The City as Host: The Return of the Kochi Muziris Biennale

In its sixth year, Kochi is back with its three-month-long interlude, brought by the Kochi Muzris Biennale, a festival that infuses everyday life with art, craft, dialogue, and moments of pause and wonder. By Sindhu Nair

There is a particular emotion that settles over Kochi when the Kochi Muziris Biennale returns. It is not sudden or loud, but something that gathers gently, like humidity before rain, like a familiar rhythm finding its way back into the body. Like aiming towards the crescendo of a Panchavadyam.  It is an emotion shared not only by artists and curators, or by those who travel across continents to be part of it, but by an entire state that seems to collectively lean in.

In Kerala, the Kochi Biennale is not experienced as a distant cultural event. It is felt intimately, claimed instinctively. Every Malayali becomes a host, homes open up, conversations include art and the Biennale, gathers momentum. There is pride, yes, but also a shared responsibility: a quiet understanding that this is a moment when the state presents itself to the world, not through art alone, but through generosity, warmth, and an unspoken confidence in its cultural profundity.

Over the years, Kochi has come to recognise the Biennale as more than an art exhibition unfolding across historic warehouses and public spaces. It is a celebration that stirs the city, its streets, its waterfronts, its economies, and its people. Small businesses prepare, ferries fill, cafés extend their hours, shops remain open through the weekend, and a heightened sense of pride in the Malayali way sets in.

The media, too, follows this shift in tempo. Headlines, photographs, and social feeds overflow with fragments of Kochi, its installations, its crowds, its most enlivening spaces. And the true measure of the Biennale’s success lies right here: in the way the city participates. Its people, its built fabric, and even its landscape seem to respond. The rain-soaked trees, the dreamy backwaters, the ageing walls of Aspinwall, all seems to open up to welcome the world.

The Kochi-Muziris Biennale becomes what it has always been: a shared act of belonging. We, at SCALE, believe that no other Biennale or art festival envelopes the city and the people as the KMB does. Period. And there in lies the success of an art festival, in its plurality and belongingness, in the way it becomes an act of commonness, not a façade created only for the visiting dignitaries.

This collective energy came into sharp focus as the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale that opened on December 12, 2025, marking the beginning of a 110-day journey across the city. Spread across 22 venues in Fort Kochi and Mattancherry, this edition brings together 66 artists and collectives from over 25 countries, alongside an expansive constellation of parallel exhibitions, performances, talks, and public programmes that will unfold until March 31, 2026.

The State Support

At the opening ceremony held at Parade Ground in West Kochi, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan formally inaugurated the Biennale, reiterating the state’s commitment to the festival with a grant of ₹7.5 crore to the Kochi Biennale Foundation. In a moment that underscored the Biennale’s political and cultural urgency, he spoke of the dangers of art being misused for divisive agendas, positioning the Biennale instead as a platform that resists homogenisation and upholds plurality. “If Kerala has found a place on the global map of art,” he noted, “the Biennale has played a major role in it.”

Curated by artist Nikhil Chopra in collaboration with HH Art Spaces, the sixth edition is titled For the Time Being, a phrase that resists permanence and embraces presence. Chopra’s curatorial framework places process over product, friendship over hierarchy, and embodiment over spectacle. This international exhibition sits in conversation with a wide-ranging programme led by Mario D’Souza, Director of Programmes, transforming Kochi into what Biennale President Bose Krishnamachari described as a “temporary university of contemporary art” for the coming months.

But beyond the speeches and statistics, the KMB venues are slowly filling with people and opinions from writers, states representatives and artists taking over social pages. Booker Prize author Arundhati Roy, visited the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and was captivated by the innovative and thought-provoking artworks on display, leaving a lasting impression on visitors. “Some of the works are beautiful, particularly the film by Kulpreet Singh. It was moving and dangerous, looking at everything that art should look at, including politics,” said the author. Kulpreet Singh’s work is featured in Anand Warehouse, Mattancherry.

