curatorial team

HH Art Spaces began as a movement of artists in Goa in 2013, shape-shifting and evolving over the years, finding form across multiple homes and formats. With live, performance, and sonic arts at its core, and through the practice of gathering and hosting, HH has always been about forging relationships and creating a circulation of artists and ideas, even when borders across the region have failed to support such exchange.

The invitation to curate the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is a natural extension of this ongoing practice, one rooted in what HH calls “friendship economies”, that have nourished spaces and ideas such as HH and Kochi-Muziris Biennale over the years.

The working group of HH Art Spaces comprises (L to R): Top- Alex Xela Alphonso, Madhavi Gore, Divyesh Undaviya, Shivani Gupta, Nikhil Chopra, Mario D’Souza, (Bottom)-Shruthi Pawels, Shaira Sequeria Shetty, Romain Loustau, Madhurjya Dey.

vision

The sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is an invitation to embrace process as methodology, and to place the friendship economies that have long nurtured artist-led initiatives as the very scaffolding of the exhibition.

We move away from the idea of the Biennale as a singular, central exhibition-event, and instead envision it as a living ecosystem; one where each element shares space, time, and resources, and grows in dialogue with each other. In Kochi, a historic port city where trade once connected distant worlds, we begin with our site and region to engage in dialogue with emerging global perspectives. This rootedness allows us to resist the pressures of the conventional biennale model as a finished spectacle, and instead shape something that is evolving, responsive, and alive.

Our inquiry begins with the body–chemical, tender, marked by memory and intimacy. We see the body as a landscape of time, a vessel of labour, joy, and loss. From these bodies emerge processes that transform into other bodies as extensions of ourselves through which meaning is carried and reality reimagined. In this convergence, we invite a deeper awareness of being, and plant seeds for a more caring and conscious future.

Our bodies are not entirely ours; they are cultivated like landscapes, by those that tend to it with care or its lack. They bear witness and record experiences as scars and marks, and time as lines. Our bodies hold hope and grief, whilst seeking love and joy for survival and sustainability. This edition of the biennale is also an invitation 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.

Aware of the ecological, political, and emotional precarity of Kochi, not as a limitation but as a generative force, we let its rhythms shape how we work. We invite artists to seek resonances across geography and time, to trace shared memories, mirrored struggles, and new affinities rooted in empathy and deep listening.

We would much rather learn from the complexities of human history, choosing to confront the contradictions and fragilities of our present. While we recognise that art alone may not change the world, we believe when cultures collide, that encounter can, at the very least, provoke conversations. This constant unsettling can possibly break the static silence, even if temporarily.

In the aftermath of a global pandemic, we are more attuned to the space between performance and witnessing, between presence and absence. The saturation of digital images and information has distanced us from the world and from each other. In these times of war and regimes, what does it mean to watch and witness? What does a call to action might mean or look like in a world desensitised by voyeuristic tendencies and mediated content production?

Many forms of liveness—performances, actions and conversations—will bring alive the 110 days of the Biennale. Durational works that blur process and presentation will invite audiences into embodied, participatory moments, challenging a static exhibition. We believe this is what a Biennale can be: a space of aliveness, presence, and communion. A place where people come together, not just to see art, but to be with it, and with each other.

 

programs

The programmes and exhibitions for the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale emerge from the idea of the biennale as a shared ecosystem where multitudes coexist without a nucleus, we ask: how can we speak to the global in local tongues?

Our imagination is situated within the realities and possibilities of our sites and contexts. We seek affinitive alignments and embrace slowness. This, we believe, would allow conversations and forms to grow, ferment, decay, or transform; to foreground relationships of nourishment and active care. We hold place for joy and grief, whilst learning from forms of gathering and being together. We acknowledge that it is impossible to conjure imaginations of a world without acknowledging the structures of violence and othering, and the unfolding of a genocide.

Conversations, film, food, music, theatre, workshops, and choreographies unfold over 109 days, led by Mario D’Souza, Director of Programmes, with Ananthan Suresh, Mashoor Ali, and Rebecca Martin.

