KOCHI-MUZIRIS BIENNALE 2025-26
The 6th edition of the KMB 2025 is curated by Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces, an artist led organisation based in Goa. Chopra is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice interweaves performance, drawing, photography, sculpture, and installation.
THE SEA IS HISTORY REALLY BEGINNING
Histories of the sea have extended concepts from terrestrial narratives and recreated the sea as the mirror of the land. What does it mean to think about the sea as a boiling vessel? How can we think histories of the sea on its own terms?
DISMANTLING AESTHETICS OF INHIBITION
Ambedkarian Aesthetics is a world free from prejudices, inhibitions, metanarrative of Brahmanic modernity, cultural nationalism thus subverting the narrative of the given and proposing to get into a process of dismantling several inhibitions.
Stories of communities about origin, spread and apocalypse being presented through episodic memories, narrative and visual texts, travel writings, murals, divine objects, church paintings, and songs provide a dense and myriad repository of historical and artistic imagination.
Aazhi archives presents Sea A Boiling Vessel. Its first exhibition as part of a long term multidisciplinary project that brings together artists, performers, scholars and intellectuals to contemplate together on the cosmopolitan pasts and futures of Kerala.
IN OUR VEINS FLOW INK AND FIRE
This edition of the KMB 2022 embodies the joy of experiencing practices of divergent sensibilities, under conditions both joyful and grim. There is optimism even in the darkest absurdity, and this is what leavens the direness of our time.
The Kochi Muziris Biennale 2022 seeks to invoke the latent cosmopolitan spirit of the modern metropolis of Kochi and its mythical past, Muziris, to create a platform that will introduce contemporary, global visual art theory and practice to India.
Step into the world of NFTs with 101 India NFT Creators Project - Myths & Memes! Witness the amalgamation of two everlasting forms of stories through a live NFT experience! Unique project presented and hosted by Cafe Papaya.
LOKAME THARAVADU:
MUST SEEN 30+1
The Kochi Biennale Foundation, with the support of the Government of Kerala presents a large-scale contemporary art survey exhibition titled Lokame Tharavad. The show will feature the works of 267 artists who trace their roots back to Kerala.
PAINTINGS OF THE MALABAR COAST
As a landscape painter who paints outdoors from direct observation, Susan Beaulah has documented Chakara, a unique fishing phenomenon, gracefully captured the lives of the fisherfolk and other bustling activities on the coasts of Kerala.
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ANCIENT ART
Art from the time of King Manuel I. Five hundred years after his death. In 2021, five centuries will have passed since the death of King Manuel I. This King’s relationship with artistic practice was one of the most important in Portuguese history.
These works are devoid of human figures and instead represent my inner landscape, with other visual symbols. They are mythical landscapes, derived from my imagining of the dichotomy between heaven and hell. They depict the confusion of my mind.
Sisyphus: Time as a Rolling Witness
Parag’s meditative practice of achieving realism on canvas is often mistaken for photographs, his troubling paintings of faces and bare bodies design a carefully linked chain on the compelling ways that material, subject, and sensibility can align on canvas.
OUT OF PLACE BY RIYAS KOMU
Virtual Exhibition
In a way, all these icons, symbols, sites, figures and images are all out of their place and time, it is as if they are all gathered here to create certain intersections of memory, thought and feeling to prompt reactions and reflections in us.
The journeys of Mancukkar have spawned various forms of oral histories and local narratives all across northern Malabar. Their travel accounts are a richly rewarding source of geography, ethnography and cultural history.
KR SUNIL
The Seafarers of Malabar
There aren’t many places in the world, to which monsoon winds and the smell of spices brought more sea trading ships than to the ports in Kerala. Their glory has faded, but photographer KR Sunil in silent portraits of sea sailors is capturing their stories.
The history of mancukkar is the history of migrant labourers who were the pioneers of cross-regional labour vital to the functioning of trade, transportation and pilgrimage throughout the Arabian Sea and beyond.
I. PEOPLE, GOODS AND IDEAS IN MOTION
Looking at maritime travels interconnectedness of various communities, their narratives and their collective sense of history and memory, many travel writers have described medieval and early modern Keralam as a world on the move.
Biju Ibrahim captures the essence of rustic geographies, the people who are now becoming archive of the earth, the mythic and mystery of spaces and places, broken vessels and torn fabric, alleys of now filled with the density of then or before.
NICK UT: The tears of the Women
It's a strange feeling to compare the "Napalm Girl" and Paris Hilton photo, I know I will never take another photograph that's as good as Kim’s photo. The big difference I grew to love Kim, whereas… frankly, I don't give a damn about Paris Hilton.
KMB 2018 seeks to invoke the cosmopolitan spirit of the modern metropolis of Kochi and its mythical past, Muziris, create a platform that introduce contemporary international visual art theory and practice to India.
My impressions of Mattancherry was informed by the widely available images and representations. But while shooting for “Mattancherry Series” all my perceptions shattered. I felt that every space is created to encourage cohabitation and togetherness.
ANITHA THAMPI
Poetry on the wall
Deshappalama: Anju Mozhippadangal. These speech-portraits are first attempts at confronting the single-person nations of Mattancherry and rendering them in poetry. Like myths, Mattancherry is a place that is woven from antiquity and multiplicity.
Dibin Thilakan is an young emerging voice in the contemporary art scene of Kerala, based in Thrissur. His work featuring strong narrative aspects exploring the human condition, have received national level recognitions.