India’s largest international art festival is back — and this time, it’s shifting the spotlight from spectacle to soul. The sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, one of the most anticipated cultural events on the global art calendar, will open its doors on December 12, 2025, and run until March 31, 2026. Titled “For the Time Being,” this year’s edition will be curated by acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Nikhil Chopra, known for his immersive work in performance, drawing, installation, and sculpture.
Fresh off performances at global art stages like documenta 14 (Athens), the Sharjah Biennial, and past editions of the Kochi Biennale itself, Chopra now takes the reins as curator — bringing with him a deeply collaborative and process-driven philosophy. At the heart of his vision is the idea of artist-led friendship economies — spaces of mutual care and creation that thrive beyond institutional boundaries.
Far from a static gallery experience, this 110-day art journey promises to be a “living ecosystem,” in the words of the Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF). It will span performances, conversations, site-specific installations, and cross-disciplinary collaborations that evolve over time — rather than merely being displayed.
As always, the Biennale will feature its dynamic verticals:
– Students’ Biennale
– Art By Children
– Residency Programme
– Invitations
– Alongside curated talks, workshops, film screenings, and more across Kochi’s historic venues.
The complete artist lineup will be announced in October 2025, but the ethos of the event is already clear: this edition won’t just showcase art — it will host it, live with it, and grow alongside it.
In an era hungry for deeper connection and slower creation, the 2025 Kochi-Muziris Biennale invites us to pause, participate, and simply be — “For the Time Being.”
About Kochi Biennale Foundation
KBF was established in 2010 as a non-profit, charitable trust in Kochi, Kerala to promote art, culture, heritage and education. It was founded by artists for artists. Amongst its mandates is to support emerging practices, platform a diversity of voices and building alternate infrastructures to promote art, culture and music. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale, our flagship event, is the largest exhibition of contemporary art in South Asia. Besides the biennale, the Foundation is also engaged in public programmes, education, conservation of heritage properties and monuments and the upliftment of traditional forms of art and culture.
Kochi-Muziris Biennale is India’s first biennale of international contemporary art and one of the largest exhibitions in Asia. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale draws on Kerala’s rich multicultural history, layered with diverse colonial influences – Portuguese, Dutch, and British, and brings to these the ancient lore of the fabled Chera harbour of Muziris, where Christian and Muslim merchants from the West and traders from the Far East exchanged goods and ideas.
The Kochi-Muziris Biennale seeks to invoke the latent cosmopolitan spirit of the modern metropolis of Kochi and its mythical past, Muziris. Its intentions are to create a platform to introduce contemporary international visual art, theory and practice to India; showcase and encourage debates on new Indian and international aesthetics and enable a dialogue among artists, curators, and the public.
About Nikhil Chopra
Nikhil Chopra’s artistic practice interweaves live art, drawing, photography, sculpture and installations. His performances, in large part improvised, dwell on identity and its construction, autobiography and authorship, the pose and self-portraiture. Nikhil combines everyday life, memory and collective history; daily acts such as eating, resting, washing and dressing, in tandem with the act and discipline of making large scale drawings in situ become the process of making an artwork.
Nikhil’s works have been included in major exhibitions including Documenta 14, 12th Sharjah Biennale, 12th Havana Biennale; 2nd Kochi-Muziris Biennale and 53rd Venice Biennale amongst others. He has also shown works and performed at the Gropius Bau, Berlin; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester; New Art Exchange, Nottingham; , SFMOMA, San Francisco; Artsonje, Seoul; Museum of Contemporary Art, Yinchuan, China; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway; Indian Highway, Serpentine Gallery, London, UK; Carriageworks, Sydney; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.
Nikhil Chopra was born in Kolkata in 1974, and lives in Goa where he runs HH Art Spaces with partners. After studying at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Vadodara, India, the artist continued his studies in the United States in 2003 to return to India in 2005 with a Masters from Ohio State University.
About HH Art Spaces
HH Art Spaces, Goa, was founded in 2014 by Nikhil Chopra and Romain Loustau, both live art and performance artists. HH Art Spaces is a movement, and currently includes the shared vision, voices, rigors, and energies of a collective of artists and cultural practitioners. Key founding and partner members of the organization are: Madhavi Gore, Shivani Gupta, and Shaira Sequeira Shetty.
HH Art Spaces fosters an ethos of collaborations, residencies and interdisciplinary exchanges within art and culture; and has worked with artists and organizations locally, regionally and internationally.
Over the years, HH Art Spaces has developed a rich archive of visual, sonic, installation, and live art and performance work, in South Asia. HH Art Spaces promotes artists and produces exhibitions and artist residencies, talks and workshops, in contemporary and traditional artistic practice-based research, bridging transdisciplinary practices through collaborations and partnerships. HH is a hub and a laboratory for artists and curators to investigate and explore new forms and approaches within arts and cultural practice.
HH Art Spaces has forged partnerships with established art collectives and prominent cultural institutions, like: The Tetley Museum, Leeds, UK; The Tate Modern, London, UK; Fondazione Elpis, Milan, Italy; Britto Arts Trust, Dhaka, Bangladesh; Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India; Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh; Chatterjee & Lal Gallery, Mumbai, India; Chemould Prescott Road Gallery, Mumbai, India; KHOJ International Artists’ Association, New Delhi, India; Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, New Delhi, India; India Art Fair, New Delhi, India; Theertha International Artists’ Collective, Colombo, Sri Lanka; Serendipity Arts Trust, New Delhi/Goa, India; Magnetic Fields Festival, Rajasthan, India; Sunaparanta Centre for the Arts, Goa, India; and Japan Foundation, Alliance Française, Canada Council for the Arts, British Council, Pro Helvetia, and the Ontario Arts Council.
