Nikhil Chopra, an interdisciplinary artist from Goa whose practice combines live art, performance, sculpture, painting, installation and photography, is the curator of the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale that opened on December 12 and will continue till March 31.Hosted by the Kochi Biennale Foundation, with assistance of Rs 7.5 crore from the government of Kerala, the latest edition, titled “For the Time Being”, features 66 artist projects from over 25 countries including India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Pakistan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Palestine, Italy and the United Arab Emirates. Spread out across the twin towns of Fort Kochi and Mattancherry in Kerala, it invites audiences to engage with the work of Ibrahim Mahama, Marina Abramović, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Naeem Mohaiemen, Abul Hisham, Bani Abidi, Dima Srouji, Prabhakar Kamble, Kulpreet Singh, Lionel Wendt, Shilpa Gupta and Zarina Mohammad, among other artists.Chopra is the co-founder of HH Art Spaces, which describes itself as “an artist-run movement working with live performance, visual, sonic and installation artists locally, regionally and internationally”. On December 11, he led a preview walkthrough for visiting mediapersons.Nikhil Chopra. Photo: Kochi Biennale FoundationAs I discovered, he can enchant you with his poetic turn of phrase and have you gasping for more, or leave you utterly confused and tearing your hair apart with his verbal wizardry. The listener’s response is, only partly, a result of Chopra’s doing. What one makes of him also reveals the expectations that one brings along while choosing to witness, interact with, or consume art.Sample this: “I want you to think with your body and feel with your mind. I want you to smell with your eyes, see with your nose, touch with your tongue, and taste with your fingertips. I want you to experience this in a very corporeal way because it is the body, essentially, that we place at the centre.” He spoke with his heart on his sleeve, with some listeners feeling deeply moved by his vision and articulation and others wondering what the hell he was talking about.I pulled him aside for a brief interview the evening before the biennale was declared open.A lot of artists have been grappling with an enormous crisis of meaning because they stood by feeling helpless as people got killed in Ukraine and Palestine. They realised that their art, despite its commitment to beauty and justice, was unable to save lives or soften the heart of people filled with hatred. How do you make sense of all this for yourself? What does it mean to make and share art in the world that we live in?Well, some of the most poetic and artistic work in the world has come out of deep deprivation. The history of jazz, for instance, is tied up with the history of slavery. Poetry and art may not have an immediate effect but there is a way in which the fragrance coming from a flower in a muddy pond refreshes you and lingers on. There has to be hope at the end of all this disarray. I feel that, as artists, the only thing we can do is hold up a mirror and reflect and pause and think and feel and breathe and smile and frown and cry and connect to a sense of ourselves that is deeper than skin. I hope that all the work being shown at the biennale will help people connect with themselves and with others. People have gone through immense suffering, and not just in Palestine or Ukraine. It is there in Africa and South America, and in the memories of the COVID-19 pandemic that we have come out of. We need to think urgently of our role as human beings on this planet.Ibrahim Mahama, Parliament of Ghosts (2017–ongoing), Anand Warehouse, Mattancherry. Photo: Kochi Biennale FoundationFrom being an artist immersed in your own studio to taking responsibility for this massive biennale as a curator, what kind of a mental shift did you have to make?You need nerves of steel. You need to know how to be agile and vulnerable, and at the same time find strength in that vulnerability. You need to work with positivity and with your rhythms, but you have to understand that taking on a project of this scale requires you to re-evaluate yourself. And you need to be truthful because if you bullshit your way through something like this, it will fall apart. It has been really important for me to constantly come back to operating from a place of intuition, trust and being very open, not feeling fixated on one kind of perfection – which I fight against because I strongly believe in accepting who we really are.Working with such a large number of people from diverse cultural contexts, how does one balance the personal and public? How does one take care of one’s mental health?What a profound question! This biennale is like a collision of art, political systems, governance, the city, the cultural fabric of this place, the market, and the hundreds of people that come together to make it, without passion perhaps but because they need to put food on the table. How do you balance all of that? This is a question that you, as a curator, have to wake up to every single morning, and allow yourself to trust yourself. If you operate from a place of honesty, you will see yourself through. Connection is the most important thing to remember.You must remember not to see people as labour but to see them as labouring. There is a very important line to draw between those two things. We are all labouring together to make this happen, so there needs to be a sense of acknowledgement and respect, to look someone in the eye, and ask, “How are you feeling?” That’s very important. It also gets reflected back on you and you have to silently ask yourself how you are feeling and face it. We need each other to be fine. Our coming together is an exchange, not a transaction. It has to be genuine and personal.Abul Hisham, Healing Room, Director’s Bungalow, Aspinwall House, Fort Kochi. Photo: Kochi Biennale FoundationThe word ‘empathy’ is overused, so I was trying to avoid it, but some of the most beloved artists are known for having the ability to go beyond headlines and think outside silos, to view and tease out nuances even in the most seemingly black-and-white situations. You spent a significant portion of your childhood in Kashmir with your grandparents who lived there. What has it been like to reconnect with those formative memories? To what extent have they influenced or enriched your approach as a curator? I look at bodies like landscapes, and landscapes like bodies. I look at scars and wounds like mountains and ravines. I look at age and time playing themselves out on our bodies, in the form of wrinkle marks and laugh lines, just as landscapes change and so do our relationships with them. All this is to say that, yes, Kashmir has played a massive part in my life. I believe that a place is really what makes us who we are. I feel that the Himalayas, the evergreen forests, the high-altitude lakes are really etched into my body and my memory. I carry them with me, not from a place of romance but a place of loss and displacement and anguish; a place of not having. I grew up thinking of nature as abundant only to come to the reality that it is actually extremely fragile. It needs to be seen as worthy of respect, of protection, of love more than anything else.Chintan Girish Modi is a writer, journalist, educator, and literary critic. His work has appeared in various anthologies, including Borderlines: Volume 1 (2015), Clear Hold Build (2019), Fearless Love (2019) and Bent Book (2020). He can be reached @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.