8 months ago
Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025: Repair and Reimagining
The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025 is a big art festival in India where artists from places like Brazil, Ghana, Singapore, and India are showing their work.
They are using old and broken things to make new art that tells stories about how to fix and improve the world.
Some artists, like Cinthia Marcelle, collected broken objects from the streets, fixed them with the help of local experts, and then gave them back to their owners.
Others, like Ibrahim Mahama, used old chairs to make big art pieces that remind people about the history of colonization.
The artists want to show that there are better ways to live and take care of the world, especially when so many resources are being wasted.
The festival is all about repairing, reimagining, and helping each other.
The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025 opened on December 12, 2025, and will run until March 31, 2026, featuring 66 artists from around the world.
Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle created an installation called 'History' by collecting and repairing 51 broken objects from the streets of Mattancherry, Kerala.
Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama used discarded chairs from government offices in Kochi to create a large installation titled 'Parliament of Ghosts'.
Singaporean artist Zarina Muhammad explores traditions and communities in her work, 'Omens Drawn by Lightning', to address overconsumption and ecological exhaustion.
The biennale's theme, 'For The Time Being', focuses on solutions to socio-economic and political crises, with artists from the Global South offering alternative ways of living.
- Who
- Artists from the Global South, including Cinthia Marcelle, Ibrahim Mahama, Zarina Muhammad, and others
- What
- The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025, a contemporary art festival addressing socio-economic and political crises
- Where
- Fort Kochi, Mattancherry, and Willingdon Island in Kerala, India
- When
- Opened on December 12, 2025, and will run until March 31, 2026
- Why
- To explore solutions to rampant consumption, consumerism, and colonialism, and to foster solidarity among artists
Key facts
- Event
- Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025
- Theme
- For The Time Being
- Duration
- December 12, 2025 - March 31, 2026
- Location
- Fort Kochi, Mattancherry, and Willingdon Island
- Curators
- Nikhil Chopra and HH Art Spaces
- Participating Artists
- 66 artists from around the world
- Notable Artists
- Cinthia Marcelle, Ibrahim Mahama, Zarina Muhammad, Bhasha Chakrabarti, Huma Mulji, Utsa Hazarika, Abul Hisham, Ali Akbar PN, Panjeri Artists’ Union
Quotes
Cinthia Marcelle
Brazilian artist and creator of the 'History' installation at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
“The collection of repaired objects disrupts the usual story of disposal and opens up a space for encounters between fragmented histories, told in unexpected ways yet deeply tied to Mattancherry’s social, economic, and emotional landscape.”
financialexpress.com
“During my time in Kochi, especially in the neighbourhood of Mattancherry, I came across a very particular scene: damaged objects accumulating in the streets, left behind yet still full of use, memory, and a sense of future possibility.”
financialexpress.com
Zarina Muhammad
Singapore-based artist and part of the artist-critic duo The White Pube.
“These practices foreground care, restraint and relational thinking, which feel deeply relevant in a moment shaped by overconsumption and ecological exhaustion. Rather than positioning the Global South as a source of ready-made solutions, the work points toward modes of attention (embodied, ancestral, and relational) that have endured despite colonial extraction and ongoing dispossession. It asks what becomes possible when we slow down, sense with the body, and accept indeterminacy as part of living.”
financialexpress.com
“For me, the Global South doesn’t offer a single ‘solution’ to Western consumerism, and I’m wary of framing it that way. What it offers instead are ways of living with limits, and of acknowledging and paying attention to non-human/ more than human forces larger than ourselves.”
financialexpress.com
Ibrahim Mahama
Ghanaian artist participating in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
“We should develop a much greater sense of empathy in order to be able to at least resolve some of the crisis we’ll find ourselves and extend that relationship to other places, to other people.”
financialexpress.com
