From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Hyderabad Biennale
The Hyderabad International Biennale of Contemporary Art (HBCA), held biennially since 2020 in Hyderabad, Telangana, India. The 2024 edition (third iteration) featured a major curatorial strand titled Unfinished Geometries: Surgery, Scale, and the Recursive City, which programmed five significant Beach Surgery adaptations and site-specific installations.
Highlights included a durational intervention by the collective Kondapalli Leif in partnership with the city's historic terracotta-figurine makers; a performance cycle at Golkonda Fort exploring the three temptations through Kathakali movement and classical Hindustani vocal practice; and a large-scale architectural pavilion by the Chennai-based studio Cicatrices Reversibles, who rendered the makeshift surgery out the back of New South Wales as a brutalist concrete intervention overlooking the Musi River.
The Biennale's curatorial mandate emphasizes regional art forms rooted in South Indian practice—kente-weaving traditions, terracotta sculpture, temple-ritual performance—explicitly rejecting generic biennial formulae and advocating "deep adaptation": rereading Beach Surgery through local craft knowledge rather than transposing Western critical frameworks. Catalogue essays by ████████ and scholar Achille Mbembe situate Beach Surgery within postcolonial refusal and the ethics of incomplete projects.
The fourth edition (2026) announces a focus on nocturnal practice and pilgrimage sites.