KOCHI-MUZIRIS BIENNALE 2025: FOR THE TIME BEING
The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025 has announced its return, with the sixth edition opening on 12 December 2025 in Kochi, Kerala, India. Titled For the Time Being, the Biennale will run for 110 days until 31 March 2026, transforming the coastal city into South Asia’s leading destination for creative travel and contemporary art.
How Kochi Biennale Transformed India’s Creative Travel Map
Founded in 2012, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is India’s first international art biennale and remains the longest-running in South Asia. It has put Kochi firmly on the global cultural map, attracting artists, curators, and creative travellers from around the world.
More than an exhibition, the Biennale activates Kochi itself. Disused warehouses, historic buildings, and courtyards become exhibition sites, creating a unique dialogue between contemporary art and the city’s layered colonial and spice-trade heritage.
Alongside the main exhibition, visitors can expect talks, film screenings, workshops, performances, and educational projects such as the Students’ Biennale, Art By Children, and the Residency Programme.
Curated by Nikhil Chopra & HH Art Spaces
The sixth edition is curated by Nikhil Chopra, a multidisciplinary artist known for blending performance, drawing, photography, sculpture, and installation, together with HH Art Spaces, an artist-led initiative from Goa.
Their curatorial framework for For the Time Being moves away from the traditional “spectacle” of a biennale and instead proposes a living ecosystem. Here, art is understood as evolving, collaborative, and deeply tied to the rhythms of place.
Chopra describes it as:
“A Biennale that is alive, responsive, and shaped through participation, where audiences don’t just see art, but share time and space with it.”
Themes for 2025/26
At its core, the Biennale will explore the body as landscape—a vessel of labour, memory, intimacy, and transformation. Works will reflect on embodied histories, ecological precarity, and shared human struggles, while inviting new ways of being together.
Visitors can expect durational performances, participatory installations, and moments that blur process and presentation. The intention is to create spaces of liveness and presence, where art and audience meet beyond the digital noise of daily life.
Why Creative Travellers Should Visit
For those seeking cultural tourism in India, Kochi offers a rare immersion into the global art scene while staying rooted in local history. During the Biennale, the city comes alive with exhibitions spread across Fort Kochi’s colonial streets, spice markets, and waterfront warehouses.
This is creative travel at its best: combining art, architecture, heritage, and community in a way few other destinations can. Visitors will also discover Kerala’s backwaters, design-led hotels, homestays, and artist-run cafés, all contributing to a uniquely immersive journey.
Key Details
Exhibition Title: For the Time Being
Dates: 12 December 2025 – 31 March 2026
Location: Kochi, Kerala, India
Curators: Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces
Programme: Central exhibition + talks, performances, screenings, Students’ Biennale, Invitations, Art By Children, Residency Programme.
A Space for Aliveness
In uncertain times, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale offers something urgent and essential: a space where art provokes, heals, and connects. It’s not just an art event—it’s a cultural journey, a chance to travel creatively, and a reminder of what it means to be alive, together, for the time being.
