In Kochi, a Biennial Becomes a Civic Laboratory
Beyond the nation-state framework codified by the Venice Biennale, the most influential biennials are those that establish a genuine dialogue with the places and communities in which they unfold—beyond the traditional art elite—and leave lasting traces that can bloom over time, fostering the growth of entire cultural ecosystems. Since its founding in 2012 by artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu as the only publicly funded international exhibition in India, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has aspired to be a cultural project with real social, educational and urban impact. In restored heritage buildings, public spaces and abandoned industrial and colonial sites in Kochi in southern India, it integrates contemporary art directly into the urban fabric, making it accessible to the public while prompting reflection on Kerala’s complex past and sparking a shared exercise in imagining its future.
Now in its 12th edition, it has, over the years, become a living laboratory where local artists, both established and emerging, engage in a broader dialogue with international peers. These visitors, in turn, are encouraged to immerse themselves in the cultural and human context in which they present their work. Running through the end of March under the curatorial direction of Nikhil Chopra and HH Art Spaces in Goa, the 2026 Kochi-Muziris Biennale features the work of 66 artists and collectives from more than 20 countries in multiple venues, engaging directly with the presence of visitors who traverse them.
Titled “For the Time Being,” this edition of the Biennale is concerned with the physical, sensory and emotional filters through which we absorb, negotiate and process our experiences of the world. Staged as a syncretic convergence of voices from diverse backgrounds within the very fabric of the city, the Biennale, as envisioned by Chopra, succeeds in transcending the limits of both self and space. It becomes a practice of human gathering that both restores and responds to our collective need for shared rituals. “The idea is that we measure our experience in the distance between heartbeats,” Chopra told Observer before the opening—evoking the rhythm of human encounter, the act of confronting the other, within a liminal space between the dense history that charges these places, the immediacy of lived experience and the future that art might help us imagine and shape. What the Kochi Biennale stages this year is a quiet yet persistent demonstration of how a biennial can truly function as a lively and expansive civic organism.
The journey begins at Aspinwall House, constructed in the 19th Century as the headquarters and trading premises of Aspinwall & Company, a British-owned firm central to Kerala’s colonial-era export economy, dealing in spices, coir, timber, coffee and rubber. The artists openly engage with and, more or less directly, confront this colonial past—traces of the Dutch and Portuguese are woven into the warp and weft of Kochi itself.
At the entrance to the Coir Godown, Adrian Villar Rojas sets the tone with a poignant installation of obsolete refrigerators transformed into diorama-like vitrines, containing rotting food that exposes the passage of time and the principle of entropy governing all matter. Like contemporary vanitas, these assemblages condense the extractive logic of the Anthropocene into the intimate scale of the domestic appliance, each element sourced from global supply chains and bearing witness to the capitalistic extractive ideology reshaping the earth.
In the following room, we encounter an expansive, multilayered presentation by the Panjeri Artists’ Union, a community of 14 practitioners enacting forms of political resistance through a multidisciplinary practice that recontextualizes and reactivates material traces of collective memory. Rooted in long histories of partition, their deeply collaborative, community-led pedagogical methods adopt a durational, process-based approach in the form of a sustained 100-workday presence, transforming the space into a platform for dissent and shared struggle. They stage and restage works and participative actions that embody radical solidarity and imagination, between revolutionary endurance and counter-hegemonic thinking.
Many works in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale are overtly political—something institutional art, particularly within the biennial format, historically embraced, but which, in today’s crisis of institutional authority and increasing governmental scrutiny, has become far rarer. Although publicly funded, the Kochi Biennale has, through many works, denounced, addressed and unearthed specific situations of inequality and injustice in India and beyond, often reviving histories omitted, distorted or entirely erased from official narratives.
Indian artist Dhiraj Rabha’s presentation draws on his childhood in a former ULFA detention settlement to examine the enduring impact of insurgency in Assam—a region absorbed into British India after the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826, where colonial extraction, demographic upheaval and political marginalization seeded tensions that later erupted into uprisings, state repression and mass displacement. Archival photographs, newspapers and pamphlets are scattered through an installation resembling the remains of a burned house, exposing fractures between official narratives and lived memory. At its center, a disconcerting garden of carnivorous flowers with sharp white teeth glows under blue UV light, buzzing with news reports on the ULFA movement in Assamese, Hindi and English from the 1990s through to 2010, the voices swallowed by noise. Eight watchtowers—modeled on the surveillance structures found in every camp—offer vantage points into and beyond the enclosure, suggesting both the violence of control and the quiet resilience through which communities have forged enduring, if precarious, forms of belonging.
