A stunning short documenting the ecological challenges of farming in the Punjab; an installation of 750 photographs showing every possible gesture of limbs working a loom; experimental tapestries of cotton and hand-spun wool; abstract paintings made of thread and wool, in a riot of colours, ranging from bright to subdued; a rural habitation in Malabar seen through the slim trunks of areca nut trees; surreal coastal landscapes in green; a corridor of mirrors with slightly distorting reflections; sea-surf on a wooden floor; gigantic milk cans on weather-beaten cycles; little portraits of women in moments of repose on a train; the notebook of a nun; floating quilts pieced together from the clothing of multiple generations – these are a few of my favourite artworks at the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, spread over 22 venues in Fort Kochi, Mattancherry and Willingdon Island, in old and new warehouses. Titled ‘For the time being’, it is curated by Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces.In his Curator’s Note, Chopra expands on the theme thus: ‘We see the Kochi-Muziris Biennale as a gathering that is suspended in time. The scale of the exhibition makes us ponder what effort, toil, and work are. The Biennale is revealing to us that we don’t have to adhere to permanence – our role as actors in the cosmic calendar is “for the time being”.’List of participating artists. Aspinwall, Fort Kochi. Photograph by author.Parliament of ghostsThe Biennale was inaugurated on December 14, 2025 and will run until March 31, 2026. Visiting it in March inevitably meant avidly following the Biennale’s social media updates and reading up its coverage by art magazines and critics in the intervening months. Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s interview in STIRworld was the most fascinating of them all. His installation, ‘Parliament of Ghosts’, in Anand Warehouse, deconstructs the colonial histories of two commodities placed in dialogue with each other – jute sacks and furniture, in the form of chairs. The sacks, sewn together and layered with stamps – to underline both trade in the food and spices that they once contained, and the labour that went into them – line the three walls of the installation as tapestries; while a huge eclectic collection of mended chairs, symbolising bureaucratic control and generational histories, are arranged under it to form the structure of the ghostly Parliament of the title. Both the sacks and the chairs have been sourced from Kochi itself – a historic port town that has witnessed successive waves of colonial settlements (Portuguese, Dutch and British) over centuries, enabled through trade, which in turn shaped its cosmopolitan character. ‘Parliament of Ghosts’, conceived as a performative space, has been used as such in the duration of the Biennale. On the day and time of my visit in early March, however, perhaps in tune with the association of Holi, it became a site of love – with two pairs of young lovers obsessively taking photos of each other, and then requesting me to take a few of them together. I readily obliged; and extracted from them the quid pro quo of taking stills of mine sitting in vacant and pensive mood, imagining the ghosts of all my dear ones dead and gone, sitting around me in those chairs. That’s what that furniture did to me. I left the Parliament surprised at my response.ShelterAnand Warehouse, which houses Mahama’s Parliament, is also the site of Jayashree Chakravarty’s Shelter: For the time being (2025), which is displayed along with several of her other works. The Kolkata-based artist is well known for her innovative mixed-media installations, and Shelter is yet another monumental example of that. In it, long suspended scrolls are stitched together to form a hooded/encircled structure, with its surface constituted of organic materials (like jute, copper wire, dry grass) and imprinted with seeds and insects. It is an exploration of the interconnectedness of different kinds of organisms of the natural world and a generous conjuring of a primal shelter that can protect all. At a time when the world has gone mad, with the sanctity of all life in danger, I felt this artwork in particular resonated with hope and kindness.Jayashree Chakravarty, ‘Shelter: For the Time Being’ (2025). Mixed media on multi layered paper, 14 feet diameter. Image courtesy: The artist & Gallery Akar Prakar, New Delhi.Four greatsA high point of the Biennale for me was to stand before the original of a favourite painting – Gieve Patel’s ‘Embrace’ – after having seen reproductions for years. Patel is in good company, with Jyoti Bhatt, in Space Gallery, within the precincts of ICCI Cochin; while Vivan Sundaram’s last work, ‘Six Stations of a Life Pursued’, a photography-based installation, finds a new iteration in Cube Art Space. Gulammohammed Sheikh’s ‘Of worlds within worlds’, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art’s tribute to him on his 80th, after the inaugural show in Delhi, is displayed in Durbar Hall, a 20-minute Water Metro ride from Fort Kochi. Curated by Roobina Karode, it is divided in three segments – City, Journeys and Maps/Mappamundi – and interestingly bookended by a bio at the entrance (with some rare photographs) and a fascinating digital collage in a triple section projection at the end. At the entrance of Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Exhibition, Durbar Hall. Photograph by author.Textile art, weaving and labourWhile it was enriching to view the work of these greats, it was the artists (both veteran and newer voices) I was encountering for the first time who left the greatest impression upon me. Interestingly, weaving and textile is central to