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The Wednesday Journal of Cultural Insights.
The current Arts Biennale in India, titled “For the Time Being,” shifted away from the idea of art as a finished object and instead positioned it as process, presence, and lived time.
Spread across 29+ venues and 66 artists from 25 countries, it unfolded more like a slow choreography across the city than a curated sequence of works.
I booked a guide for four hours to understand better the local vision, she was an artist herself and had to pass several rounds of interviews to be accepted.
The biennale reframed itself as an ecosystem with performances that seemingly occurred spontaneously in a room when you were just admiring the art exhibited and had to pause and sit with it for a while ( I loved that!), workshops, conversations, and evolving installations replacing the idea of fixed displays.
Curated by Nikhil Chopra, I felt here was an allover political undercurrent – quiet but persistent. I still remember how heavy the first rooms and art works felt, an impression that would get lighter during our visit.
Without being overtly didactic, many works touched on:
Kochi, the city itself was not a backdrop, but it was a host or co-author opening colonial warehouses; there was humidity, decay, texture, port history.
This made the experience spatially inseparable from context, a strong lesson in material is never neutral.
I picked a few projects to share:
The viewer steps into the Anand Warehouse—a former storage site once used by Dutch, and later British, traders to move goods through Kochi’s port. Within this charged space, Ibrahim Mahama presents Parliament of Ghosts (2017–present): an enclosed chamber draped in dense curtains of reclaimed jute sacks and populated by more than a hundred chairs gathered from furniture shops across the city.
These sacks—once used to transport pepper, grain, and timber from colonial territories to Europe—still seem to carry the weight of their journeys. Their textures and lingering scent evoke labor, trade, and extraction, as if these histories have yet to fully dissipate.
The installation holds multiple readings at once. It echoes the architecture of a parliament, a cathedral, and a courtroom—spaces historically tied to Western authority—while also suggesting a classroom: a place left open, provisional, and available for collective presence and exchange.
In a hidden backyard, visitors move into a roofless, timeworn enclosure where banyan roots slowly reclaim the space. Here, Otobong Nkanga cultivates a living garden. It’s an evolving work that draws on her long-standing practice of using cultivation as a means to restore land marked by histories of extraction and colonial damage. In Kochi, she works with a selection of tropical species, attuned to the local climate and soil.
Heliconia, clock vines, frangipani, hibiscus, peacock flowers, bamboo, lemongrass, pepper bushes, torch ginger, ixora, orange jasmine, and lilies begin to shape a landscape that is not fixed but unfolding. Over the course of the Biennale, the garden is tended by local hands, allowing the work to grow, shift, and root itself in place.
Titled Soft Offerings to Scorched Lands and the Brokenhearted (2025), the installation becomes a quiet proposition for repair. Women’s voices – carrying fragments of folklore, conversation, and lullabies – emerge subtly from within the space. Simple mud seating, oriented toward water and horizon, encourages visitors to slow down, to listen, and to stay for a while.
The very first and rather striking installation we saw was by Adrián Villar Rojas: refrigerators – familiar, almost banal, interrupted mid-use. Inside, they no longer preserve but expose. Fruits, vegetables, meat, bottled liquids, and organic matter sit suspended in varying states of decay,, their surfaces softening, collapsing, or overtaken by mould during the duration of the Biennale at a steady temperature.
By compressing natural and industrial elements into a single, enclosed system, Villar Rojas reflects on a world shaped by extraction, consumption, and global circulation. Each object whether fruit or packaged drink speaks of supply chains, displacement, and the artificial separation between what is grown and what is produced.
The artist reflects in a large space on the exploitative brick industry’s forgotten labourers.
The viewer encounters a work shaped by the rhythms of the brick industry—an economy built on repetition, heat, and human endurance, yet largely invisible in its human cost. Here, the focus turns to the labourers who mould, carry, and fire each brick: bodies embedded in a system of extraction that leaves little trace of their presence once the structures rise.
Earth, dust, and clay become both material and testimony. The work gathers these elements not as neutral matter, but as carriers of effort, time, and inequity—pointing to cycles of labour that are continuous yet rarely acknowledged. Traces of touch and weight remain, suggesting the physical toll of production and the conditions under which it unfolds.
It was quite impactful. Hollow bodies, empty hands – rather than illustrating, the installation holds space for recognition, yet is very emotional.
Here go a few more images taken at the streets, which I find interesting to see the context of these warehouses and exhibit venues all close to the sea.
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