Labor exploitation emerges as a critical theme across multiple works. New Delhi artist Birender Yadav confronts this reality through dissected, fragmented bodies reflecting the precarious lives of seasonal migrant workers, particularly those laboring in the brick kilns of Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh. Terracotta casts of everyday belongings left behind in temporary dwellings are displayed with the detached precision of archaeological specimens, appearing as oblique biographical fragments scattered throughout the installation. It is the poetry of these reconstructed and reassembled remains that translates the Biennale’s notion of “embodied histories,” giving form to the lives of those who came before us and those who continue to inhabit this ongoing human epic. Here, the dominant clay tone concentrates centuries of labor—alongside labor-knowledge and craftsmanship—into a site of commemoration that restores dignity to individual microhistories while elevating ancient local knowledge once intimately bound to the land.
Similarly, Smitha M. Babu’s earth-toned painting practice celebrates rituals of reconnecting with nature, labor and community. Drawing on her lived experiences along Ashtamudi Lake in Kollam and her close observation of the region’s coir-making tradition, Babu elevates everyday working-class gestures into a living archive of fragile knowledge through her watercolors. As embodied records of labor, resilience and cultural memory, painting—alongside her live performances—becomes a ritual practice that preserves the overlooked rhythms of a community whose relationship to land, craft and survival resists historical erasure.
Remnants of collective memory
Recurrent across the works is the direct engagement with memory—with relics and fragments of the past—where artmaking becomes a tool not only to confront loss and the grief of historical trauma, but also to affirm survival and gesture toward reconciliation and healing. In Kochi, colonial ruins are transformed into sites of repair. The precarious architectural structures of Shiraz Bayjoo, for example, function as portals to retrieve symbolically coded and materially embedded resistant oceanic imaginaries and as conduits for interrogating the histories of maritime trade and colonial extraction across the Indian Ocean. These works examine their manipulation through the extractive construction of so-called “ethnographic” museographies.
Fragments from religious and secular sites are combined into hybrid historical pastiches by Indian artist Ali Akbar PN to reveal how cultural forms are continuously reshaped through appropriation, historical distortion and fertile cross-cultural hybridization. At the center of the installation, a seated lion sculpture becomes a charged symbol of both monument and mutable political life: its formal lineage traces back to Middle Eastern, Indo-Islamic and Buddhist traditions, where the lion signified protection and sovereignty. Yet, its altered, aggressive expression reflects contemporary appropriation within ethnonationalist visual culture. Oscillating between symbolic resistance and erasure within shared documents and identification symbols, his layered reconstruction reveals how monuments are repeatedly re-signified across time, their forms embodying ideological forces that claim them in the making and unmaking of public memory.
Entangled narratives of trade, labor and migration are materially embedded in Basha Chakrabarti’s floating quilts, which she describes as “Diasporic Transcriptions.” Suspended in space, the textiles chart layered histories of their making, tracing cross-border movements and the legacies of oceanic slavery. An enveloping soundscape wraps around the installation, carrying the voices of African-American women in Alabama and Siddi women in Karnataka, transforming the space into a site of remembrance, transmission and belonging.
One of the most compelling interventions is that of Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle, who focuses on the social and poetic life of material objects, framing repair as a gesture of care and collaboration—a starting point for reconciliation and reconnection. A diverse array of objects marked by wear and time is scattered throughout an open shop along the road near Anand Warehouse, seamlessly absorbed into the local ecosystem of commercial and artisanal activity—another sign of how the Biennale fluidly merges with the city’s everyday life. Gathered from Kochi residents, these objects were restored by local craftsmen and technicians, transforming the intervention into a temporary archive of the city’s material histories and inviting reflection on repair as a radical act of resistance.
Some of the biennial’s artists lean into the more poetic and metaphorical possibilities of materials. This is the case in the work of Indian artist Fazia Hassan, who brings the sea indoors, transforming the first floor into an immersive environment where bodies of water become repositories of collective memory. The sea is both archive and threshold, its liquidity holding together dispersed temporalities, its surface reflecting the layered entanglements of migration, trade and belonging.
