The 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, curated by Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces under the theme For the Time Being, features over 60 artists across more than 20 venues. The Biennale, expansive yet intimate, encourages viewers to slow down, engage deliberately, and explore themes of labour, memory, ecology, and the unfinished present. This Homegrown guide simplifies how to experience one of South Asia’s key contemporary art events without burnout.
Since its launch in 2012, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has reshaped how contemporary art is produced, shown, and experienced in India. Conceived as both an exhibition and a civic intervention, it transformed the historic port city of Kochi into a long-term, city-wide site for art, debate, and creative encounters.
By evoking the lost city of Muziris, a historic port and a centre of cross-border maritime trade in classical antiquity, the biennale has paid homage to Kochi’s intangible cultural heritage as a living confluence of cultures and faiths and a site for learning since its very beginning. The 6th edition, taking place across the city until 31 March 2026, is no exception. Sprawling across more than 20 sites, including repurposed warehouses, heritage buildings, and public spaces in Fort Kochi and Mattancherry, the 2025 Kochi-Muziris Biennale is curated by Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces and follows the overarching theme ‘For the Time Being’.
In the curatorial note, Chopra and HH Art Spaces write: “We imagine the Biennale as a living ecosystem where each element shares space, time, and resources, and grows in dialogue with each other. In Kochi, a historic port city where trade connected distant worlds, we begin with our site and region to dialogue with ancient and emerging global perspectives. This immersion into the daily rhythms of Kochi allows us to explore the idea of the unfinished spectacle and shape something that is evolving, responsive, and alive.”
Our bodies are not entirely ours; they are inherited, cultivated like landscapes by those who tend to it, with or without care. This edition of the Biennale is an invitation to think through the embodied histories of those who came before us and continue to live within us in the form of cells, stories, and techniques.Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces, Co-Curators, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025
This year, the biennale brings together more than 60 artists and collectives from over 20 countries worldwide, exploring contemporary concerns across media like installation, sculpture, video, painting, performance, and more. The expanded format sees more works placed outside traditional pavilion settings, across warehouses and public spaces. Here’s how to navigate this year’s Kochi-Muziris Biennale without feeling overwhelmed or burning out.
Whether you are a first-time visitor or a seasoned art connoisseur, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale can feel overwhelming by virtue of its sheer scale and the number of artists, collectives, and exhibits that are on view this year. Here are some of dos and don'ts before you begin:
1. Spread your itinerary over several days. Take your time with the exhibits — examine, notice details, and enjoy the venues. It’s not a checklist. The biennale is city-wide and durational by design. Explore as if you’re discovering a city. Two or three venues daily is enough. There’s plenty of time.
2. Return to the same venues several times. Aspinwall House, in particular, changes depending on time of day, performances, and crowd density. Some works only reveal themselves on a second or third encounter.
3. Many performance pieces are episodic and time-relevant. Look up schedules before you visit a venue.
4. Carry water, sunscreen, and cash. Fort Kochi can be quite hot and humid, even during the winter. Keep cash for public transport which may still operate cash-first.
5. Talk to volunteers and guides. Ask questions about the works on display to understand additional context.
6. Plan pit-stops along the way. Include cafés, restaurants, and bars — Kochi has many — in your itinerary.
1. Start with your camera. Spend a few minutes with an artwork before photographing it — especially performance pieces and sound-based exhibits.
2. Treat the Biennale as a single event. It’s multiple exhibitions layered across multiple sites. Treating it like a checklist and thinking you can cross off every single item on your itinerary will leave you frustrated and numb. Embrace the joy of missing out.
3. Expect linear narratives. The Biennale resists didactic framing and neatly-packed narratives by design.
4. Discuss and debate artworks loudly inside the venue. If a work provokes discomfort, disagreement, or discourse, step outside before unpacking it.
5. Underestimate the time it takes to walk between exhibits or commute between venues. Like most Indian cities, Kochi traffic is unpredictable. Include extra time in your itinerary.
Here are seven exhibits and venues you should see at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale this year:
Ghana-based Ibrahim Mahama’s practice explores the intersections of nation-building, architecture, migration, and global markets, using large-scale installations, drawings, and sculpture to foreground the labour embedded in everyday materials. At the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, he presents an iteration of ‘Parliament of Ghosts’ (2017–ongoing), responding to Kochi’s political and economic histories and the lingering legacies of colonial extraction. Installed at Anand Warehouse, a colonial-era godown in Mattancherry, the work features walls covered in used jute sacks bearing traces of trade, repaired by women labourers from Mattancherry, alongside discarded institutional chairs restored by local carpenters. Through acts of building and mending, Mahama reimagines existing resources as spaces for dialogue and renewal.