D’Souza notes, “To think with people is a gift in this fractured, polarised world. It is important to find joy, share a meal, grieve, and come to terms with loss. Resilience, in the face of adversity and forms of systemic erasure, is one of humanity’s greatest strengths. We honour caregivers and those that keep hope alive in our broken world”.

The Biennale Pavilion commission for 2025-26 was awarded to Senthil Kumar Doss for Primordial, which was selected by a jury composed of Aric Chen, Bose Krishnamachari, Radhika Desai, Shimul Javeri Kadri, and Tony Joseph.

The Pavilion is the beating heart of the biennale, activated by gatherings, events, and happenings. These include “Nothing will remain other than the thorn lodged in the throat of this world,” a lecture-performance by Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian; a presentation of Somnath Waghmare’s documentary practice; “Imagining Zomia,” a conversation with practitioners, film makers, historians and artists to re-examine the highlands of Central, South, and Southeast Asia beyond their framing as peripheral or stateless zones; “Statues Must Die” by Naeem Mohaiemen; “(Towards) Crip Aesthetics: Disability as Method” by Resting Museum engages with crip aesthetics as a mode of resistance to able-bodied and able-minded norms, foregrounding lived experience as a site of theory and art-making; “Eelam Dialogues” with Meena Kandasamy and Nimmi Gowrinathan, and presentations of films by the Dharamshala International Film Festival, and the Palestine Film Institute; “History of Long Durational Performances and MAI,” a performance by Marina Abramović; and South by South which brings together artists, curators, and institutions to explore the intertwined histories of trade, migration, violence and cultural hybridities across the Indian Ocean. A full list of contributors and a schedule will be announced in the second half of November.

Invitations was initiated in 2022 in the post-pandemic landscape to think with and learn from independent, artist-run initiatives, and public exhibitions from the Southern, majoritarian world. In sharing space and resources, we share frameworks and learn from each other’s work, methodologies, and challenges. This year, we see contributions from 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/Gudskul (Jakarta), amongst others.

Realised as part of our Foundation exhibitions, Edam foregrounds artistic practices and processes from Kerala, and is curated by Aishwarya Suresh and K.M. Madhusudhan. Set across three venues, it weaves 36 projects by local artists as essay projects.

The sixth edition of the Students Biennale(SB) brings together 70 artist projects across four venues, mapping a record 150 art schools across the country. SB is curated by Khursheed Ahmed and Salman Bashir Baba; Savyasachi Anju Prabir and Sukanya Deb; Secular Art Collective represented by Bhushan Bhombhale, Khan Shamim Akhtar, Salik Ansari, and Shamooda Amrelia; GABAA; Anga Art Collective; Ashok Vish and Chinar Shah; and Seethal CP and Sudheesh Kottembram. The Thinking Lab, an extended shape-shifting site, will host workshops, seminars, performances, and programming.

Art by Children (ABC) programme, led by Blaise Joseph with Neethu KS, creates non-competitive, fearless, creative art spaces for young minds. Through workshops led by artists and cultural practitioners, it inculcates learning beyond the curriculum, engaging the perceptive minds of children, educators, parents, and communities.

We relaunch our Residency Programme with Oraayiram Kadal/A Thousand Seas, a long-term research and development project extending from the Foundation’s interest in trans-oceanic, trans-regional worldings that challenge western, colonial, and post-colonial forms of identification and classification. We are interested in speculative and/or embodied histories that approach lands and seas through the experiences of the people who traversed them. It seeks clues and offerings in stories and songs, legends and lies to contemplate and learn practices of survival and resistance, and those left out of mainstream, state-prescribed narratives. It acknowledges transmissions – stories, goods, Gods, beasts, and seeds – and people that voluntarily or involuntarily took to uncertain seas. These cultures then produced were born out of possibilities and resilience, but also the violence of imperialism and extraction. We host our first batch of artists, including Daniel Godínez Nivón (Netherlands/Mexico) and Shivay La Multiple (France), who will be joined by returning artists Flo Maak and Juliane Tübke (Germany) to showcase works from their times in Kochi.