The sixth edition, For the Time Being (from 12 December 2025 to 31 March 2026), marks a significant evolution of the format. Curated by the artist Nikhil Chopra together with the Goa-based platform HH Art Spaces, the Biennale unfolds as a true “living ecosystem,” in which processes, relationships, and communities become an integral part of the work itself. Exhibitions, performances, workshops, screenings, and collateral programs — such as the Students’ Biennale, Art By Children, and Invitations — are spread across dozens of venues, transforming the experience into a continuous act of traversal. This openness reveals how the Biennale is far more than an exhibition showcase: it operates as a relational device that weaves together memory, pedagogy and imagination, returning historic spaces to the city and, at the same time, the city to the gaze of art. Taking part in it felt, for me, like a pilgrimage — an experience of immersion and deep listening, through which I rediscovered a sense of joy in art that I had not felt for a long time The program also includes a rich selection of performances an integral part of Chopra’s curatorial vision. Visual artists and performers such as Mónica de Miranda, Smitha M Babu, Naeem Mohaiemen and Mandeep Raikhy operate in a terrain where body, narration, and the urban context become tools for poetic inquiry.
Antonella Cirigliano and Francesca Gagliardi visiting the Kochi-Muziris Biennale
The curatorial approach, attentive to the processual dimension of artistic practice and to art’s capacity to activate critical thinking, turns Kochi into an open cultural device. The city thus emerges as a cosmopolitan space for exchange and knowledge production, where aesthetic experience intertwines with a broader reflection on the social and political urgencies of the present.
One of the most significant voices to comment on this edition of the Biennale is Arundhati Roy, the internationally renowned author, who has described the event as a celebration of cultural diversity and expressive freedom. n a recent interview, she emphasized how many of the works — citing in particular the film by Kulpreet Singh — are “beautiful, profound, and dangerous,” capable of looking at reality while including politics within their boundaries. For Roy, the value of the Biennale also lies in the fact that it is not dominated by commercial or corporate dynamics, instead offering artists space free from market-driven judgments.
Walking through the pavilions and colonial buildings of Kochi, one cannot fail to notice the coexistence of different communities — Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and others — as a sign of a cultural model based on inclusion and dialogue.
At a time when large international events risk conforming to logics of spectacle and consumption, the Kochi Biennale emerges as a site of critical insistence and reciprocal openness where art and society meet without predefined hierarchies, and where time — for the time being — becomes a dimension of coexistence and transformation.
A journey into the aura of key practices and figures of spirituality and performance art between body, gesture and vision.
