Long curtains reveal a high-ceilinged hall. Its walls are decorated with curtains made from hundreds of jute bags stitched together. Their musty, raw aroma wafts across the room, and the old fans creak with each slow, forced rotation. There are three continuous rows of chairs around the room. They vary in shape and size, spaced at equal intervals.
The brown room is strangely familiar and therefore comforting. It’s the kind of place where you want to sit quietly, staring at nothing. My meditation is interrupted when Ghanian artist Ibrahim Mahama walks in. Dressed in all pink, the man who topped the Art Review Power 100 list of 2025 sits in the middle of the room. There is a certain authority in his gait as he welcomes the first few visitors of the day at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2025-2026). After all, this is his creation at one of the most awaited contemporary art events in India, and it is titled Parliament of Ghosts.
This installation explores colonialism, its shared history, global trade and labor exploitation through salvaged everyday materials. It creates a physical space for reflection on the erased history of exploitation during colonialism and the trade practices used at that time. “The aim of the work is to look at the process, its political conditioning, ideas of reparation and the found materials,” says Mahama. In Kochi, she worked with local women who brought jute bags from the city, one of the oldest ports in the world, and sewed them together. Mahama says Indian made bags are used in Ghana to store and import goods. This creates a shared physical history.
The chairs were also found in Kochi and repaired by local carpenters. Mahama set up a large television at the location while it was being created to explain his creation process and the idea behind his work to student volunteers. In return for their labor, he viewed and reviewed each of their portfolios. “The idea was to build together, with the support of others and with the resources available,” he says.
That practice is the essence of it‘for the time beingThe theme of this biennale has been created by performance artist Nikhil Chopra and the artist collective HH Art Spaces, which he co-founded in Goa. “The exhibition moves from a ready-made spectacle to a living, evolving and performance-based ecosystem,” says Chopra. He added, “The sixth edition is an invitation to embrace process as methodology and to scaffold the exhibition on the friendship economies that have long nurtured artist-led initiatives.”
In short, as the days go by, the works evolve, as more viewers experience and participate in them. Chopra’s tenure prioritizes collaboration, trust, shared resources and mutual support between artists, workers and the local community. And, I’m pleased to report, this is certainly reflected in the biennial’s 66 main projects spread across 22 venues by artists from 25 countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Germany, Kenya, Palestine, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Women’s Ward in New York divine smile A perfect example. Their project starts with a pushcart which is taken to various locations in Fort Kochi. People passing by are encouraged to smile at the two small tin boxes with mirrored bases. As the participants see themselves smiling in the box, an old-style can sealer is placed on a cart with a rotating wheel, which seals both of them in a smiling manner. One tin is given to the participant as a souvenir and the other is stuck on a giant magnetic ball in the Anand Warehouse. Each tin adds more glass and light to the ball, making it look like a big disco ball of joy. Ward explains, “The idea is to transform a fleeting, everyday human expression into a lasting, shared monument of community resilience and positive human connection.”
In addition to participatory installations, the other major presence in the biennale is that of performing arts. Among the most notable is Marina Abramovic’s work, a three-channel video installation titled waterfall (2000-03). Known for pushing the boundaries of performance art, Abramovic began her career in Serbia in the 1970s. waterfall There is a large video installation featuring the faces of 120 Tibetan monks and nuns from five different Buddhist schools accompanied by chants. heart formula (a Buddhist text) in unison. Abramovic shot the footage at the Sacred Music Festival in Bangalore in 2000. All chanting together creates a sound similar to a waterfall, which fills the exhibition space at Willingdon Island. The audience is invited to sit on deck chairs placed on the sand in front of the monumental screen, if only for a short time, to immerse themselves in the film and take a break from the digital overload of modern life.
Then, one of the main venues of the Biennale, is the installation of The Panzeri Artists’ Union in some rooms of Aspinwall House. A group of artists, activists and academics from Kolkata present an exhibition that traces the common history of Kochi and Bengal. The showcase opens in sections over several days and includes protest posters, slogans, charcoal drawings depicting bodies and faces, and hand-woven textiles made by displaced workers. This is also a site for performance. In one act, one artist draws lines with chalk only to have them erased by another, visually representing the ongoing processes of creation and erasure.
While discussing the creative process, the work of Jayshree Chakraborty comes to the fore. He spent almost a year creating a monumental installation called Shelter: for some time. This is one of those works that you will never get tired of watching. When you walk into the dimly lit room and look at the work spread from floor to ceiling in the torchlight of your phone, you see so many different things: weeds, twigs, grasses, seeds, roots, insects collected between layers of translucent paper and wrapped in blankets, all completely handmade by Chakraborty. She says, “It’s my practice. I find creating with my hands meditative. I created every small element of the work myself.” His work records the patterns and continuities of the natural world. “Nature is our original haven where all beings can feel welcome and relax,” she says. “It has always protected us and nurtured us. However, here I have placed it inside a larger installation to show how, today, it needs protection from us.”
Another subtle work is by Smita M Babu pakkalamA painting and performance project featuring finely detailed, beautiful watercolors of the lakeside landscape of his hometown Kollam, a traditional coir-growing region in Kerala. Explore Pictures pakkalamMalayalam for weaving workbench. Small human figures, dressed in white, surrounded by coconut trees, stand in a circle, pulling the strings of the choir, zigzagging and intertwining with the dance-like acrobatic movements of the humans. Elsewhere, a laborer carries a large cloud of brown ropes on his head, while little girls in pink dresses play with a bicycle tyre, turning it with a stick. These earthy-toned layered images documenting everyday life in Kollam are beautiful to behold. “My project blends my background in visual and theater arts to document the labour, memory and lived experiences of Kollam’s traditional coir-making community,” says Babu. The site-responsive works, drawn from his life growing up on the banks of Ashtamudi Lake, include a performance that reimagines coir-making as a poetic movement ritual. It highlights the dignity of physical labor and the community life surrounding the coir industry, which aligns with the Biennale’s curatorial theme of friendship economies and its valuation of process and shared resources.
Other works that caught my attention included the work of Prabhakar Kamble Bizarre Drama (Theatre of the Absurd) and Brazilian artist Cynthia Marcelle’s participatory project and installation History (version Mattancherry)).
Marseille is the home of repairs. He invited Kochi residents to donate their valuable broken items. After this, in 1341 AD, he found people who could repair them in Mattancherry, a port located on the world trade route. The stationary items are now kept at a temporary location in what looks like an old shop in the neighbourhood. The surprising thing here is that she managed to find people, whom she describes as craftsmen, who could repair the manual calculator that looked like a typewriter with just 13 keys. There is also a small golden steam iron; A black suitcase contained a vinyl recorder, an umbrella, a washing machine, a percussion instrument and more. Some of these are more than a hundred years old. The project challenges the “capitalist logic” of constant consumption and replacement by highlighting the value of keeping and repairing objects that hold personal history and memory, emphasizing the importance of community, shared resources, and the often invisible labor of artisans. All these objects will be returned to their owners after the biennium.
Kamble’s work sheds light on the actions of Dalit labourers. He uses ropes, textiles, metal scraps etc. to create his multi-part installations, which talk about caste eradication. “If you really want equality, we should insist on case destruction,” he says, “Ambedkar had said that when art is segregated on the basis of caste, it is detrimental to it.”
The sixth edition of the Kochi Muziris Biennale is an attempt to transgress those boundaries; Old, restrictive codes of making art and seeing the world. This creates a space that is collective, collaborative and inclusive.
Riddhi Doshi is an independent journalist.