“I like the idea that it’s not corporate sponsored, it’s not commercial, people have a chance to exhibit because art does not always have to be judged by how commercial it is,” she said, “My heart is full walking around the Biennale, not just for the beautiful art, but for the real star, Kerala and Cochin, the ancient buildings around and the public. I really can’t imagine another place that would accommodate such beauty, with such support even from the state government, that the rest of India needs to learn from.”

She believes that culture revolves around supporting artists, writers, musicians, and those who essay them.

Another Kochiite, social advocate and writer Nandini Valsan visited the Biennale with her family that included her sons. “We spent a couple of hours at the Biennale and the Kochiite in me was beaming with pride on experiencing the vibrant atmosphere that engulfed Fort Kochi,” she says, “I do miss having the entire vastness of Aspinwall yo dawdle around but atleast we have access to a portion of it. The focus on performance is particularly exciting and I hope to catch more of them.”

We select a few highlights from KMB:

A Collaborative Process

Ibrahim Manama

Parliament of Ghosts

Location: Anand Ware House

Ghanaian artist, Ibrahim Mahama stole the limelight as a major participant in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025 with his immersive installation, “Parliament of Ghosts”. He transformed a historic warehouse into a space filled with jute sacks and salvaged chairs to explore colonial trade, labour, and postcolonial power dynamics, inviting collective participation and dialogue through shared creation and reimagined histories.

The work reflects on colonial extraction, global commerce, political structures, and memory, turning everyday materials into powerful symbols of labour and exploitation.

Local workers, artisans, and carpenters participate in stitching and assembling the sacks, making the art a shared act of repair, care, and collective memory.

The installation functions as a civic space, inviting visitors to sit, wait, and speak, becoming a site for performances, talks, and communal reflection.

The choice of materials and location in a historic port city links to India’s own trade history and the shared legacies of colonial extraction.

Mahama brings a powerful critique of global economic systems, highlighting the overlooked histories embedded in commodities and labour, and reimagining spaces for dialogue and change.

Communities Uprooted

Panjeri Artist Union

Location: Coir Godown at Fort Kochi’s Aspinwall House

Among the many voices unfolding across the Biennale, collectives like the Panjeri Artist Union bring histories that are carried in the body as much as in material. Working primarily with jute, 14 Bengal-based collective traces lives shaped by displacement, labour, and the long afterlife of Partition. Their works speak of communities uprooted across borders, from British India to East Pakistan to Bangladesh, where migration fractured not just geographies but livelihoods. Nets, knots, and woven forms recur as metaphors for impermanence and survival, while craft becomes a language of resistance, memory, and continuity.

Those above the age of 75 in Habra of West Bengal are people who have sung four different national anthems in a single lifetime.

On display here are stories of their own community, forced to witness their lives being divided repeatedly even after Partition. Their lives have unfolded across shifting national identities: from British India to East Pakistan to Bangladesh and, eventually, to independent India.

This four-year-old art collective, with its origin in Banipur not far from Kolkata, comprises artists drawn from diverse fields including visual art, design, literature, cinema, photography and music.

Jute is the primary raw material used in the artworks. There is a reason for this, says Bhaskar Hazarika, a member of the collective. For centuries, jute cultivation was the main source of livelihood for the people of the region. Then, from the mid-19th century, began industrialisation, first under the imperial British and later with the arrival of modern products in the market. Eventually, globalisation since the 1990s dealt a severe blow to the jute industry, according to the collective.

The 1947 Partition meant that this community became residents of East Pakistan. Twenty-four years later, the 1971 India-Pakistan war led to the birth of Bangladesh. Amid a surge in the civic conflict in the nascent nation, the community’s members crossed to border to arrive in India’s West Bengal as refugees.

“These lived hardships have deeply influenced our artworks,” says Bhaskar. “Net-like grids recur frequently in the works, symbolising an unstable and uncertain life.”

