Kerala Catholics force withdrawal of a Last Supper–inspired painting at Kochi Biennale, exposing deep tensions between artistic freedom and religious faith.
Newsroom (06/01/2026 Gaudium Press ) On a humid January afternoon in Kochi, South India’s premier art festival quietly took a painting off its walls—and walked straight into a national debate.
The work, titled Supper at a Nunnery, had hung as part of the 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the massive international showcase that bills itself as South Asia’s longest-running art biennale. For days, it sat there as visitors wound through the galleries of India’s largest global art event, which opened on Dec. 12, 2025, and runs through March 31 in the coastal city of Kochi, Kerala.
Then Catholic groups complained. Within hours of their objections becoming public, the painting was gone.
A Last Supper, Recast
The picture at the heart of the storm is by Tom Vattakuzhy, a Kerala-born artist now based in Qatar. In Supper at a Nunnery, he takes one of Christianity’s most iconic images—the Last Supper—and replaces its central figures.
In Vattakuzhy’s version, Jesus and his disciples vanish. In their place stands a naked Mata Hari, the Dutch courtesan executed by firing squad in 1917 after a conviction for spying for Germany during World War I. Around her sit and stand nuns, moments before her death.
The composition unmistakably echoes Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, but the artist’s substitutions turn a sacred scene into a charged tableau of female vulnerability and institutional authority. To Catholic leaders in Kerala, it was not a reinterpretation but a desecration.
“This distorted depiction of the Last Supper…is a holy symbol of the Christian faith,” the Syro-Malabar Church said in an official statement, condemning the work as a “distorted depiction” of a scene central to Christian belief.
A Quiet, Public Climbdown
Faced with growing protest from Catholic groups, the Kochi Biennale Foundation moved carefully. In a Jan. 4 statement, organizers announced that “the curator and the artist” had decided to withdraw the painting.
The phrasing was deliberate. The foundation stressed that the decision came from those directly responsible for the work and was taken “respecting public sentiments and in the interest of the common good.”
At the same time, the organizers took pains to underline their broader principles: the foundation, which “has always stood for artistic and curatorial freedom,” said it “respects their decision.”
On paper, then, no one had censored the painting. In practice, a powerful religious constituency had made clear it would not tolerate a work it saw as an attack on faith, and the biennale had removed it.
A Church on Alert
Church leaders did not hide their satisfaction.
Father Tom Olikkarott, public relations officer of the Eastern Rite Syro-Malabar Church—one of the largest and most influential Christian communities in Kerala—welcomed the move in remarks to UCA News on Jan. 6.
“We see a rising trend of targeting Christians to defame them through such distorted forms of artworks,” Olikkarott said, framing the painting as part of a wider pattern rather than an isolated creative experiment.
Unlike Leonardo da Vinci’s original, he argued, Vattakuzhy’s canvas “not only distorted the original work but also misrepresented it.”
“We cannot approve perverted forms of art as they give a wrong message to society. Such acts cannot be justified,” he added.
The Syro-Malabar Church’s written statement went further, questioning motive. Noting that the same artwork had appeared in a magazine in 2016 and that “the entire edition was withdrawn following protests,” church leaders asked whether its selection for the biennale “was done intentionally to insult the Christian faith.”
For Catholic lay leaders, too, the line was clear. “Whatever may be his arguments, Catholics cannot agree with him and his painting, which is not acceptable to us,” said Cheriyan Joseph, a Catholic leader in Kerala.
An Artist’s Alternate Narrative
From the other side of the controversy, Vattakuzhy insisted his intent had little to do with blasphemy and everything to do with re-reading history.
“Interpreting it in a strictly religious context is meaningless,” he told the media, rejecting the premise that his work should be viewed only as a commentary on a sacred scene.
He said he chose Mata Hari as a way to highlight how a woman, vilified in the public imagination as a seductress and traitor, could also be read as a scapegoat of her era.
According to the artist, Mata Hari “fell victim to the patriarchal atrocities in Europe at that time.” He said he looked at her with “compassion” and tried to evoke in viewers “emotions like love and mercy” rather than shock or provocation alone.
To Catholic groups, that interpretive gloss did not matter. To them, the visual grammar of the painting—the unmistakable echo of the Last Supper, the nudity, the presence of nuns—overwhelmed any attempt to frame the canvas as a feminist or anti-war statement.
Old Controversy, New Stage
The 2025–26 biennale is not the first time Supper at a Nunnery has stirred outrage.
Years before it reached the walls in Kochi, the painting had appeared in print. In 2016, it was reproduced in a magazine. The backlash was immediate and fierce enough that “the entire edition was withdrawn following protests,” the Syro-Malabar Church noted.
That earlier episode lent weight to Catholic suspicions about its inclusion in the biennale. Church leaders openly wondered whether resurrecting the painting in such a high-profile space was an honest curatorial choice or “done intentionally to insult the Christian faith.”
The history also underscores how, in India’s churning cultural landscape, an image can leave a long trail of grievance. A work once forced out of a magazine re-emerged nearly a decade later in a global art festival, only to meet the same fate.
Faith, Freedom and a Fragile Balance
Behind the dispute lies Kerala’s unique religious and social fabric. Christians make up about 18 percent of the state’s roughly 33 million people, while Hindus form a 54 percent majority and Muslims about 26 percent.
In a state where minority communities are numerous and politically organized, religious sensibilities carry real weight. Parties and institutions of all stripes are acutely aware of the risks of appearing indifferent to perceived insults to faith.
For the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, that context creates a difficult calculus. The festival has built an international reputation on hosting bold, boundary-pushing art. Its organizers publicly assert that they “have always stood for artistic and curatorial freedom.”
Yet they also operate in a local environment where churches, mosques and temples are not distant observers but active forces. When those institutions see a line crossed, pressure follows fast.
The foundation’s decision to emphasize both its commitment to artistic freedom and its respect for “public sentiments” and “the common good” signals an attempt to stand on both sides of a widening divide: granting space to experimentation while retreating when that experimentation provokes organized religious backlash.
A Flashpoint That Will Linger
With the canvas now out of view, the immediate protest has cooled. But the questions raised by its short, turbulent presence at the biennale are unlikely to fade.
For Catholic leaders, Supper at a Nunnery has become another exhibit in a larger case: that Christians in India are, in Father Olikkarott’s words, being “targeted…to defame them through such distorted forms of artworks.”
For artists and curators, the withdrawal will stand as a reminder that certain symbols—as central to believers as the Last Supper is to Christians—remain flashpoints, and that challenging them in public institutions carries not only aesthetic risk but political consequence.
Vattakuzhy, for his part, maintains that he was trying to look at Mata Hari with mercy, not mock the Eucharist. The Catholics who objected say that, intentions aside, they saw their holiest imagery “distorted” and “misrepresented,” and that for them, that was the only reading that mattered.
Between those two irreconcilable interpretations lies the uneasy ground where Indian art and Indian faith increasingly meet: in galleries that are also battlegrounds, and at festivals where a single painting can become a referendum on who gets to imagine the sacred—and how.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from UCA News
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