How The Latest Edition Of Kochi Biennale Weaves The City Into Its Art Trail

I have been attending the Kochi-Muziris Biennale long enough to recognise its tells. The way Fort Kochi slows down and speeds up at once. Galleries that aren’t even part of the Biennale brace themselves for visitors, brands from the city open temporary outposts for the duration of the Biennale. Decrepit warehouses are given new life when art finds its place in them. The city prepares itself, not just infrastructurally, but emotionally to be gazed upon.

This is my fifth Biennale as a viewer, barring the first one, which I was too young to attend. What has stayed with me is not just how the Biennale has grown, but also the kinds of people I have seen engaging with art – from families coming en masse from other districts to globally acclaimed artists. I have also noticed how it opens up. When walking in Mattancherry to get my morning tea, I was welcomed in by every small shop owner - they have opened up their home and are ready to receive visitors.

This opening up is not incidental. It has been shaped over time by the Biennale’s insistence on embedding itself within Kochi’s everyday life, rather than hovering above it as a global art spectacle temporarily landing in the city, as is the case with most other art events.

Friendship As Method, Not Metaphor

The 2025–26 edition of Kochi Muziris Biennale, which opened on December 12th 2025, marks a clear shift from its earlier renditions. Curated by artist Nikhil Chopra of HH Art Spaces, Goa, under the theme For the Time Being, this edition is less interested in spectacle and more invested in proximity - between artists, workers, audiences, and the city itself. Chopra describes this as a “friendship economy,” a phrase that feels deceptively gentle until you realise how fundamentally it challenges the way large-scale exhibitions are usually produced.

“Anything that happened in my early life as an artist happened because of a friend,” Chopra told me. “I was surrounded by people I loved. I was leaning on friendships. Not just emotionally, but on both the talent and support they came with.” Over time, he says, he began to question the Western insistence on singular authorship. “If you really want to unpack what it means to be an artist, you have to understand that it doesn’t exist without collaboration. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum.”

For Chopra, this shift is also political. Friendship, in his words, is not a soft alternative to structure, but a counter-structure in itself. One that resists extraction, hierarchy, and the erasure of labour.

This refusal of isolation shapes the current Biennale’s curatorial spine. Chopra speaks repeatedly about context – about how art is not just made, but received. “If we’re talking about expression, it’s not just what, but to whom,” he says. “Friendship becomes important because relationships built on trust and commonality are what allow us to share politics, space, and labour.” The Biennale, in this framing, becomes less an exhibition and more an ecosystem where solidarity is not an abstract value but a working method.

That ethic extends beyond artists to the many people who physically build the Biennale into being. Chopra is careful to name them: painters, wall builders, contractors, production teams. “To approach them eye to eye, hand in hand, recognising their time, their labour, their bodies – that’s a big ask,” he says. “We can’t assume this ends with payment. These are human beings. Trust has to be mutual.”

He adds that the Biennale’s scale makes this approach both necessary and difficult. “The larger the exhibition, the easier it is to forget the human cost. This edition tries to slow that forgetting down.” It’s a reminder that the most radical gestures are often logistical.

A Biennale You Walk Through, Not Just Visit

Logistics, in fact, are where this Biennale’s philosophy becomes most visible. Under the leadership of Thomas Varghese, CEO of the Kochi Biennale Foundation, the 2025–26 edition has consciously moved away from a single dominant venue towards a dense, walkable network of spaces across Fort Kochi and Mattancherry.

“We wanted visitors to soak in the culture while moving between venues,” Varghese explains. “The cafés, the shops, the streets - this also supports local economic development, instead of bringing everyone into one central site.” He notes that the intention was always to let the city itself become part of the Biennale’s rhythm, rather than a backdrop to it.

What this means on the ground is transformative. Two primary venue clusters - both connected by the Kochi Water Metro - allow visitors to encounter nearly 26 Biennale and collateral venues within short walking distances. “Nobody really needs to go around in a car,” Varghese says. “It reduces the carbon footprint, but it also changes how you experience the city.”