The monster of materialism, again with relics from ordinary life, can also be found inside Anand House, with Prabhakar Kamble’s Vichitra Natak (Theatre of the Absurd) (2025), investigating the aesthetic and social architectures of caste. Inspired by the talim—an Indian wrestler’s ring—where caste is momentarily suspended by the ethics of skill and friendship—the artist condenses the absurdity of these hierarchies into a highly symbolic and theatrical environment, where relics of labor, craft and survival become tools of awareness of the spiritual and aesthetic mechanisms that sustain the caste system.
At the Adasan Warehouse, in Jayashree Chakravarty’s organic choreography of matter, this poetics of repair intersects with notions of symbiosis. Weeds, twigs, grasses, seeds and roots are gathered and pressed between translucent layers of handmade paper, recording subtle continuities of the natural world. The works register seasonal shifts, ecological fragility and the persistence of organic interdependence. In an age marked by environmental imbalance, the installation insists on interconnectedness, presenting repair not as restoration of a prior order but as ecological communion—an invitation to situate human temporality within the deeper scale of earthtime and shared habitat.
Meanwhile, for Delhi-based artist Niroj Satpathy, landfills become subterranean archives and habitats eclipsed by the bureaucratic glare, where mutants and mythical creatures can emerge in abyssal expressiveness, channels of both decay and renewal. Drawing on his five years as a night supervisor in Delhi’s Solid Waste Management Department to collect, segregate and reassemble discarded matter into immersive, unsettling worlds, Satpathy suggests a kind of futuristic Indian shamanism that can emerge only on and under the ground, beyond the sanctioned surfaces of today’s systems. Taxidermic skulls, wires, seeds, dolls and electronics compress global circuits of extraction and consumption into monstrous figures that expose hyper-materialism’s violence but also propose waste not only as residue but as a threshold into alternative realities where matter, memory and marginalized lives can reclaim agency.
In a similarly mythological and metaphorical register, the monstrous creature imagined by Sandra Mujinga inside the MZ Café originates as an ode to amphibious transcoastal communities and the intergenerational lives of fishing cultures. Drawing from ancestral traditions of fishnet making, Mujinga plays with visibility and opacity through imposing dark forms that hover in space—enigmatic beings open to being received as visitors, sentinels, or kin. Their presence insists on unknowability, gesturing toward what exceeds human mastery and linear time. They embody knowledge transmitted through touch, through labor, through haptic memory.
Art as a ritual of collective healing
In many cases—particularly among artists from India and the surrounding region—the symbolic register activated by artmaking has a ritualistic function. Creation becomes a process of recovery through which trauma can be acknowledged, metabolized and transformed. Singapore-based artist Zarina Muhammad, with Omens Drawn by Lightning (2025), has created within the Biennale a literal sanctuary. Part of a triptych of installation-performances across the ports of Kochi, Colombo and Singapore, her work invites visitors to remove their shoes and enter a meditative realm shaped by sound, scent and material presence. Drawing on ceraunoscopy—the divination of omens through thunder and lightning—Muhammad transforms the space into a threshold between worlds. Performed at the beginning and end of the Biennale, the work reclaims ritual as collective remembrance and regeneration, offering a space where loss, resistance and healing converge.
Similarly, within the Bungalow, Kerala-born, Amsterdam-based artist Abul Hisham transforms reconstructed fragments of mnemonic architecture into a site of healing. Through a multisensory orchestration of painting, sculpture, fragrance, water and taste, Healing Room (2025) encourages a ritualized movement through space, where the spiritual and the lived blend into a suspended topology of memory. The experience dissolves physical boundaries, transcending the immediacy of architectural enclosure.
At the Pepper House, Jompet Kuswidananto stages a procession of ghostly presences that explore how colonial trauma and resilience are preserved through ballads of melancholia and longing. The installation functions both as elaboration and exorcism, transforming historical experiences of migration, displacement and disillusionment into performative rituals of endurance.
Several other artists transform their works into physical sites of encounter and exchange. Also at the Pepper House, three performances by legendary Tino Sehgal—Kiss (2003), Yet Untitled (2013) and Untitled (2025)—are re-enacted, staying true to the artist’s ascetic ethos, privileging unmediated “constructed situations” of live encounters between visitors and interpreters, pulling in everyone within the vicinity of human contact. Here, presence becomes the medium, interaction becomes a form of art, resulting in a site of human connection and embodied understanding.
