KOCHI.- The sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, titled For The Time Being, opened to the public today, December 12, 2025, unfolding across 29 venues in Fort Kochi, Mattancherry, Willingdon Island, and Ernakulam. The international exhibition features 66 artist-projects from over 25 countries, shaped by the curatorial vision of Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces. It sits in conversation with a constellation of exhibitions, performances, and discursive programmes led by Director of Programmes Mario D’Souza, set in close dialogue with Kochi’s unique geographical, social and cultural ecology.
Embracing process as methodology, this edition places the friendship economies as the very scaffolding of the exhibition. The curatorial vision acknowledges bodies as a landscape of time, a vessel of labour, joy, and loss, and invites the visitors 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’.
The Foundation’s key programmes—Invitations, Students’ Biennale, Art By Children and Edam—will open on December 13, and run through March 31, 2026.
The Invitations Programme, a platform founded in 2022 to recognise artists, collectives, and institutions whose work sustains cultural ecosystems across the Global South, unfolds at seven venues from 13 December. Participating institutions include Alice Yard (Trinidad and Tobago), Alkazi Theatre Archives, in collaboration with Alkazi Collection of Photography (India), Bienal das Amazônias (Brazil), Conflictorium (India), Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research (Palestine), Ghetto Biennale (Haiti), Khoj International Artists’ Association (India), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá (Panama), Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (Kenya), Packet (Sri Lanka), and ruangrupa/OK.Video (Jakarta).
The Students’ Biennale 2025–26 opens at VKL Warehouse, Mattancherry, presenting projects by student artists from over 175 art institutions across India. Curated by seven curators/collectives, including Angaa Art Collective, Ashok Vish, Chinar Shah, GABAA, Khursheed Ahmad, Salman Bashir Baba, Savyasachi Anju Prabir, Secular Art Collective, Seethal CP, Sudheesh Kottembram and Sukanya Deb, working across seven regions, this edition emphasises nourishment, peer-led learning, and artistic ecosystems outside market-driven and grant-driven structures.
The exhibition Edam, curated by Aishwarya Suresh and K. M. Madhusudhanan, opens across three venues on Bazaar Road, Mattancherry, and features 36 artists and collectives from Kerala and its diaspora. Edam surveys contemporary practices shaped by lived experience, intergenerational dialogue, and local lineages of making and thinking. A special project on late Vivan Sundaram—a photography-based installation titled Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2022) will be exhibited at Cube Art Space, Mattancherry.
The Kochi Biennale Foundation also introduces the Island Mural Project to bring art and ideas to public spaces in conversation with communities and regional histories.
The Residency Programme opens on December 13, featuring artists and works created as part of One Thousand Seas, a long-term research and development project extending from Kochi Biennale Foundation’s interest in oceanic worldings that challenge Western, colonial, postcolonial, and contemporary narratives.
Throughout the opening week, performances, conversations, lecture-presentations, and concerts take place across the venues. Highlights include performances by Mehfil-e-Sama’a, The F16s, Nanjiyamma and Team, Yuva Kerala Chavittu Nadaka Kalasamithi performing the Latin Christian theatre believed to have originated in 16th-century Kochi, Mehboob Memorial Orchestra and Karinthalakoottam, a folk band presenting art forms like Thira, Vattamudi Kolam, Karimkali Kolam, and more.
