Time sets the tone at this year's Kochi-Muziris Biennale

Kochi: The sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) was formally inaugurated by Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Friday in Fort Kochi. The event will run until March 31, 2026, across 22 venues in Fort Kochi, Mattancherry and Willingdon Island.

Organised by the Kochi Biennale Foundation and curated by artist Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces, a Goa-based art collective, the biennale returns after earlier organisational controversies, including delays and payment disputes in previous editions.

This year, the organisers insist that the biennale has been envisioned as a more transparent event, with a clear curatorial structure, wider international participation and community-led projects such as the Students' Biennale, which will run alongside the main festival.

A notable new addition is the Collaterals Programme, which launches on December 14 and features nine institutes showcasing a wide range of practices aligned with the key theme. Highlights include exhibits by well-known abstractionist Shobha Broota, Lilies in the Garden of Tomorrow, a multi-element exhibition by artist Sarah Chandy, and visual artist Lakshmi Madhavan’s Looming Bodies on the Kasavu-weaving communities of Kerala.

'For the Time Being', the theme of this edition, frames the biennale around the relationship between embodied experience and artistic practice and its physical environment, said Nikhil Chopra. He added that the theme emphasises Kochi’s history as a port city shaped by collaboration and the exchange of goods and ideas, treating the city itself as part of the biennale’s "living, breathing ecosystem".

The exhibition features as many as 66 artists from over 25 countries. Several major international projects anchor the exhibition. Marina Abramović (Serbia) presents a performance lecture, The Past, Present and Future of Performance Art, and exhibits Waterfall (2003) — an 18-metre-wide, multi-channel projection featuring 108 Tibetan monks and nuns in continuous chant — at the Island Warehouse. Adrián Villar Rojas (Argentina) shows new artworks at the Coir Godown, using obsolete refrigerators as vitrines holding frozen organic matter. Mónica de Miranda (Portugal/Angola) installs Earthship (2025), a rammed-earth, S-shaped garden structure with locally grown plants, imagined as a public gathering space.

R B Shajith

Among Indian artists, Mandeep Raikhy presents Hallucinations of an Artifact (2023), a performance that imagines alternate lives for the 4,500-year-old ‘Dancing Girl’ figurine from Mohenjo-Daro. Pallavi Palu shows Alaq (2025), a work on grief and renewal, while Sheba Chhachhi and Janet Price explore chronic distress in their work Beauty/Pain (2025). Abul Hisham’s Healing Room (2025) is a multisensory installation employing painting, sculpture, scent and sound, and is expected to draw in the crowds.