KBF’s ‘Invitations’ exhibitions in multiple venues draw crowds
Kochi / December 28, 2025
Kochi, Dec 28: The ‘Invitations’ programme of Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF) as part of Kochi-Muziris Biennale has been drawing crowds across six venues in Mattancherry and Fort Kochi.
The Invitations Programme, launched in 2022, honours institutions and collectives shaping cultural life. It is a space where institutional memory awakens collective consciousness and energies.
Teams from 10 institutions in India, Sri Lanka, Jakarta, Kenya, Brazil, Palestine, Trinidad and Tobago and Panama connect with Kochi through their works, sparking conversation.
The 11 th institution, Ghetto Biennale Atis Rezistans (Resistance), showcasing a group of artists in Haiti, will present its ‘Spectres of History’ (2025) at St. Andrew’s Parish Hall, Fort Kochi, in February 2026.
The exhibition, ‘Trilogy of Environmental Trials’ presented in Space, Indian Chamber of Commerce, Chamber Road, Mattancherry’ is 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). It explores the role of art in creating awareness of ecological issues through staged hearing of lawyers and judges,
A little distance away, Conflictorium, a participatory museum at the intersections of art, activism, and access with spaces in Ahmedabad (Gujarat) and Raipur (Chhattisgarh) is featured in Oottupura dining hall of the vintage Pazhayannur Bhagavathi Temple by Jew Town Road, 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.
Four projects exhibited in Devassy Jose & Sons, Bazaar Road, Mattancherry, offer an immersive experience. As you walk into Devassy and take a few steps, a stream of paper rolling out from a dot matrix printer in the room on the right catches your attention. The heavy weight of tiny little things (2021 -ongoing) presented by The Packet, a collective from Sri Lanka, strings together a series of observation in printed memory.
The room ahead features visual artist and curator, Armando Queiroz’s video, Frente Babilonia, projected on the floor wherein he depicts a ‘human anthill’ on a quest for gold. The rooms to the right showcase 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, presented by Ruangrupa, a Jakarta-based artists’ collective.
The other work at Devassy is, So We Could Come Back’ 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. While three are featured on the ground floor, Emily Jacir’s hand painted wall pattern, coir carpets, and sound installation is featured upstairs. They trace the movement of bodies, kinship networks, and sites of belonging traversing across the skies of the Global South.
In the last room facing the sea, 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, through sprouting as a language, with mango that reached Brazil from India as the main image.
A few yards away in Simi Warehouse in Mattancherry, An Instigators’ Handbook for Play, Friendship, Generosity, and Autonomy by Alice Yard from Trinidad and Tobago spurs conversation between Kochi and Port-of-Spain. In another room, ‘Water Binds Me to Your Name’, that embraces water as a conceptual framework is featured by MAC Panamá (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá), a non- profit organisation dedicated exclusively to modern and contemporary art in the Latin American country. It’s an edit of its ongoing exhibition.
‘Scree’, a project that emphasises embodied histories and the body as a site that records experience across time is presented by The Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, in David Hall, Fort Kochi. Charcoal and pastel drawings of the people of Kenya and Kochi dot the walls. They are juxtaposed with the bundles of vinyl hoardings grouped on the floor, triggering conversations.
The collection of post-independence theatre in India of Alkazi Theatre Archives (ATA), Re: Public/Staging Delhi, is showcased in Jail of Freedom Struggle, Fort Kochi in collaboration with the Alkazi Collection of Photography. ATA functions under the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, a privately owned collection of post- independence theatre in India.
ENDS
