I landed in Kochi for the biennale on February 10, the day its greatest international star, Marina Abramović, was to perform. If the excitement over her event was palpable among the organisers, for Kochi it was just another day. The young men at the reception of the hotel where I was staying glanced at my media pass and looked away, bored. When I asked them excitedly about transport to the Mattancherry ferry point from where I was supposed to board the Water Metro—the Abramović event was happening on Willingdon Island, recently connected to mainland Kochi by a chic public boat service, some of whose booking centres are also venues for the biennale—they mouthed “auto” before going back to doing whatever Kochiites do on a hot summer day.

More Kochiness was in store: the direct ferry to Willingdon was out of service that afternoon. So, after a long detour on the Metro that took more than an hour, I reached Willingdon in the nick of time, panting with anxiety. I learnt later that the Water Metro is largely a tourist attraction; local people use the bridge. Hence the hotel receptionists’ contempt at the mention of the ferry; they had profiled and dismissed me as a tourist looking for art in the everydayness of their city.

To the credit of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB)—the largest contemporary art festival in South Asia, now in its sixth edition—it uses precisely this feature, everydayness, to go beyond it in terms of time and space. The title of the sixth edition (December 12, 2025, to March 31, 2026), “For the Time Being”, is particularly apt. The curator, Nikhil Chopra, locates this edition in the here and now, using the city’s colonial buildings, warehouses, public walls, and public services rather than galleries or museums to showcase art.

Chopra’s understanding of how art speaks to everyone the moment it is liberated from vitrine cases is evident in his curation. The art at the KMB has grown out of life: it communicates its message not from exalted heights but in conjunction with its surroundings, extraordinary or mundane. As such, it is heartfelt, unapologetically political, and almost always engaging.

I say almost. I began with Abramović’s “performance”, which turned out to be a two-hour lecture on the history of performance art accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation projected on a humongous screen behind her. While the 79-year-old artist has a remarkable presence, her talk was unexciting. She spoke of body and nature as sources of artistic inspiration; of mindfulness (her performance began with her asking the audience to breathe deeply with eyes closed); of overcoming fears of mortality by testing the limits of the body; and of spirituality, which, she said, India/the East had given the world. All this could have come from any neighbourhood guru, a packaged guide to self-realisation for the spiritually inclined, I thought sceptically.

Thankfully, the KMB had plenty of materiality too. Earth Knows Their Labour by Birender Yadav, a young artist from Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, reconstructs the lives and labour of seasonal migrant workers in the brick kilns of Mirzapur. It substitutes the workers’ presence with terracotta casts of sundry objects like a rusty nail, a hammer, a battered jerrycan, a worn-out shoe (perhaps a nod to Van Gogh’s painting), crumpled cloth bundles. The sense is that the labourers themselves have departed but have left behind their sweat, thirst, tiredness, and unvoiced emotions, hinted at by handprints on the wall or objects like a disembodied, outstretched palm. The installation, which also includes drawings, clay tablets, and sculptures like that of a sleeping labourer, is enclosed by brick walls. A heavy ochre dust rises from everything: in that claustrophobic, overheated space on the ground floor of Aspinwall House, you feel what the brick kiln workers must feel every moment, every day.

Broken bodies

If the body speaks through its absence in Yadav’s work, in Aditya Puthur’s large canvases at SMS Hall, it is laid out, cut open like slabs of meat, then sutured. In this theatre of operation, the residues are severed organs—blood red and greasy brown—in steel kidney dishes. In their graphic realism, the paintings underline that what lies inside a dissected body is not the elusive spirit but flesh, blood, and gore.

The materiality of the body is highlighted again in Malu Joy’s work. Coming from her, it holds greater force, for Malu Joy, or Sister Roswin CMC, is a nun. Her terracotta sculptures depict ageing, broken bodies; her subjects are elderly nuns and visitors in the convent’s sickroom. The faces do not glow with beatitude but are contorted with suffering. The third artist on the first floor of SMS Hall is Gieve Patel. His famous painting of two men holding each other tenderly is not just a celebration of gay love: look closely, and the man in the foreground might be dying and the gaunt man behind him, with closed eyes, might be drowning in sorrow. There is no transcendence, just the detritus of grief and the memory of love.

