6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, “For the Time Being”

In their introduction to the sixth edition of India’s flagship biennial, co-curators Nikhil Chopra and the Goa-based HH Art Spaces collective (of which Chopra is a member), express their wish to “explore the idea of the unfinished spectacle,” emphasis theirs.1 On the evidence of the opening days they have been, if anything, a little too successful.

This review of a sprawling, stimulating show—in which work by sixty-six artists and collectives is dispersed across a “living ecosystem” of more than twenty venues across the port city—is constrained by problems attributed to production delays. Some venues were half-finished at the time of the show’s opening, with laborers working on most of the sites; several artists’ work was not yet ready to view. The vast warehouse on Willingdon Island was periodically illuminated by sparks from angle-grinders and scissor lifts were parked beside sculptures, while artists and their gallerists wandered in search of answers as to why their work had not yet been mounted. It was hard not to feel that this exhibition, focused on the “human behind the art,” was letting some of them down.2

To call a biennial “unfinished” begs the question of whether it is being held in a condition of perpetual becoming according to a curatorial logic, in which decay and renewal are locked in restless balance, or whether something has gone wrong. Given this exhibition’s recent history, the confusion between the two is disappointing, if not surprising. The fourth edition was overshadowed by catastrophic floods in Kerala while the Covid-19 pandemic delayed the fifth.3 Adding to these tragedies, the 2022 biennial was postponed the night before it was due to open, prompting participating artists to publish an open letter expressing “concern and shock” alongside solidarity with curator Shubigi Rao, yet citing “daily struggles with the Biennale management.”4 Since then there has been a “period of reflection and restructuring,” according to a statement by biennial president Bose Krishnamachari. He is still in post.

Despite all of this, the work on view, much of it newly commissioned, was often excellent. Most notable are the nuanced ways that artists have found to operate within structures—political, economic, environmental, personal, cultural—in states of collapse. A standout is Dima Srouji and Piero Tomassoni’s Air of Firozabad/Air of Palestine (all works 2025 unless otherwise stated), in which hundreds of glass baubles, blown in the titular locations, are suspended over viewers’ heads on transparent wires, such that it seems they could at any moment fall, shatter, and thereby cause harm. The work makes felt how vulnerable people are to harm from the air, be it from pollution or warfare, most sharply in the context of an ongoing genocide. As with much of the best work on show, its delicacy was its strength.

At Aspinwall House, a historic waterfront warehouse complex and the largest of the four main exhibition spaces, Shiraz Bayjoo’s Sa Sime Lamer (The Path to the Sea) is an installation of textile drapes depicting sixteenth-century botanical illustrations of Indian medicinal plants, banana-like terracotta forms, ceramic figurines, rope, and wooden posts. Reminiscent of an unusually nuanced museum display, Bayjoo’s work deftly evokes the unfinished reckoning with colonialism and its legacies, specifically that of Kochi as a trading center for the Dutch but also indirectly for the British. (Aspinwall and Company, which still operates today, was one of the earliest major trading firms established along the coast of Kerala during the British colonial period.)

Upstairs in the same building, Faiza Hasan’s Kal offsets six small wall-mounted charcoal self-portraits, made since 2020, with a floor piece depicting an undulating wave, in silver foil, that appears to be flooding the room. While Bayjoo’s work is carefully assembled from remnants of a violent past, Hasan’s feels oriented towards an entropic future: from the impact of time on the body to rising sea levels on coastal ecosystems, inhabitants and environments are at the whim of forces that slowly if radically alter them. Wooden floors become waters; buildings are in flux; the outside infiltrates the art show. Huma Mulji’s Bombay Duck, on the same floor as Hasan, featured wooden branches, draped with wilting blown-glass forms, that appear to grow from the walls and into the floor, turning the space into a mangrove swamp.

If the economic and environmental structures on which societies depend are being mismanaged to the point of collapse, where might refuge be found? One answer was the body, not as it appears in the figurative art which is the market’s redoubt in a downturn, but the body under pressure to survive. Among the discoveries of this biennale are photographs by Lionel Wendt, on display in Aspinwall, presenting bodies salvaged from the wreckage of history. These frankly erotic, starkly composed photographs of young Sri Lankan men, some of them at work, are a revelation, not least as they were taken in the thirties, when homosexuality was criminalized under British colonial law. Connecting Wendt's work to the present, Birender Yadav’s crafted ceramic tools and torsos, displayed against a brick wall referencing the brick kilns of Uttar Pradesh, testify to the impact of manual labor on migrant workers’ bodies.

Set to a pounding soundtrack, Kulpreet Singh’s video Indelible Black Marks (2022–24), installed at Anand Warehouse, documents a performance in which the artist and his collaborators, wearing white and dragging long white cotton banners behind them, run synchronized routes of a rice field in Punjab during stubble-burning. As flames lap at the edges of the field and smoke rises from the blackened crops, the work draws arresting attention to the plight of disempowered farmers and the pollution caused by such burning practices.

Over at Pepper House, Minam Apang’s Specter of War: Big Thief comprised a series of large, intricate drawings of jungle scenes, referencing the threat of displacement faced by Indigenous communities in Arunachal Pradesh, that from a distance resembled camouflage. The charcoal, soil, and turmeric lent an atmosphere half sepia, half mustard gas to these tangled environments, in which closer inspection revealed sinister glimpses of violence—such as the hunter aiming a rifle at a dog—that pervade the atmosphere of each composition as a whole. The effect is further emphasized by field recordings, played from speakers, of Indigenous war dances and songs.

Apang’s impressive work, which draws its formal energy from the dynamic between detail and the overview, fragment and whole, is a reminder that no single view of a given environment or situation—whether a jungle, a global economy, even a biennial—can ever be complete. Rather than deny that incompleteness, art such as Apang’s makes of it a space in which the imagination can flourish.

That is the also case in Sandra Mujinga’s Remember Me, at KJV Warehouse. With the vaulting invention that is a hallmark of this artist’s work, two loping, skeletal beings tower over the visitor. Gothic swags of black netting, a reference to local fishing practices, are draped over welded steel frames evoking nonhuman cyborgs. At Simi Warehouse, Simon Shim-Sutcliffe’s thirty-four-minute video Zone blends archival material, 16 mm aerial footage, and intertitles to mesmerizing effect, reframing the Panama canal as a Tarkovskian “zone,” irrevocably altered by an outside force. Both artists deploy aesthetics and tropes from science fiction, a genre long associated with postcolonial critique, in ways that feel fresh. Perhaps the only way to understand the violently unstable, fragmentary present and recent past is to step outside it; to frame the world as otherworldly; to estrange in order to explain.