Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025-2026

I had been to Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2023 for only a day unfortunately, and ever since I've always wanted to properly attend a Biennale. The 2025-26 Biennale was on my bucket list - and I did make it! It was phenomenal. I spent 3 days, 2 nights in Kochi and here are some highlights. I covered almost all the venues.

For those who aren't familiar, Biennale (Italian for biennial) is an international contemporary art exhibition that happens once in every two years at a particular place. Originating at Venice in 1895, it now happens in many countries including Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, the US, Morocco, Egypt, Brazil, and of course India.

Aspinwall House

"The Quiet Weight of Shadows" by Dhiraj Rabha (ULFA Movement)

"Kal" by Faiza Hasan

Arthshila

"Imagined Ecosystem" by Jyothika Byju T M and Nandana Amba

"Between Rooms" by Astha Tiwari, Subham Das and Sagarika Sarkar

Oy's Cafe

Jail of Freedom Struggle

Pepper House

"All of Us" by Nityan Unnikrishnan

"In Hymn For The Drawing" by Nityan Unnikrishnan

Moonis Ahmad Shah

"Ghost Ballad" by Jompet Kuswidandanto

An installation which finds sen music traditions along the resonances between music traditions along the coasts of Kerala and Goa, such as Fado - a genre of melancholic songs about the sea in Portuguese, still sung today - and Javer's Keroncong music, brought by Portuguese sailors to Indonesian port cities in the 17th century. He explores experiences of colonial trauma and resilience are preserved through these songs and performances. Each of these musical forms carries the sentiments of melancholia and longing, tied to the historical experiences of migration displacement, and disillusionment. Ghost Ballad builds on the network of colonial encounters between these coasts with on installation of a kinetic, bodiless crowd which comes to life to play stringed instruments. Made with the used, everyday clothing and shoes of people shoes of people Kochi and Yogyakarta, Kuswidananto's assemblage of ghost figures carrying small, portable automated instruments marks the absence of those forgotten or erased by colonial histories. Along with the music made the ghost parade, a soundscape weaves through the room with layered recordings of Fado, Keroncong, and other musical influences. The voices of Goan singer Nadia Rebelo and Indonesian singer Giwang Topo ask visitors to witness narratives of resistance and survival rooted in a shared colonial past.

-- Aparna Chivukula

K.M Building

"Looming Bodies" by Lakshmi Madhavan

Durbar Hall

"Of Worlds, Within Worlds", Gulammohammed Sheikh

"Cityscapes: Modes of Space-Making" by Gulammohammed Sheikh

"Mappamundi" by Gulammohammed Sheikh

A lot of Kabir in their works

Island Warehouse

"Retrieve" and "Seedbed" by Himanshu Jamod (about the Alang ship breaking yard)

"My Last Breath with All My Burdens" by Vinoja Tharmalingam (Sri Lanka's civil war)

The bunker is a recurring motif in Vinoja's works-a precarious, temporary shelter constructed out of materials such as sarees, palm stumps, boats, tractor trolleys, rice bags, and sand, which were built across the northern province of Sri Lanka during the Civil War. At the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, she presents My Last Breath with All My Burdens (2025), a series of bunker installations akin to the enclosures which families built, cooked in, and slept in, while keeping a lookout for shelling, air raids, and other imminent danger. They were often forced to evacuate within a matter of days or weeks to survive. Walking through the bunker installations, visitors will encounter the materials that were once urgently repurposed to forge temporary shelters in desperate circumstances, as well as the geo-cultural connections between the coasts of Sri Lanka and Kerala. Built with materials locally sourced in Kochi, each bunker is fortified differently: a few walls strengthened by palm fronds, a buffer created by jute sacks and rice husks on a tractor-trolley, sarees flattened between sandbags, a boat as a ceiling and a shield. These re-created bunkers carry the experience of the home as a makeshift, volatile site, on the brink of destruction, offering temporary protection and survival but haunted by the palimpsest of previously destroyed or evacuated homes.

A Land Woven with the Threads of Memories (2025), α series in textile, is made with the hand-felting technique called Namda. Practised in Kashmir, Lahore, and other parts of the subcontinent, the technique involves fluffing, matting, and layering cotton and wool fibres to create rugs. Incorporating bandages, rope, human hair, and fabric, these textiles are perishable and sensitive to humidity and heat, evoking the vulnerability of human bodies in unstable and threatened forested landscapes.

Vinoja's practice seeks to resist the obscuring and forgetting of the Sri Lankan Civil War and its aftermath; the bunker stands as a momentary shelter as well as a burial site, and cloth is both a blanket and a shroud.