The theme overflows into the biggest installation at Anand Warehouse, Parliament of Ghosts, by the Ghana-based artist Ibrahim Mahama. Making use of discarded objects such as jute sacks and old chairs, the work is at once political and philosophical. Mahama transforms a hall of the colonial-era godown into the parliament of the title, its members represented by empty, discarded chairs. The jute bags on the walls carry the stamps, sometimes literally, of changed ownerships, processes of grain and spice production, and undocumented labour. Were the interests of the people who handled the sacks ever represented in the parliament? Natural light flows into the space through a skylight, giving the impression of a spotlight falling on something invisible. Mahama said in an interview that his work is about decay, repair, restitution, and, most importantly, about the gift of memory. The objects he uses might be old and scarred with use, but for him, they are just beginning to live. The artist resuscitates them by listening to their stories, and then gives them a semblance of the justice and freedom denied to them in life by telling those stories.

Politics on their sleeve

Arundhati Roy recently made news by pulling out of the Venice Biennale after the head of the festival jury said that art, movies in particular, should not be overtly political. She would be proud of the biennale in her home State because here most of the artworks wear their politics on their sleeve. Aspinwall has two very political installations by the Panjeri Artists’ Union and Dhiraj Rabha.

The Panjeri artists use video, found objects, terracotta sculptures, books, and women’s craft to highlight the condition of the migrants in West Bengal who arrived in two waves, first after the Partition of 1947 and then after the formation of Bangladesh in 1971. In Habra, West Bengal, people aged above 75 have lived through four different national anthems. As they narrate their lives in Bengali in the video, the different anthems play and merge with the eerie sounds coming from Rabha’s installation in the next room of carnivorous plants, denoting state surveillance. Since speaking in Bengali has become fraught with danger in recent times, the two strains mingle to create an air of dread.

Overlapping sounds are one of the distinctive features of KMB 2025: most of the installations in adjoining rooms have audio and video playing together, and the sounds get mixed. Under normal circumstances, the result would have been cacophony, but in the KMB, the cadences flow into and somehow enhance one another. The multiple sounds might make you alarmed and pleased at the same time: the experience forces you to try and disentangle your emotions.

Rabha is from Goalpara, Assam, where he grew up in a camp of the banned insurgent group the United Liberation Front of Assam. His installation, The Quiet Weight of Shadows, is about the legacies of a generation that has lived with post-traumatic stress and the pressures of a hypervigilant state. His recreation of camp life includes charred photographs taken between 1982 and the 2000s capturing training sessions, weddings, and moments of daily life; blackened wooden planks suggesting burnt homes; and cobweb-lined objects of daily use like wooden cabinets and bamboo tubes lying forgotten inside those homes. All of it carries a sharp poignancy.

Another haunting work from yet another insurgency-torn State is the Kashmiri artist Moonis Ahmad Shah’s multimedia installation, Almost Entirely Sisyphus, in which a typewriter types out in an infinite loop the names of the people disappeared in Kashmir. But there is no paper in the machine—the Sisyphus-typewriter’s task is meaningless because the names have been erased from official records. Its ghostly clickety-clack fills the room, enhanced by the stubborn silence of the black-painted walls.

The same presence of absence is reiterated in the joint work of Dima Srouji and Piero Tomassoni, Air of Firozabad/Air of Palestine. Here hundreds of transparent glass baubles are suspended from the roof of a room in 111 Markaz & Cafe. The hand-blown baubles might seem empty but contain the breath of the glassblowers—one from Jaba, Palestine, and the rest from Firozabad, both hubs of the glass industry.

What meets the eye

In contrast, Utsa Hazarika’s expansive project in Pepper House, meant to challenge the rise of majoritarian rhetoric and the suppression of marginalised voices, does not resonate. Her outdoor sculpture, Yantra (32°N/Horizon), installed in the courtyard of Pepper House, is modelled on Jantar Mantar, with its association to dissent, and is angled at 32°N, the latitude of Palestine. But I felt indifferent to the blue steel structure, which looked more like a jungle gym to me.

