Sixth edition: For the Time Being

The Kochi Biennale Foundation is delighted to announce the dates and curatorial framework for the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Titled For the Time Being, the edition will open on 12 December 2025 and run for 110 days, until March 31, 2026.

The international exhibition, alongside a diverse programme of talks, performances, workshops, and film screenings, as well as key verticals including Students’ Biennale, Invitations, Art By Children and the Residency Programme, will take place across various sites in Kochi, India. Kochi-Muziris Biennale is India’s first and South Asia’s longest-running contemporary art biennale.

The sixth edition is curated by Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces, an artist-led organisation based out of Goa. Chopra is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice interweaves performance, drawing, photography, sculpture, and installation.

Curatorial vision
The sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is an invitation to embrace process as methodology, and to place the friendship economies that have long nurtured artist-led initiatives as the very scaffolding of the exhibition.

We move away from the idea of the Biennale as a singular, central exhibition-event, and instead envision it as a living ecosystem; one where each element shares space, time, and resources, and grows in dialogue with each other. In Kochi, a historic port city where trade once connected distant worlds, we begin with our site and region to engage in dialogue with emerging global perspectives. This rootedness allows us to resist the pressures of the conventional biennale model as a finished spectacle, and instead shape something that is evolving, responsive, and alive.

Our inquiry begins with the body–chemical, tender, marked by memory and intimacy. We see the body as a landscape of time, a vessel of labour, joy, and loss. From these bodies emerge processes that transform into other bodies as extensions of ourselves through which meaning is carried and reality reimagined. In this convergence, we invite a deeper awareness of being, and plant seeds for a more caring and conscious future.

Our bodies are not entirely ours; they are cultivated like landscapes, by those that tend to it with care or its lack. They bear witness and record experiences as scars and marks, and time as lines. Our bodies hold hope and grief, whilst seeking love and joy for survival and sustainability. This edition of the biennale is also an invitation to think through embodied histories, of those that came before us and continue to live within us in the form of cells, stories and techniques.

Aware of the ecological, political, and emotional precarity of Kochi, not as a limitation but as a generative force, we let its rhythms shape how we work. We invite artists to seek resonances across geography and time, to trace shared memories, mirrored struggles, and new affinities rooted in empathy and deep listening.

We would much rather learn from the complexities of human history, choosing to confront the contradictions and fragilities of our present. While we recognise that art alone may not change the world, we believe when cultures collide, that encounter can, at the very least, provoke conversations. This constant unsettling can possibly break the static silence, even if temporarily.

In the aftermath of a global pandemic, we are more attuned to the space between performance and witnessing, between presence and absence. The saturation of digital images and information has distanced us from the world and from each other. In these times of war and regimes, what does it mean to watch and witness? What does a call to action might mean or look like in a world desensitised by voyeuristic tendencies and mediated content production?

Many forms of liveness—performances, actions and conversations—will bring alive the 110 days of the Biennale. Durational works that blur process and presentation will invite audiences into embodied, participatory moments, challenging a static exhibition. We believe this is what a Biennale can be: a space of aliveness, presence, and communion. A place where people come together, not just to see art, but to be with it, and with each other.

The full artist list will be announced in October. For media or press enquiries, please write to press@kochimuzirisbiennale.org.