several of their shows: Lakshmi Madhavan’s ‘Looming Bodies’ in K.M. Building; Monika Correa’s tapestries in Pepper House; and Shobha Broota’s ‘The Lightness of Being’, curated by Ina Puri and presented by the Ardee Foundation in Mocha Art Café.Tucked away in a 400-year-old Dutch building in one of the bustling alleys of Jew Town, Mattencherry, is Mocha Art Café, with its gallery space (strewn with antique furniture) folded between the café area and a lovely boutique. As I ascended the steep flight of stairs, the noise outside faded away and I found myself in the luminous presence of Broota’s artworks. They made me pause, after a hectic day of travel. And savour the harmony of colour, form and material. Each of the 33 works displayed are abstract meditations on colour, framed within geometric forms (mostly rectangles and squares), and built with lines of thread and wool. Up close, the textures of the materials used become visible; but from afar, the artworks simply radiate a haze of colours – shades of blue and green, yellow, fuchsia, maroon – making this show one of the most immersive in the Biennale. And the most exquisite works here are those that play with different shades of the same colour – a visual equivalent of subtle variations of tone in music, something Broota was trained in and which informs her artistic practice. Shobha Broota, ‘The Lightness of Being’. Wool on canvas (set of 3 works), 12″ × 12″ each, 2018. Photo courtesy: Ina Puri.Monica Correa’s experimental tapestries take up an entire room in the upper floor of the Pepper House in Kochi, covering a wide span of her trajectory as an artist. I was drawn to both her iconic representations of the natural world (The Banyan Tree, 1984 and Snowscape, 1986) and the more abstract works (Ying Yang I, 2012-2013 and Inverted Forest, 2021-23). Largely self-taught, the innovations in Correa’s weaving stem from the removal of the reed from an eight-shaft teak loom she has worked on all her life – allowing her greater freedom in manipulating the materials used. The technicalities involved in such a practice can perhaps best be understood by those who are familiar with weaving, but the artworks speak to even a lay visitor – inviting her to slow down and invoking a contemplative mood.Lakshmi Madhavan’s ‘Looming Bodies’, done in collaboration with the weaving community of Balaramapuram, centres around the production of kasavu, the traditional gold-and-white textile of Kerala. It juxtaposes textile works against photographic works (a first for the artist) to tease out the hierarchies inherent in the production and consumption of the material. While we think of the kasavu principally in terms of the wearing body (often in landmark moments in life), what remains invisible and is almost written out of the narrative of the cloth is the labouring body. Madhavan highlights that in a series of 750 photographs chosen from an archive of 20,000 stills taken over five years. The photographs privilege gesture over identity, the focus being the “imprint of labour on the body – the texture of skin, bone, muscle”. These black-and-white images, which take up the major space in the installation, stand in stark contrast to the shimmer of the kasavu fabric hung on the other side, along with loom fragments and weavers’ wage books (as a relentless reminder of the cost of labour). The mural on the wall, at the entrance of the Exhibition – a close up of a pair of hands working the loom – adds to the uniqueness of this Collateral.The labouring body is also at the heart of Birender Yadav’s ‘Only the Earth Knows Their Labour’ (2025), displayed in Aspinwall; in this case, it is that of the seasonal migrant workers in brick kilns of Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh, who have been the central concern of Yadav’s practice. The installation recreates the structure of a kiln with the presence of the workers everywhere, mostly in fragments, and traces: a male worker centrally positioned, sitting, without his head; another standing, without his torso, his trouser-waist holding the tools of his trade; innumerable palm prints on bricks; a pair of clay feet; and terracotta casts of everyday objects and tools used in a life of relentless exploitative anonymous labour. I can never look upon a brick again without thinking of this labour and the reddish hue I was enveloped in, literally inside that kiln.God’s own countryOne almost expects to see verdant landscapes on gallery walls in God’s own country. Sujith S.N.’s paintings in Space Gallery give us that. ‘Gateway to the Botanical Garden’, tempera-on-paper (2025), is a surreal landscape: a long white wall with an enigmatic colonial-style entrance encloses a luminous green tropical forest that seems to exist outside time. “The green wilderness”, as Aswathy Gopalakrishnan points out in her catalogue essay on the artist, “recurs across all the paintings, producing a continuity of colour, light and stillness, leaving the viewer suspended in an imagined landscape”. Vegetation and forest also feature prominently in the immersive 10-panel acrylic on canvas painting by RB Shajith – ‘Wiping Out’ (which is part of a series). We get a slice of rural Malabar here; an entire habitation can be seen through gaps in the vertical columns of areca nut tree-trunks, with a resplendent peacock given centre-stage in the artwork. Shajith’s work (like Yadav’s) is displayed in the Coir Godown of Aspinwall, one of the 11 displays there. The Bungalow in the same venue, overlooking the Arabian Sea, has an additional 14 displays – of which, Faiza Hasan’s ‘Kal’ (2025), metal floor drawing of sea-foam, merges with its backdrop. The ebb and flow of time, evoked by the sea, is visually represented in an