Similarly unimpressive is Nari Ward’s much-Instagrammed installation in Anand Warehouse, Divine Smiles. The “sculpture”, with tin cans “containing” smiles of Kochiites and visitors, looks like a flashy disco ball and is about as thought-provoking. Placed next to Mahama’s Parliament of Ghosts, it looks all the more gimmicky. The meaning of many of these works becomes apparent only when you read the captions; in themselves they do not convey much more than what you see.

Perhaps the most underwhelming of them all is Abramović’s massive video installation at Willingdon Island Warehouse, Waterfall. It has 108 Tibetan monks and nuns chanting the Heart Sutra in unison and is supposed to create the peace-inducing, synaesthetic effect of a water cascade. It only reminded me of the general hum transmitted by idle loudspeakers before a public meeting. Other sounds at the warehouse, notably the marsh sounds of chirping crickets and croaking frogs from Lakshmi Nivas Collective’s video installation, are more calming.

Green zone

As are the simple canvases of Khageswar Rout and Raja Boro, a relief from the sensory onslaught of the multimedia works. The woodcuts of Boro, a printmaker based in Santiniketan, take you back to the pastoral landscapes of Nandalal Bose or Benode Behari Mukherjee. The series, aptly titled Landscapes of Memory, has stubbled fields bordered by the palmyra palm; mustard fields carpeted with yellow; a single tree in furious bloom; stars glowing like lamps in a print aptly titled Home. Originally from the Bodo community of Rangia, Assam, Boro is evidently attuned to the colours and rituals of the changing seasons. His sensitivity makes his work an oasis of quiet.

The same is true of Between Herbaria and Habitat, Rout’s series of ink drawings and paintings rendered in watercolours, indigo, earth, and stone pigments. Depicting plants and weeds found on Kolkata’s roadsides, they open up a hidden world of delicate flowers, tiny insects, and dainty leaves, which thrive unheeded but are essential to the larger ecosystem. Human figures are missing from the canvases of both Boro and Rout, but their works are inescapably political, consciously decentring humans from the narrative of nature and stressing the preciousness of small, ignored lives.

Another environmentally conscious work is that of the Belgium-based Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga. With local gardeners, she has created a real garden in a sea-facing patch behind 111 Markaz & Café. Full of native and non-native varieties of fruiting and flowering plants, Soft Offerings to Scorched Lands and the Brokenhearted is a veritable Eden, returning us to the beauty and mystery of the mythical garden.

A paved shrub-lined path leads to a dilapidated room open to the sky that has two fish ponds surrounded by earthen seats. In a corner, an ancient (pre-existing) banyan breaks through the concrete, reclaiming the space it once owned. In this garden, you experience what the ancient mariners who arrived in Kochi centuries ago must have felt: wonder and awe at the fecundity of the land and a vague sense of having reached home. Behind the wall, the sea rolls, murmuring softly about more voyages to come.

At the biennale, you encounter the Arabian Sea at every corner. It adds another dimension to the works and also puts them in perspective. The immense waters—swelling and ebbing, changing colour with the time of the day—speak of repose too. As someone whose durational performances include naps taken in public view, Nikhil Chopra clearly knows the value of sleep. There are benches aplenty at the KMB, inviting viewers to sit, gaze, ponder, and perhaps doze.

The idea of repose is embodied in Bhasha Chakrabarti’s installation, Diasporic Transcriptions, where patchwork quilts hang from the ceiling or are spread out on the wooden floor. Natural light floods in, as do the recorded earthy voices of the quilters—African American women from Alabama and Siddi women from Karnataka. Chakrabarti’s paintings on paper made of cloth scraps capture the women quilters at moments of rest. In a world of constant hustle, sleeping is also a political act, as Birender Yadav’s curled-up labourer and Chakrabarti’s work-hardened women remind us.

The art at the KMB serves food for thought and food for disagreement, reasons to smile, to grieve, to rejoice. Whether individually inspiring or unaffecting, the whole is undeniably alive. And, sponsored largely by a State government, it loudly communicates the message that despite palpable threats to the freedom of expression, the future of art is yet secure.

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