Sandra Mujinga

Remember Me

Location: Markaz & Café

At the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Oslo-Congo based Sandra Mujinga presented Remember Me (2025) as an ode to the oceanic horizons and tactile registers of Kochi, the lives of its intergenerational coastal communities, and the haptic transfers of knowledge among the fishing community. Remember Me continues Mujinga’s interest in ancestral crafts of fishing communities, explored in an earlier work titled  Silent Flight (2025),which drew inspiration from the basket-weaving traditions of the fishing community of Chute Wagenia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Remember Me stages two creatures oriented towards each entrance that also face each other. Their heads double as their tails, and their scaffolded bodies are draped in dark fishing nets that are sourced  from the local markets of Kochi. The perforated and permeable fishing nets are moulded and sculpted to produce clusters of transparency and opacity, permitting and redacting lines of sight. In consonance with the invisible worlds and motions of the deep sea, the creatures remain enigmatic—open to being received as visitors, sentinels, or kin, yet presenting an insistent unknowability.

For the Love of Animals

Lakshmi Nivas Collective

Location: Island Warehouse

Lakshmi Nivas Collective was established in 2018 by Sunoj D, a visual artist, and Namrata Neog, whose background spans history, archaeology, and anthropology. Rooted in seasonal animal grazing and fodder foraging in the predominantly agrarian landscape of Parudur in Palakkad, Kerala, the Collective’s research and practice probe human and non-human entanglements and the complexities of human agency across time and terrain. Their practice includes productions in moving image, sculpture, text, and installation.

For the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the Collective presents two sculptures and a video installation, all of which are interlinked by a conceptual dialogue. The pieces arise from an ongoing enquiry into non-institutionalised faith practices centred on a non-human cosmology that spans animals, plants, landscapes, and seasonal cycles.

Prayer, in this context, becomes a technique to negotiate between human and non-human life for survival and reciprocity. The video installation, Wait (2025), unfolds at a slow, contemplative pace, evoking the meditative temporality of prayer and the cyclicality of seasons.

Birender Yadav

Only the Earth Knows

Location: Coir Godown at Fort Kochi’s Aspinwall House

The lives and labour of seasonal migrant workers— particularly those working in brick kilns in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh, inform the fundamental concerns of Birender Yadav’s artistic practice. Currently based in Delhi, he reflects on the living and working conditions of landless bonded labourers caught in a complex socioeconomic system of extraction and exploitation.

Only the Earth Knows Their Labour (2025) reconstructs the atmosphere and structures of a kiln, without the workers. Only the intensity of their labour remains visible, through an encircling landscape of brick walls and steps. The palm prints pressed into each brick recall their bodies.

The terracotta casts of their everyday belongings left behind in their temporary homes are dispersed as oblique, biographical fragments throughout the installation. These castings, reframed as sculptures, include bottles, cloth bundles, tools, and clothing. Each object carries a slight variation created by the worker, who once used it, as a surrogate presence.

KAALAM

Hashtag#Collective

Location: Gallery OED Courtyard, Mattancherry, Kochi.

Kaalam, a large-scale, site-specific installation by the Hashtag#Collective, is conceived at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, and contemporary art. The installation reimagines Time not as an abstract idea, but as a spatial condition, one that is experienced through movement, material, light, and built form. Kaalam approaches time as something that can be built, occupied, and felt. Rather than treating the courtyard at Gallery OED as a neutral container, the Hashtag#Collective works with its existing proportions, edges, and circulation to turn the site into an active architectural partner.

Through fractured geometries, layered surfaces, light, text, and moments of spatial compression and release, the installation makes time perceptible as movement, pause, and transition. It demonstrates how architectural thinking can move beyond permanent buildings into temporary, performative structures that register urgency, memory, and change, inviting the body to experience time spatially rather than conceptually.

The project is led by the Hashtag#Collective, an interdisciplinary practice working across architecture, art, design, and public space. The collective comprises architect and urbanist Biju Kuriakose, artist and writer Parvathi Nayar, designer Abin Chaudhuri, and artist Saira Biju. This edition of Kaalam also marks a collaboration with visual artist Apoorv Dutt, whose graphic interventions amplify the installation’s fractured spatial language, alongside architect and urban designer VS Sindhura, a long-standing collaborator with the collective.