accompanying set of six small self-portraits in charcoal, made by the artist since 2020. Faiza Hasan, ‘Kal’ (2025). Metal leaf on wooden floor. Photograph by author.Site-responsive artOne of the densest sites of the Biennale is Jew Town, Mattancherry, with multiple venues in walking distance from each other. A most unique one is at the JRC Marine, which is showcasing “Durga Puja Art: The Living Museum of Bengal’s Public Art”, a Collateral project presented by massArt. Curated by Sayantan Maitra Boka, and including in its team award winning artists in this arena like Bhabatosh Sutar and Pradip Das, it brings Kolkata’s UNESCO-recognised pandal art to Kochi, initiating a creative dialogue between the two port cities. The most poignant manifestation of it is the installation bisarjan right on the edge of the coast, which emulates the immersion of the goddess Durga at the end of the festival in Bengal.What’s interesting about its conceptualisation is that it doesn’t replicate a pandal, rather gives a structure (kathamo) and emphasises the core values of pandal art: “shared labour, adaptive construction, collaborative authorship, and multi-sensory storytelling”. The centrepiece is a gigantic 80-foot inverted boat (nouko), made of bamboo, that both harks back to what has been historically the chief means of transport and means of livelihood of a riverine people and also represents the traditional do-chala roofs of yore. Surrounding it are several installations – dhak, jatra and samarpan – that evoke the atmosphere of the Durga Puja and the experience of the pavilions where the goddess and her children are housed for the ten days of the festival. A promotional video in one of the rooms narrates the journey of massArt – an NGO that has helped promote this festival with the support of UNESCO and taken it to a larger (national and international) audience since 2022, through a ‘Preview Show’ of selected pandals that gives exclusive access to them before they are open to the public. Deep Das & Eshika Chandra, Bisarjan. Bamboo installation. Part of ‘Durga Puja Art: The Living Museum of Bengal’s Public Art’, presented by massArt.Students’ BiennaleThe Students’ Biennale across six venues in Kochi, supported by Tata Trusts, is a robust offering. I visited the VKL Warehouse, where the work of five students in particular (from art institutions across the country) caught my attention.A set of untitled watercolours on paper by Diya Joseph, capturing women in moments of stillness and rest in the ladies’ coach of local trains in Mumbai, the pauses a sharp counterpoint to the frenetic pace of the maximum city; ‘Milk Distributors’ by Abhijit Das, acrylic on canvas, highlighting the ubiquity of the humble bicycle as the principal conduit of the staple drink and a symbol of freedom and agency for the poor; ‘The People’s Orchestra’ by Rutuja Sanawane, an installation that’s a tribute to the artist’s father, Bhagwan Sanawane, who started a modest brass band on a handcart 50 years ago, named ‘Swar Samrat’, which has now become “an indispensable fixture at political gatherings across Maharashtra” because of its politically charged music steeped in Ambedkarite teachings; ‘Land Erosion’ by Tanmoy Dutta, a diptych (oil on canvas) representing the laterite landscapes of the Birbhum, Bankura and Purulia districts of West Bengal, which are at the receiving end of rampant encroachment by developers, leading to the displacement of the local Santhal Adivasi community; and ‘Shifting Landscapes’ by Reppandee Lepcha, a mixed media work articulating a variant of the same theme as Dutta, but played out in Ladakh, focussing on the fading language and culture of the Rong (Lepcha) people. Between them, these students cover different parts of the nation’s geographical terrain, mapping the diverse realities of contemporary India. Indelible black marksThis was my first experience of the Kochi Biennale; it was brief, intense and enriching. Two days of marathon viewing left me physically exhausted, but my mind teeming with images. The one that has been seared into my consciousness is Kulprit Singh’s Indelible Black Marks – an 8-minute short on stubble burning in the farmlands of Punjab that raises profound questions about ecology and the onus that farmers have to bear. Few films have left me as mesmerised: I watched it thrice in loop, unable to drag myself out of the dark room, with bales of hay as seats, showing the single-channel video. The power of the short derives from the way it brings together community performance and filming, with its aerial perspective suitably imparting a sense of the scale of the staged act, and the surround sound creating a visceral experience for the viewer. In the film, Singh and his peers re-enact the ritual of stubble-burning, traditionally done by farmers to remove weeds and pests from their agricultural land as a preparation for the next harvest cycle. But it doesn’t stop there. After burning, the men drag massive white canvasses across the burning fields, “to capture the residue of the land on canvas” – thereby, literally imprinting land onto an art material. Indeed, many of the paintings of the artist’s critically acclaimed solo in 2024 (of which this film is a part) were created using fire and stubble-ash on canvas. Some of them are displayed in a room adjacent to the one showing the video.I had a brief, informal communication with the artist after the visit. His humble words in response to my effusion about his work was: Ye sab ka hai… sab ke liye hai… ye ek joint venture hai (“This is for all… this is meant for all… it is a joint venture)”. That could be another caption for the Biennale. Rituparna Roy is a writer based in Kolkata. She can be reached at royrituparna.com