He also points out that this decentralisation has allowed the Biennale to move into unexpected architectural typologies – from warehouses and heritage homes to buildings near transit points like Willingdon Island. “We are constantly scouting for spaces,” he says, echoing a belief long held by the Foundation that venues are not fixed, but found.

For those of us who have navigated Fort Kochi long before the Water Metro existed, this feels like a long-awaited alignment between infrastructure and lived reality.

Accessibility has also been foregrounded in ways that previous editions struggled to achieve. Temporary lifts have been installed at key heritage venues, including Aspinwall House and Pepper House, allowing visitors with mobility issues to access upper floors. It’s a significant intervention; acknowledging that inclusion cannot be symbolic. Varghese also speaks about sustainability beyond optics: rental-based infrastructure, buyback systems, and partnerships with Kudumbashree to run Biennale cafeterias. Profit, in several instances, has been deliberately deprioritised in favour of social impact.

“If we are serious about being a public-facing institution,” Varghese says, “we have to think about who is excluded by default, and what systems we can put in place to change that.”

Returning To Dissent, Rooted In Place

For someone like me, who has watched the Biennale mature alongside the city, these decisions feel less like innovation and more like accountability. This is especially important considering that there were multiple deterrents to the smooth running of the last two editions of the Biennale. The sentiment is echoed by Dr V.Venu, Biennale Chairperson and long-time steward of Kerala’s cultural ecosystem, whom I spoke to as part of this feature.

He situated the Biennale within a longer continuum of Kerala’s cultural self-awareness – one that has always balanced global exchange with local grounding. In his view, the Biennale’s strength lies in its refusal to exoticise Kerala, instead allowing its histories of resistance, labour, and collective life to surface organically through contemporary practice.

That grounding is particularly visible in this edition’s engagement with Kerala-based artists and practices. Without positioning “local” as a category apart, the Biennale allows everyday bodily practices - craft, performance, ritual, movement - to sit alongside contemporary visual art without hierarchy. 

Chopra speaks about looking not just for “liveness” in works, but for “aliveness.” “Each work has a certain sense of aliveness,” he says. “It looks back at you. It demands an active gaze.” There is dissent here - not always loud, but persistent. The body carries memory. Labour leaves marks. History refuses to stay buried. Chopra notes that even works by artists no longer alive, such as Lionel Wendt, feel present. “You really feel that they are there - behind the camera, on the canvas, actively making,” he says. “They are not passive historical references. They are still speaking.”

Founder member and president Bose Krishnamachari has long maintained that the Biennale was created as a movement to democratise contemporary art. “I believe the Biennale was not just created for the Keralite,” he has said, “but as a cultural, inspiring movement for institutions and individuals from the world over. It was created with the intent that we could democratise contemporary art and take this thinking to a local, national and even an international acceptance.”

Yet, over a decade in, it feels newly at home in its own city. Reflecting on the Biennale’s expansion across Kochi, Krishnamachari notes, “Spaces can be created, or found. Aspinwall itself was something we discovered by chance. And today, we have venues across the city - many that are near the Water Metro, one warehouse even on Willingdon Island.” He adds, “But ultimately it’s the people who have made the Biennale what it is today.”

Walking through Kochi during the Biennale now feels less like entering an event and more like participating in a shared moment. Life continues – children pass venues on their way home, ferries cut across water routes, cafés fill and empty – but art is threaded through it all. As someone from the outskirts of Kochi, I recognise this version of the city. It’s not performing itself for the world; it’s allowing itself to be seen.

Perhaps that’s what For the Time Being truly gestures towards – an understanding that the Biennale does not need to be permanent to be meaningful. It only needs to be attentive. And in choosing friendship, dissent, and care as its organising principles, this edition reminds us that art, like cities, is sustained not by grandeur, but by relationships.