Oslo- and Berlin-based artist Sandra Mujinga works across sculpture, sound, and video to build immersive worlds that interrogate colonial legacies, memory, and more-than-human futures. Drawing on Afrofuturism, worldbuilding, and epistemic sovereignty, her practice treats bodies as sites of history and portals to alternative ways of being. At the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Mujinga presents ‘Remember Me’ (2025), inspired by Kochi’s coastal communities and oceanic knowledge systems. The installation stages two enigmatic, net-draped creatures — at once sentinels and kin — whose mirrored forms disturb singular viewpoints and propose multiplicity, opacity, and relationality as foundations for imagining life beyond fixed human limits.
‘Edam’ brings together artworks that register the signs of our time—war, displacement, caste and gendered violence, and the fractures produced by exclusionary politics. As walls continue to divide lives and landscapes, art, as Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Darwish once wrote, stands upright like a dying tree — an act of both defiance and remembrance. Each artist traces these ruptures through gestures that function as both word and wound. The letter, in its many forms, becomes a vessel for memory, desire, and longing — intimate yet universal. Moving between speech and silence, the works inhabit a threshold where language becomes texture and meaning remains fluid, unsettled, and alive.
‘Six Stations of a Life Pursued’ (2022) is Vivan Sundaram’s final work — a photography-based installation first shown at Sharjah Biennial 15, conceived by Okwui Enwezor and realised under Hoor Al Qasimi. Sundaram did not live to see it installed. Structured as a journey with six halts, the work moves through pain, mourning, memory, horror, and renewal. Across shifting image constellations, bodies appear wounded, incarcerated, familial, spectral, and dispersed—bearing history at once personal and collective. In its final station, the work discards its own props, leaving behind the material residue of memory, activism, and a life lived in ethical engagement with history.
Bhasha Chakrabarti aligns her practice with aesthetic traditions across South Asian, Hawaiian, and African-American contexts, using textile and painting to examine hierarchies of knowledge shaped by trade, labour, and migration. Cloth sits at the centre of her work — as both material and metaphor — woven, quilted, mended, embroidered, and painted to trace intimacy and conflict across histories of movement. Her installation ‘Diasporic Transcriptions’ (2025) comprises seven floating quilts made with teacher-companions Mary Ann Pettway and China Pettway in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and Fatimbi Devkari and Haniphabi Karol in Kalghatgi, Karnataka. Pieced from multigenerational family clothing, the quilts are embroidered with maps of their making, accompanied by encaustic paintings created from leftover cloth scraps.
The retrospective-scale exhibition draws inspiration from the ever-expanding pictorial world of Gulam Mohammed Sheikh that resists the idea of a singular time or place. From early preoccupations with writing and drawing, Sheikh evolved a multidimensional practice shaped by postcolonial thought, syncretic cultures, and modes of storytelling. His paintings — teeming with houses, streets, banyan canopies, marketplaces, and intimate neighbourhood scenes — are rooted in Baroda and memories of his childhood in Wadhwan, Gujarat. Moving fluidly across histories and geographies, Sheikh invokes figures such as Gandhi, Kabir, Mirabai, and Mary Magdalene, crafting layered visual narratives that ask enduring questions about coexistence, humanity, and worlds yet to come.
London-based artist and architect Dima Srouji works through research-driven collaborations to revisit excavated Palestinian landscapes and artefacts, exposing their material, gendered, and ecological histories while critiquing the weaponisation of architecture under settler colonialism. In collaboration with curator and practitioner Piero Tomassoni, she presents two installations at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale that reflect on reclaiming time, space, and air. ‘Air of Firozabad/Air of Palestine’ (2025) suspends hand-blown glass baubles from India and Palestine as fragile extensions of breath and survival, while ‘Time Reclaiming Structures: Watchhouses’ (2025) installs sentinel-like steel forms outdoors, proposing spaces of pause, care, and sustained observation amid ecological and political precarity. As Israel continues its attacks on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, these works challenge visitors to confront India’s increasing alignment with Israel and our complicity in the ongoing Palestinian holocaust.
As always, this is not a comprehensive list, but it should get you started. For daily programmes, performances, parallel events, and the complete schedule, visit kochimuzirisbiennale.org.
The 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale is taking place across multiple venues across Fort Kochi, Mattancherry, Willingdon Island, and Ernakulam until 31 March 2026. Learn more here.
If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:
In ‘Of Land, River, And Body’, Ashfika Rahman Builds An Archive Against Erasure
“What Does It Mean To Survive A Fractured World?” Asks An Upcoming Kochi Exhibition
On Our Radar: 6 Homegrown Illustrators Redefining South Asian Visual Language