Verso is an independent gallery and archive in Fort Kochi, showing contemporary work beside the pieces a city almost lost — restored, reframed and returned to view.
Visit the gallery
Look again.
A gallery is not a warehouse for the past. It is a room where old work and new work are made to argue with each other — and the visitor is the one who decides who wins.
Salt & Silver
Group show · nine artists
6 June – 30 August 2026 · Main hall
Photography and painting made along the Malabar coast, hung so a 1950s salt-print sits beside a canvas finished this year. The wall label tells you which is which — but only after you have looked.
Exhibitions & events
- Exhibitions
- Talks
- Screenings
Exhibition
6 Jun – 30 Aug 2026
Main hall
Salt & Silver
Nine artists along the Malabar coast, a century apart, hung as one argument.
Talk
12 Jul 2026
The reading room
What a city keeps, and what it loses
Our archivist on the restoration of the Verso family-photograph collection.
Screening
26 Jul – 4 Aug 2026
Courtyard
Home Movies, Malabar
Restored 8mm family film from the fifties, projected after dark, admission free.
6 Jun – 30 Aug 2026 · Main hall
Salt & Silver
Group show · nine artists
The show the gallery was built around — a century of coastal image-making, hung without labels until you ask.
The collection
Forty works are on the walls at any time, half of them from the archive and half on loan from living artists. These six are up now.
Field
R. Menon
Grandmother
Anon.
Undertow
S. Varma
Kochi, in parts
A. Pillai
The backwater
Anon., restored
Monsoon II
R. Menon
A word with the curator
Why hang old and new work together?
Because a painting does not know what year it is. Put a salt-print from 1953 next to a canvas from last month and the wall stops being a timeline — it becomes an argument about what has actually changed, which for this coast is less than you would think.
Where does the archive come from?
Mostly from families. People bring us a box of photographs a grandparent kept, we restore what we can, and we return the originals. The gallery keeps a scan and, with permission, the right to show it. Half of what is on the walls was nearly thrown away.
Is any of it for sale?
The contemporary work, yes — that is how the artists eat. The archive, never. It was almost lost once already; it is not going to become someone's investment now.
Talks, tours & screenings
- 1
The archive, opened
Every Sat - 2
What a city keeps
12 Jul Workshop
3Restoring a family photograph
20 JulScreening
4Home Movies, Malabar
26 Jul- 5
Salt & Silver, with the curator
3 Aug
Come and look
- Where
- Bastion Street, Fort Kochi 682001
- Hours
- Tue – Sun, 10:00 – 18:00
- Admission
- Free · donations kept the doors open
- Getting here
- Ten minutes on foot from the jetty
- Access
- Ground floor step-free; a ramp to the courtyard
Groups of eight or more, write ahead and we will open the archive for you.
Ask a questionWhat is coming down off the walls, and what is going up
A letter when a show opens or closes, and when the archive turns up something worth seeing. Roughly monthly, never more.