Art

Jan 7, 2026 12:58PM

Shiraz Bayjoo, installation view of *Sa Sime Lamer, *2025 at KMB 2025-26. Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation.

“I am an artist. I only know how to work in the studio, and this biennale is an extension of that studio,” said Nikhil Chopra at the opening of the 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, South Asia’s largest contemporary art exhibition and the first biennial founded in India. An internationally renowned performance artist and founder of HH Art Spaces, Chopra has shaped the curatorial vision of this edition.

Titled “For the Time Being,” the biennale brings together 66 artists from 25 countries across 29 venues in Kochi, India, a historic port city on the country’s southwestern coast. Much like a performance, the program unfolds gradually, running across 110 days. Rather than presenting a fixed exhibition, many venues function as active sites for durational works, shifting installations, and slow processes of gathering and making.

Responding to a world shaped by conflict, rapid technological change, deepening inequality, environmental crisis, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness, Chopra selected artworks that propose presence and friendship as practical responses to the moment. Many of the works invite visitors to slow down and engage with art through the body—by sitting, walking, sleeping, eating, listening, or simply conversing.

Here, we highlight seven powerful works that made an impression.

Panjeri Artists’ Union

Assemblies of Hope Amidst the Death-Worlds, 2025

Installation view of Panjeri Artists’ Union at Aspinwall House at KMB 2025-26. Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation.

The first work visitors encounter at the entrance of Aspinwall House, the Biennale’s main venue, is by Panjeri Artists’ Union, a 14-member anti-caste art collective formed in 2021. Based in Uchu Amtala, West Bengal, just a few train stops from the India-Bangladesh border, the group works from a region shaped by the consequences of the 1947 partition.

Their practice responds to border realities—surveillance, restricted movement, violence under security regimes, and disputes over shared rivers such as the Ichamati—conditions that disproportionately affect marginalized communities. At Kochi, this context takes physical form as a dense room full of ephemera. Protest posters and slogans line the walls, including texts by Indian social reformers, Dalit thinkers, and political poets. Charcoal drawings by members of the collective depict hands, faces, and bodies bent under injustice, alongside watercolors of rivers and children’s drawings that imagine quieter, more idyllic worlds.

The installation also includes handwoven textiles made by laborers put out of work by the shift to machine-weaving in the area. These hang opposite elaborate costumes designed to resemble gods, which draw from Bhaona, a centuries-old theater tradition from the neighboring state of Assam that’s rooted in Bhakti philosophy. This theater is historically performed by lower-caste communities, invoking a sharp tension between spiritual equality and lived inequality.

The space is alive with performance as well. One artist draws chalk lines across the floor while another follows, erasing them. As Anupam Roy, a member of the collective, put it: “Other industries have unions. Art should too, so artists can organize themselves politically.”

Ibrahim Mahama

*Parliament of Ghosts, *2017–present

Ibrahim Mahama, Parliament of Ghosts, 2017–present. Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation.

Moving deeper into the Biennale, the viewer finds themself inside the Anand Warehouse, a space once used by the Dutch, and later the British, to store goods moving through Kochi’s ports. Here, Ibrahim Mahama has built Parliament of Ghosts (2017–present), an enclosed chamber lined with heavy curtains made from used jute sacks with over a hundred chairs salvaged from furniture shops across Kochi. The sacks, previously used to transport pepper, grain, and timber from the colonies to Europe, still carry the smell of labor and sea, as if histories of extraction and colonial violence have not fully settled.

An evolution of earlier versions presented at the Manchester International Festival in 2019 (and currently on view at project space Ibraaz in London), the work resembles a parliament, a cathedral, and a courtroom—institutions tied to Western power—but also a classroom, held open for gathering. This openness echoes Mahama’s own training; as he recalled in an interview, his art education in Ghana focused on “transforming art from a state of commodity into a gift.”

Recently ranked at the top of ArtReview’s Power 100 list, Mahama, who founded the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) and Red Clay Studio in Tamale, Ghana, was present throughout the opening week, talking with visitors and hosting public conversations and performances.

Kulpreet Singh

Indelible Black Marks, 2022–present

Kulpreet Singh, installation view of Indelible Black Marks, 2022–present a at KMB 2025-26. Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation.

Right across from Mahama’s installation, visitors enter a darkened room with three haystacks arranged as seating where they can watch an eight-minute film titled *Indelible Black Marks *(2022–present). The nightmarish work focuses on stubble burning in Patiala, India, the heart of India’s Green Revolution and its rice-growing belt.

The film unfolds in a surreal, cinematic register with a menacing soundtrack: Farmers run through fields overtaken by fire, the air thick with smoke, carrying canvas in an attempt to extinguish the flames, the land visibly suffocating. The burning of leftover rice stalks after harvest, often due to a lack of alternatives, has become widespread, contributing to severe air pollution across northern India, including Delhi.

