KMB Invitations Programme from 13th Dec; 11 Projects in Seven Venues

KOCHI:
The Kochi Biennale Foundation announces 11 institutional participants of Invitations, a key programme hosted across seven venues in Fort Kochi and Mattancherry. Invitations exhibitions will run parallel to the Sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), starting on December 12, 2025.

Invitations will be officially inaugurated on December 13, a day after the opening of KMB-6, curated by Nikhil Chopra with HH Spaces. Mario D’Souza, KBF’s Director of Programmes, said that the ‘Invitations’ programme seeks to honour art-workers who sustain formal as well as informal institutions across the majoritarian world. “It was originally conceived in 2022 in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, amid intensifying xenophobic and volatile political climates across the world,” he said. The programme “aspires to share space to learn from each other’s methods, languages, and institutional forms.”

The programme has opened its venues—historical warehouses shaped by centuries of maritime movement, labour and stories— to “like-minded institutions to stage exhibitions, re-activate archives or re-situate works previously located in different contexts”, D’Souza said.

Invitations will showcase the work-in-progress by a contemporary art space and collective from the West Indies. The artwork, by Alice Yard from Trinidad and Tobago, is titled An Instigators’ Handbook for Play, Friendship, Generosity, and Autonomy. It will be on display at Simi Warehouse in Mattancherry, seeking to bring Kochi and Port-of-Spain into direct conversation.

Simi will also host MAC Panamá (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá), a non-profit organisation dedicated exclusively to modern and contemporary art in the Latin American country, featuring an edit of its ongoing exhibition titled ‘Water Binds Me to Your Name’, embracing water as a conceptual framework.

Alkazi Theatre Archives (ATA), in collaboration with the Alkazi Collection of Photography, Delhi will present ‘Re: Public/Staging Delhi’ in the Jail of Freedom Struggle, Fort Kochi. ATA functions under the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, which is a privately owned collection of post-independence theatre in India.

Then there is Conflictorium, a participatory museum at the intersections of art, activism, and access with spaces in Ahmedabad (Gujarat) and Raipur (Chhattisgarh) in the Oottupura dining hall of the vintage Pazhayannur Bhagavathi Temple in Mattancherry. Featuring ‘Liberated Zone and Other Displays: Habitable Conversations with the Imaginary’, this exhibition explores liberation as a radical act of seeing differently by bringing to light overlooked histories, voices, and truths.

Another project is ‘Spectres of History’ (2025) by Ghetto Biennale | Atis Rezistans (Resistance), showcasing a group of artists in Haiti. Ghetto Biennale aims to inform and debate the impact of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), while also discussing the radical lessons that Haitian majority-class cultures can offer to people in the 21st century. This will be held in St. Andrews’ Parish Hall at Fort Kochi and will open in the first week of February, 2026.

Besides, Space at Mattanacherry will host a ‘Trilogy of Environmental Trials’. It will be an exhibition of a three-part project between 2016 and 2023, conceived by Khoj International Artists’ Association and Zuleikha Chaudhari. It is being held in collaboration with advocates Anand Grover (first two chapters of the trilogy) and Harish Mehla (third chapter).

David Hall in Fort Kochi will host ‘Scree’, a project that emphasises embodied histories and the body as a site that records experience across time. This will be presented by The Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute.

Four projects will be exhibited in Devassy Jose & Sons at Mattancherry. Biennal das Amazonias, an art institution from the Amazon that seeks to shift the debate on the arts and their potential as a tool for economic and social transformation away from the dominant axes of the art market, presents a project titled Inner Strength.

‘So We Could Come Back’ is an exhibition led by four artists, presented by Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research, an artist-led space in the Southern West Bank. The artwork traces the movement of bodies, kinship networks, and sites of belonging and traverses across the skies of the Global South.

The third, titled ‘The heavy weight of tiny little things’ (2021–ongoing), strings together a series of observations into a continuous stream of paper emitted from a dot-matrix printer. It is presented by The Packet, a collective from Sri Lanka.

Ruangrupa, a Jakarta-based artists’ collective, presents OK.Video, an evolving platform for media arts that has been active since 2003, emerging from the experimental art and activist movements in the Indonesian capital. OK.Video began as the Jakarta International Video Festival; it has since expanded into a living archive of the archipelago’s media arts ecosystem.