Dear friends and supporters,

In fewer than 30 days, the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale will come to a close. As we gear up to welcome a final surge of visitors over the next few weeks, we also begin to take stock of what these months have meant. In particular, how do we think of art and art exhibitions in times as these, when the world is gripped by fear and uncertainty, with violence unleashed and its images circulated with an unsettling ease?

Across the Biennale venues, one encounters artworks that respond to the present in different modalities, obliquely. Works that draw from personal memory and history to become conduits to think about grief, tenderness, rage, and justice, or those that marshal facts with judicial precision to assemble a witness’s testimony. Art, here, in its essential form, forges a space for refuge, to pause and grasp the many currents that feed every ocean, to repair and rebuild what is lost.

Consider artist-choreographer Mandeep Raikhy’s The Secular Project, a performance piece he conceived in 2020 against the context of the citizenship protests in India, which was restaged in Fort Kochi on 18 February as Choreographic Promenade. Gathering a group of people, Raikhy walked the street towards the seashore, conducting a performative intervention in the public space, marking dissent against majoritarianism through gestures of joy, announcing the power of people’s collectives.

Raikhy’s was one of the many performances that unfolded at various venues across the Biennale last month. In Aspinwall’s courtyard, artist Hiwa K presented the Kochi iteration of his long-running project Chicago Boys, which draws on collective music-making and collaboration to push back against neoliberal practices. The venue also saw Dhaka-based artist Yasmin Jahan Nupur’s The Touch, which sought to inspire empathy and humanism in spectators, transcending hardened political boundaries. The wired fence she used in the performance still stands on the site, its sharp edges blunted with coats of clay, reminding the visitors that the myriad barriers that shape human lives can be unmade.

British-Gujarati artist Hetain Patel’s Mathroo Basha, staged at Anand Warehouse, intertwined dance with family audio testimonies to think on migration, language, and gendered inheritance through the lens of personal memory, while artist Mallika Das Sutar, in association with Panjeri Artists’ Union, presented Each Body Remembers Its Own Stories, a performance that delved into the themes of conflicts, loss and embodied memories.

Each of these pieces spoke to the audience about being present and bearing witness.

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