in specific Caribbean histories rather than in purely abstract systems

Within Alice Yard, Christopher Cozier holds much of the conceptual and historical ground. Alongside Sean Leonard (and Nicholas Laughlin), he helped shape the project from an early shared sketchbook into a modest space for experiment and conversations that could not happen in conventional gallery settings. His broader work as an artist and critic — thinking through Caribbean visual culture, small‑state conditions, and institutional gaps — feeds directly into the yard’s ongoing discussions, keeping its activities tied to Trinidad and the wider region. At the same time, his role as a writer, curator, and organiser links Alice Yard to a larger network of Caribbean and diasporic practices, from Small Axe debates to collaborations and residencies that extend beyond Port of Spain.

If Leonard focuses on the space, Cozier focuses on the questions. Together with Robert Young — who brings Carnival, cloth, and the movement of bodies into Alice Yard through mas bands and costume presentations — the collective takes form through different but connected roles. At Alice Yard, architecture, critical thinking, and embodied Carnival practice share the same yard, so they are worked through together rather than sitting in separate institutional boxes.