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Curated by Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces
IT WAS PERHAPS FITTING that I took a short ferry ride to Willingdon Island to visit one of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale’s newest venues, the Island Warehouse. After all, Kochi boasts a rich maritime history and once played a significant role in the global spice trade. While the Chinese junks and Arab dhows that once docked here have long since gone, boats are still the fastest way to get to parts of the port city.
The cavernous industrial warehouse is one of eight primary venues to play host to artworks at the sixth edition of the biennial, titled “For the Time Being.” Curated by multidisciplinary artist Nikhil Chopra and HH Art Spaces, an artist-led organization based in Goa, it features sixty-six artists and collectives from more than twenty-five countries. The show’s title suggests an in-betweenness, a transitional state with the potential for transformation over 110 days. As the curatorial note in the guidebook states, it is “an invitation to embrace process as methodology, and to place the friendship economies that have long nurtured artist-led initiatives as the very scaffolding of the exhibition.”
This certainly rang true, in more ways than one, at Island Warehouse, where workers were still assembling an artwork by Sayan Chanda during the opening week of the biennial. The massive hall is an ideal setting for large-scale installations such as Dineo Seshee Bopape’s Mme Mmu, Bhumi Bhumi , 2025, comprising domed dwellings inspired by sacred termite mounds. Viewers can enter these dimly lit structures and contemplate constellations of stars on their ceilings. At the other end of the hall, Marina Abramović’s multichannel video projection Waterfall , 2000–2003, offers another space for reflection, invitingbiennial-goers to sit in one of twelve deck chairs and listen to the recorded chants of 108 Tibetan monks and nuns, which play simultaneously.
In contrast to these comforting opportunities to commune with natural and inner worlds, Vinoja Tharmalingam’s bunker installations—fashioned out of palm stumps, boats, a tractor trolley, and bags of sand—are a sobering reflection on the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009) and the violence, grief, and displacement that emerged in its wake. Similar concerns with hypervigilance and post-traumatic stress are evident in Dhiraj Rabha’s The Quiet Weight of Shadows , 2025,at the Coir Godown at Aspinwall House, the erstwhile headquarters of the trading company Aspinwall & Company Ltd in Fort Kochi. Highlighting the war between the Indian state and ULFA (the United Liberation Front of Asom), an armed separatist organization founded in Assam in 1979 and active until 2011, the installation draws viewers in with a surreal fluorescent garden of artificial carnivorous flowers, interrupted by ominous watchtowers modeled on the surveillance structures in detention camps where Rabha spent his childhood after his father, an ex-ULFA member, surrendered. Playing on a loop nearby is Rabha’s evocative film Whispers Beneath the Ashes , 2025,about a group of children wandering through a forest in search of a home—another reflection on a childhood plagued by uncertainty and the desire for a sense of normalcy.
Among the biennial’s most prominent threads is an emphasis on embodied histories, with the curatorial text emphasizing the “body as a landscape of time, a vessel of labour, joy, and loss.” This comes across forcefully in Birender Yadav’s site-specific installation, Only the Earth Knows Their Labour , 2025, an ode to the hard labor performed in brick kilns by seasonal migrant workers. Reminiscent of a kiln but evacuated of laborers, the work uses the imprints of their palms and terra-cotta casts of their belongings as a substitute for absent bodies. Likewise emphasizing the idea of material as medium and witness is Kirtika Kain’s Chronicles , 2025,a suite of etched copper plates suspended from the ceiling, meant to weather over time when exposed to Kochi’s sultry climes. As a member of the Dalit community, a historically marginalized set of social groups in India, Kain explores the role that abstraction could play in articulating the unspoken histories of this section of society. Resisting a singular Dalit aesthetic—assumed to be figuration—Kain employs tar and gold as a metaphor for the resilience of the Dalit body. Sheba Chhachhi and Janet Price’s three-channel video installation Beauty/Pain , 2025, is narrated in the first person by Price, who uses a wheelchair, serving as an embodied account of pain and practices of care as well as a critique of global pharmaceutical companies through the lens of Price’s own experiences.
Notable in this edition of the biennial is the spirit of easy camaraderie between the curators and the care and generosity provided to the artists.
