The 7 Most Striking Artworks at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025–2026

Source Artsy by Gautami Reddy
“I am an artist. I only know how to work in the studio, and this biennale is an extension of that studio,” said Nikhil Chopra at the opening of the 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, South Asia’s largest contemporary art exhibition and the first biennial founded in India. An internationally renowned performance artist and founder of HH Art Spaces, Chopra has shaped the curatorial vision of this edition. Titled “For the Time Being,” the biennale brings together 66 artists from 25 countries across 29 venues in Kochi, India, a historic port city on the country’s southwestern coast. Much like a performance, the program unfolds gradually, running across 110 days. Rather than presenting a fixed exhibition, many venues function as active sites for durational works, shifting installations, and slow processes of gathering and making. Responding to a world shaped by conflict, rapid technological change, deepening inequality, environmental crisis, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness, Chopra selected artworks that propose presence and friendship as practical responses to the moment. Many of the works invite visitors to slow down and engage with art through the body—by sitting, walking, sleeping, eating, listening, or simply conversing.
> read more

The Sixth Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foregrounds Human Experience

Source Observer by Elisa Carollo
“The biennale wants to take stock of what it means to be present on this planet together. Even though we inherit collective histories and memories, and we speak of ourselves as a people stretched across time, landscapes and geographies, one fact remains: we are here now,” Chopra reflected. “We are contemporaries of one another in the present, and we share this moment. That sense of presence is one of the forces driving us.” Here, the human body is understood as the only filter, site of encounter and witness to temporality as we confront the present world. For this reason, presence—physical presence, specifically—sits at the core of the show and shaped the criteria for selecting artists. “Whenever we visited an artist’s studio, or when I looked back at artworks I’ve encountered around the world, we were asking: can we feel the artist’s presence? Not only through performance or liveness, though those are part of our programming, but in any medium—can you believe that the artist is truly here, in their work?” Chopra said. This approach led to the notion of “the neighboring body.” “We wanted to feel the sweat, blood and toil of the artist, whether in painting, sculpture or any other form, and we were looking for intelligence that emerges through making.” Ultimately, the biennale is about returning us to real encounters—with the work, with others and with the world... “The ghosts of the past are etched right into the walls of these warehouses—the very spaces the artists are showing in,” Chopra observed. “They’re not white, pristine cubes at all; they’re full of texture, memory, smells, history—distant voices still coming through.
> read more