Kochi Muziris Biennale

Birender Yadav’s ‘Only the Earth Knows the Labour’ (2025), which is exhibited at the Muziris Biennale in Kochi, deserves special attention in the context of the ideas it puts forward. The marginalisation of migrant workers is a significant subject in Yadav’s 2025 work. Yadav focuses on the “facelessness” of those who construct our contemporary infrastructure […]

Vivan Sundaram’s artworks exhibited at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale are immense, eerie works that connect his late-career meditations on mortality with his lifetime of political activism. Sundaram’s use of industrial materials to capture the frailty of the human body is best described as a choreography of the transient. ‘Six Stations of a Life Pursued’ is presented

The Panjeri Artists’ Union is an anti-caste art collective based in Banipur, West Bengal, through their project, ‘Assemblies of Hope Amidst the Death-Worlds: A 100-Day Work Proposition’, which is a central highlight of the 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2025–2026). This project, set up at the front of the main venue, Aspinwall House, is an ‘assemblage’ that

At the 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2025–26), Indonesian artist Jompet Kuswidananto presents ‘Ghost Ballad,’ a site-specific installation at Pepper House, marking the journey from dictatorship to democracy and bringing together once-thriving, banned music and performances. The work uses his signature objects of ‘bodiless’ figures to gather the fractured chronology of Indonesia, acting as a bridge between

In the context of the exhibition “പൊന്നുപോലെ/Like Gold”, curated by Meena Vari as a collateral event of the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale, examines gold not merely as a mineral or currency, but as a site of intense emotional, material, and historical “transmutation.” ‘Like’ is an expression that can be attached to many things! A world created

The installation “Parliament of Ghosts” by Ibrahim Mahama, displayed at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, offers reflections on the politics of space, with its colonial undertone. Mahama’s work, which uses stitched jute sacks and chairs, portrays hidden chronologies of trade, labour, and colonial power. At the Biennale, Mahama transforms a room at Anand Warehouse, a colonial-era godown,

The works in the Rinascimento series by Argentinian artist Adrian Villar Rojas, exhibited at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, remind one of Barbara Kruger’s famous phrase, ‘I shop, therefore I am.’ If Barbara’s work can be seen as a parody or a comic version of René Descartes’ statement, ‘I think therefore I am,’ which overturned the stream

When observing Nityan Unnikrishnan’s artworks displayed at Kochi Muziris Biennale, Deleuze’s phrase ‘To be fully a part of the crowd and at the same time completely outside it, removed from it’ comes to mind. What Deleuze means is not to avoid or withdraw from the crowd, but rather, philosophically, to respond to it. It calls

The paintings from Smita M. Babu’s series ‘Pakalam’, exhibited at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, traverse the geographical peculiarities of the Ashtamudi Lake shore in Kollam, a region with numerous unique characteristics. Smita’s works, which hint at various aspects related to the coir industry, including occupations, history, and traditions, stand as a testament to how an artist

Art is multiplicity; it is multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and intersubjective; therefore, it is impossible to define what art is. Art implies many things, and so is the artist. When the contemporary world suggests that art is a product of capitalism, the art life of Shilpi Rajan testifies that art is also ‘socialism,’ or at least an