Something similar, though infused with a more oracular, ritualistic tenor, unfolds in the participation of performance art pioneer Marina Abramović, whose presence at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale extends beyond the exhibition into the public program through initiatives linked to her institute and the Abramović Method. Arriving in Kochi shortly after the India Art Fair, Abramović appeared at the Samudrika Convention Centre on Willingdon Island for a lecture-performance tracing the history and discipline of performance art. Framed as both pedagogy and invocation, the event reaffirmed her long-held conviction that performance can reactivate art’s primordial spiritual and ritual dimensions—restoring live presence, duration and shared attention as instruments of collective connection and empowerment.
Meanwhile, Hiwa K presents an iteration of his participatory project Chicago Boys: While We Were Singing, They Were Dreaming (2010). Through an open call, local musicians, storytellers, students and community members are invited to play, share experiences and shape their own performances. With no fixed lineup, the temporary band gathers in a carpeted room at Pepper House stocked with instruments, remaining in constant flux. Participants from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds collaborate regardless of musical training, recording their ideas, lyrics and evolving processes directly on paper stretched across the walls—transforming the room into an archive of collective learning.
One of the most remarkable interventions in this spirit is Barakah (2025), an outdoor café pavilion designed by Indian architect Anupama Kundoo and activated through collaboration with Pakistani artist Bani Abidi. Built from locally sourced wood, thatch and rope using traditional techniques, the lightweight structure becomes a space where visitors gather, eat and rest. Hospitality is transformed into shared artistic and social practice. Daily meals prepared by the women’s collective Kudumbashree, using local ingredients, are served at communal tables, extending the pavilion beyond architecture into a living site of exchange. In dialogue with Abidi’s broader practice—which employs humor and performative strategies to examine nationalism and border politics, particularly within the legacy of Partition and the India-Pakistan conflict—the pavilion stages hospitality as a quiet political act, countering division through shared presence and care.
A similar ethos animates Otobong Nkanga’s intervention in Kochi. She transforms a semi-abandoned site into a living garden for collective healing and ecological restoration. Developed in close collaboration with local gardeners, Soft Offerings to Scorched Lands and the Brokenhearted (2025) is a durational intervention in which plant growth becomes both gesture and method of repair. As visitors move along laterite paths, they encounter soil, roots and water reclaiming a built structure—a dilapidated room held together by the expanding roots of a banyan tree, alongside a pond inhabited by fish, lotuses and water lilies. The garden evolves over the course of the Biennale, inviting viewers to witness cycles of regeneration. Mud and laterite seating covered with woven cane and bamboo mats encourage pause and gathering, while an enveloping soundscape connects bodily memory with landscape. Conceived as an arena of interspecies care, Nkanga’s work insists on the deep entanglement between human and ecological life, revealing fragile ecosystems of shared histories and fates.
The Kochi Biennale successfully transforms the usual large-scale international exhibition format into a context-specific, intentionally participatory site of encounter and connection with the community, the land and the histories that shape it. Finding the perfect ground for his practice at the intersection of material history, labor economies and postcolonial memory, world-celebrated Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama creates an actual parliament in Kochi, with a new iteration of his Parliament of Ghosts (2017-ongoing)—each responding to the city’s political and economic histories and the global spectres of colonial extraction. At the Anand Warehouse—a colonial-era godown once embedded in global trade routes—the space is transformed into a discursive arena and immersive archive of objects-as-documents, already inscribed with the realities of labor, the traumas of colonial presence and the enduring dynamics of its trade infrastructure. Nari Ward adopts a more playful approach in Divine Smiles (2025), inviting visitors to “preserve their smiles inside small cans.” The cans, once imbued with a person’s smile, are then closed using the hand-turned can sealer mounted onto the cart, creating a participatory artwork that grows through positive engagement with the community.
Ultimately, the Kochi Biennale demonstrates how major international exhibitions can become far more than displays of art, transforming cities into living spaces of reflection, experimentation, shared learning and empowerment—an expansion of vision that exceeds the limits of the exhibition format itself. It becomes an agora for collective thinking and repair, a fluid and open workshop of confrontation with the past, re-elaboration of the present and a shared exercise in reimagining the future. Engaging in this fluid dialogue between the individual, the ancestral and the collective, the Biennale offers an opportunity for the local community to confront what was obscured, a re-presencing of shadow within the larger current of global history and cosmic life, while empowering an entire community to reclaim the creative force capable of imagining—and enacting—a more just and sustainable future.
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