Kochi’s historical position as a port city, where cultures once intermingled, was not without its downsides. Waves of colonizers swept over its shores, starting with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, followed by the Dutch and the English. As in previous editions of the biennial, colonial exploitation and extraction are an underlying motif in the show. Bali- and Yogyakarta-based Jompet Kuswidananto presents Ghost Ballad , 2025, an installation of a kinetic, bodiless crowd made with used clothing and shoes of inhabitants of Kochi and Yogyakarta playing stringed instruments. Making connections between the melancholic music traditions along the coasts of Kerala, Goa, and Java—all places with a significant Portuguese presence—it underscores experiences of colonial trauma and resilience. For Parliament of Ghosts , 2017–, Ibrahim Mahama covered the soaring walls of a room in the Anand Warehouse, a colonial-era godown, with used brown jute sacks reminiscent of the material used by British colonizers to transport commodities such as cocoa in his home country of Ghana; Mahama had them repaired by local women, thereby making connections between colonialism’s legacies in different parts of the globe. Three rows of secondhand wooden chairs, set right by carpenters and art students with whom he held multiple workshops, serve as a space for dialogue, used for conversations and performances throughout the biennial. Mahama regards his parliament not as a formal institution but as a gathering of material, labor, and bodies.
Notable in this edition of the biennial is the spirit of easy camaraderie between the curators and the care and generosity provided to the artists. Coming on the heels of the 2022 show, which was plagued by a delayed opening and accusations of mismanagement by the participating artists, this is a welcome development. Reducing the number of artist projects from two hundred in the prior edition to sixty-six in this one clearly has helped and, barring minor hiccups, presumably made managing the Biennale easier. A large part of Aspinwall House has been given over to the Panjeri Artists’ Union, a team of fourteen practitioners from diverse fields including visual art, design, literature, film, photography, and music, to create a discursive and pedagogical site encouraging community participation. Over the hundred days of the exhibition’s run they have planned a series of durational performances, roundtable discussions, and film screenings.
Given Chopra’s own practice as a performance artist, this edition of the biennial unsurprisingly features plenty of live performances, including a trio of works by Tino Sehgal performed throughout the day at Pepper House, most memorably Kiss , 2003, featuring the slow intertwining of bodies as performers reconstruct images of couples embracing throughout art history. Highlights of the program included Madeep Raikhy’s Hallucinations of an Artifact and Naeem Mohaiemen and Mallika Taneja’s performance lecture “Statues must die.” In the former, dancers imagine alternate lives for an iconic prehistoric bronze statue of a dancing girl from the Indus Valley civilization (an artwork that has been the subject of competing political claims) by interacting with an AI-generated avatar by Jonathan O’Hear. In “Statues must die,” which was delivered in the Biennale’s opening week, the artists addressed the return of toxic masculinity in the aftermath of Bangladesh’s recent student uprising, bringing it into conversation with Taneja’s initiative Women Walk at Midnight , which encourages women to reclaim the city at night.
Other performances emphasize a more participatory engagement with the audience. Zarina Muhammad’s Omens Drawn by Lightning , 2025, is the latest iteration in a series of installation-performances she has staged in port cities. Collaborating with local musicians, she also offers visitors a space to pause, rest, and try their hand at various percussion instruments. Guided by Amílcar Cabral’s proposal that land is a dynamic political and historical body, Mónica de Miranda likewise collaborates with local communities, creating “social sculptures” fashioned with wood and rammed earth that double as meeting places for reflection on soil as a symbol of care, reciprocity, and resistance. On the opening day, she presented “A New Alphabet,” inviting participants to create new sounds for each letter of an invented alphabet. She also has created a parallel program of performances and workshops with local curators and artists exploring postcolonial ecological thinking and community knowledge, which is slated to unfold over time. Nari Ward brings a grin to visitors’ faces in his performative work Divine Smiles , 2025, in which he invites them to smile into a mirrored can, which is then sealed, as if to preserve it. Working with local manufacturers, Mylar sellers, and label printers, Ward intends to sell the cans after the Biennale, plowing the proceeds back into the community.
These kinds of collaborative initiatives between the artists and inhabitants of the city have gone a long way toward instilling a sense of belonging and ownership over the exhibition among the inhabitants of Kochi. In previous editions, signs of “Our Biennale” across the city spoke of local pride in the project. One of the largest educational programs of the Kochi Biennale Foundation, the Students’ Biennale, runs parallel to the main event. Curated by seven curators/collectives, it offers students from art colleges across India the opportunity to showcase their work at five venues, a valuable platform for peer-to-peer learning and a space for experimentation. Meanwhile, artists could be spotted painting several walls across the city as part of the Island Mural Project, a new Biennale initiative aimed at taking artworks outside designated venues and bringing them directly in conversation with communities in their own neighborhoods. But the greatest testament to this sense of ownership is that the Biennale has spurred local organizations and residents to create their own public art projects, independent of the official program. Near one of the main Biennale venues, Kochi residents, mangrove workers, and members of fishing communities worked alongside a group of artists from across South Asia to paint a two-hundred-meter community mural on the walls of the Indian Coast Guard Office. Foregrounding coastal labor and climate vulnerability, it added yet another dimension to the artistic transformation of the city and made clear that this is very much a people’s biennial. The 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale is on view through March 31.
Meera Menezes is a writer and independent curator based in Delhi.
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