-- Aparna Chivukula

Oottupura

"Manmade scape" by Nimesh Patel

VKL Warehouse

"Earth's Last Stand" by Dindi Praveen Sagar

SPACE

"Mondo Cane" by Jyoti Bhatt

Cube Art Spaces

"Suture" by Vivian Sundaram

These images are based on photographs of Vivan's back after three spinal surgeries: his head, neck, shoulders, hips. The photographs are manipulated. There are amputations, headless torsos, shoulders rounded off without arms.

The body-surface is made vulnerable by slitting open the lip-like sutures, fuzzing the marks of secretions, expanding the blood blotches, pulling out the scarring tissue, shading the bulges, highlighting the creases, and making fresh designs with digital stitching.

At times there is uncanny efflorescence. In one image, gashes pull the flesh and stretch it like a bat's wings. The torso is sliced by a crescent moon. A miniature tattoo, a ring of thorns, appears at the nape of his neck. The wounds fly out beyond the contour of the back like butterflies. There is a deep dark bloodless cave between his shoulder blades. Elsewhere his body splits at the waist like a marble bust.

These are phantasmal renderings of Vivan's body; but, exhausted by its own grotesquerie, it offers identification with whipped and wounded bodies in the world around him.

As the torso in fiction has been 'submitted' to punishment, and as it is his own back, Vivan is testing the ground: gauging the effect of pain at both a private and communally shared level, thereby envisaging moral retribution and desperate camaraderie.

Excerpt from Geeta Kapur's text in the forthcoming publication, Vivan Sundaram: Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2026).

A close-up

"Lake Sublime" by Vivian Sundaram

An azure lake 'pictured' as a square within a square seen from the top.

The reference is to Dal Lake in the heart of a magnificent valley, Srinagar. Vivan started with an ordinary photograph of blue water formatted to become a fairly large (58 x 58 inches) image, but composed with the aesthetic of a miniature. The subtle tones of the water surface are deceptive: your eyes squint to see the water body strewn not with what appear at first like lilies and lace, but things sinuous and hard.

Microscopic scrutiny discovers minuscule fragments of the artist's torso, his own flesh cut and strewn across the lake along with other 'suspicious' debris.

Vivan worked with his collaborator Hilal Ahmed to take his own photographed torso, miniaturize it to the size of a child's thumbnail, cut it up digitally, and choke the water surface with the minutiae. Whereby the viewer is duped into seeing the surface of the lake as an embroidered carpet, a floral flotage, a gossamer shroud, or, if at all a body, the sloughed-off skin of a water creature.

There can be, there should be, a forensic reading of this material: are these miniature body-parts, sliced and thrown away, the detritus of a captured and 'disappeared' body? As for the cache of waste, it is integral to Vivan's obsession with discarded material (in hospitals in markets on earth in water). Here it could be read as the detritus of a 'civil war' that may invite investigation.

Decoding the debris turns out to be suggestive of present-day Kashmir: a puzzle of fused bombs flags trucks guns and slogans, active memorabilia of a shattered State. Mystifying fragments that act as subterfuge for both violence and beauty; a wreckage that turns translucent to become a mirage over Dal Lake.

Excerpt from Geeta Kapur's text in the forthcoming publication, Vivan Sundaram: Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2026).

Anand Warehouse

"Parliament of Ghosts" (2017-ongoing) by Ibrahim Mahama

Each iteration of the project responding to the city's political and economic histories and the global spectres of colonial extraction. He turns a room at Anand Warehouse, a colonial-era godown, into a discursive arena and an immersive archive of objects-as-documents. With walls covered in used jute sacks-bearing the stained stampings of changing ownerships, processes of grain and spice production, and rough histories of resource extraction and inequitable returns-the space is furnished with rows of discarded chairs from public institutions. Through interventions drawn from the local, Mahama overwrites parliamentary spatialities-which otherwise rely on neoclassical styles and nationalistic emblems to signify supremacy-with the striking presence of materials from secondhand markets of Kochi and the lingering traces of their users' gestures. Mahama tunes into the material and immaterial burdens of labour bone by workers, who-marginalised in forms of political decision-making-constantly negotiate, contest, and remake these spaces.

Placing a wall-sized tapestry of sacks sewn together by women homemakers in conversation with rickety chairs stabilised for use by carpenters from Kochi, Mahama positions space-making as an attunement to labour forms that shape mundane objects. By foregrounding the skills of building and mending which breathe life into devalued forms, he envisions a space to foster dialogue on the potential of existing resources, reconfiguring them into new possibilities.

The project originally stemmed from probing the troubled histories and unfulfilled promises embodied by the remnants of seven-year developmental projects initiated by Kwame Nkrumah's government in Ghana right after independence, which were deserted following political coups. In adapting the project for a former British colony, Mahama implores us to reflect on the spectres of similar histories of exploitation and unrealised social revolutions that continue to haunt the present. Activated by public programmes during the Biennale, the space strips the exclusivity emanated by exhibitions, inviting various stakeholders and makers into the fray.

-- Stuti Bhavsar