Artist Kulpreet Singh, who is from a family of farmers, approaches his subject from within. In particular, his work is shaped by the farmers’ protests against market deregulation that were brutally suppressed in the wake of COVID-19 in 2020–21. “This is a systemic problem,” he said, in an interview. Outside the screening space, two blackened canvases rubbed with burnt hay bear the residue of the process seen on screen.

Dima Srouji and Piero Tomassoni

Air of Firozabad/Air of Palestine, 2025

Visitors at Dima Srouji and Piero Tomassoni’s work, Air of Firozabad/Air of Palestine, 2025 at KMB 2025-26. Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation

On the first floor of a former rice warehouse, hundreds of delicate glass bubbles hang in a floating cloud, dancing to the shifts in wind and light.

The installation by Dima Srouji and Piero Tomassoni builds on Srouji’s decade-long engagement with glassblowers in Palestine, a craft facing steady decline. This work was realized instead in Firozabad, India, home to one of the world’s oldest glassblowing communities. Of the 451 glass forms on view, 450 were made in India, while one was produced in Palestine, subtly linking the two sites.

“This is a space for exhalation,” the artists explain. Along a narrow corridor, a small library of philosophy books invites visitors to sit and read. Above, the glass forms hover like held breath, quietly drawing attention to the invisible makers behind the objects we encounter, and to their often-unacknowledged presence across the Biennale.

Otobong Nkanga

Soft Offerings to Scorched Lands and the Brokenhearted, 2025

Installation view of Otobong Nkanga, Soft Offerings to Scorched Lands and the Brokenhearted, 2025 at KMB 2025-26. Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation

Stepping back outdoors, visitors enter a dilapidated, roofless space threaded with banyan tree roots where Otobong Nkanga is growing a garden. Known for projects that use gardening as a way to heal land damaged by colonial exploitation, Nkanga turns here to a mix of flowering and fruiting plants suited to Kochi’s tropical soil.

Heliconia, clock vines, frangipani, hibiscus, peacock flowers, bamboo, lemongrass, pepper bushes, torch ginger, ixora, orange jasmine, and lily varieties form the beginnings of a living landscape. Nkanga’s artwork will grow over the course of the Biennale under the care of local gardeners.

Titled *Soft Offerings to Scorched Lands and the Brokenhearted *(2025), the work creates a gentle space of repair. Women’s voices—folk stories, conversations, lullabies—echo through the garden from hidden speakers, while mud seats facing the pond and sea invite visitors to pause, listen, and rest.

Marina Abramović

At the Waterfall, 2003

Marina Abramović, installation view of Waterfall, 2003 at KMB 2025-26. Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation

On a small island a short ferry ride from the main venue, a monumental curved screen fills the space of Wellington Warehouse. It plays recordings of the faces of 120 Tibetan monks and nuns from five Buddhist schools, along with their voices. It’s a work made by Marina Abramović, captured at the Sacred Music Festival in Bangalore, India, in 2000, as these religious devotees recited the Heart Sutra.

Abramović, who has long been drawn to ancient ritual as a way of cultivating presence, recalled a moment of realization she had while editing the footage: “When you hear all the prayers from different monasteries and traditions at the same time, they sound like a huge waterfall.”

Only 12 chairs face the screen. Those who choose to sit become part of the energy field created by the overlapping chants, entering not just the sound, but its physical force.

Bani Abidi and Anupama Kundaroo

Barakah, 2025

Bani Abidi and Anupama Kundaroo, Barakah, 2025 at KMB 2025-26. Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation.

Chosen by Nikhil Chopra as one of his favorite works of the Biennale, *Barakah *(2025) is a community kitchen conceived by artists Bani Abidi and Anupama Kundaroo, from Pakistan and India respectively. Named after the Arabic term for “blessing,” the work is shaped by their shared experience of hosting meals and gatherings in their homes in Berlin, where they both live. The project brings together artists, cooks, and local communities around the simple act of sharing food.

The exhibition note calls these gatherings-cum-artworks “a counterspell to the anxieties of capitalism,” and, in the Indian context, to communal divisions as well. Run by women from Kudumbashree, Kerala, India’s state-supported network of women’s self-help groups, the kitchen is open daily from 12 to 3 p.m., serving freshly cooked South Indian meals made from local produce at affordable prices, regardless of who you are.

The space itself is modest and welcoming: a circular canteen built from local timber, with a thatched roof and rope joinery that echoes vernacular architecture. In the spirit of the Biennale, Barakah becomes a place to eat and be together, if only for the time being.

Gautami Reddy

Gautami Reddy is a culture writer, editor, and cultural strategist focused on South Asian modern and contemporary art and its histories. She has held senior leadership roles across India Art Fair, Art Dubai, and Alserkal. She studied English Literature at Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi, and holds a Master’s in Culture, Media and Governance from Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi.