On November 20, the Kochi Biennale Foundation announced Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces as the curators of its sixth edition, opening in December 2025. In a conversation with STIR, Chopra discussed his curatorial outlook for the biennale and the collaborative approaches that shape his work at HH Art Spaces, described as “an artist-run movement and collective”, of which he is a co-founder. “I would like to commend the Kochi-Muziris Biennale for its deliberate effort to shift the paradigm, embracing diverse voices, talents, and disciplines to carry the Biennale into its next phase as a formidable collective force. This effort reflects a shared commitment to reimagining what is possible when we create together,” he said.

The selection committee that picked Chopra and HH Art Spaces was made up of artists, patrons and curators, including Shanay Jhaveri, Dayanita Singh, Rajeeb Samdani, Jitish Kallat and Bose Krishnamachari. Over the years, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has weathered significant challenges, including funding and the unavailability and dilapidation of key venues. In 2022, it was forced to announce a last-minute postponement, pushing the opening of the biennale from its original December 12 start date to December 23. Recently, it announced several new appointments, with former Chief Secretary Venu V as chairperson of the board, while management professional Thomas Varghese was appointed as CEO. Shanay Jhaveri, head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, reflected on these challenges and the ways in which an artist-led biennale could respond to them. He said, “...The organisation has and is in the process of reflection, reevaluation, underscoring that along with connecting to its local history, the lived, real context in which such endeavours are made are as important. The hope is the next exhibition will embody these learnings in agility and ingenuity, reiterating the aspirations behind KMB to be a space, a place for community, for debate, for dialogue.”   

Photographer and offset artist Dayanita Singh emphasised on the biennale’s significance in the South Asian arts landscape. “KMB is the most crucial organisation for the artists and their work in this region…a space to experiment and build community. We need many more biennales for a country our size…Being an artist-run biennale, I feel it is also my biennale.”

Artists have always been at the helm of the Kochi Biennale – its previous curators have included Kallat and Krishnamachari, Shubigi Rao, Anita Dube and Sudarshan Shetty. Krishnamachari, who is also president of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, explained that the selection of curators for the sixth edition was motivated by the desire to respond to the present moment, while being grounded in Kerala’s history. “When we looked to curate the 6th edition of the Biennale, we felt that Nikhil Chopra and HH Art Spaces would bring an exciting and fresh perspective to the event especially with their engagement with live and performance art. Nikhil Chopra, with his multidisciplinary practice and deep engagement with issues of identity, memory, and place, is the ideal curator to lead this edition. His work speaks to the intersection of personal and political histories, which resonates deeply with the spirit of the Biennale and its commitment to fostering dialogues across cultures. Moreover, HH Art Spaces, a collective that has been central to the art scene in Goa, brings an intimate understanding of the local context, yet with a global outlook,” he said of the committee’s decision.

Chopra spoke with STIR at length about the work of HH Art Spaces, his focus on the body as the core of artistic and curatorial inquiry, and the plan to imagine the 2025 Biennale as a constellation of ‘moments’, as opposed to a single event. Edited excerpts from the conversation below.

Ranjana Dave: What is your vision for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025?

Nikhil Chopra: I am both thrilled and humbled to be invited, alongside my collaborators at HH Art Spaces, to co-curate one of the most anticipated biennales in the region. We envision Kochi as a welcoming host—hospitable, nourishing, offering us a safe space to think, create and share. A port, after all, serves as a temporary refuge for both expected and unexpected travellers and goods. In the presence of visitors, passersby and storytellers from distant lands, we aspire to foster moments of gathering—as people, as contemporaries and as co-habitants. Here, we will reflect on one another as bodies of sensation and feeling, intelligent and eager, where trade and exchange transform from mere transactions into layers of a richer, more expansive human experience.

We aim to discover spaces and gaps through which we can move beyond terrestrial and imaginary borders, crossing currents and taking artistic risks that lead to responsible cultural collisions.

Ranjana: What aspects of history — both of Kochi and the biennale — and contemporary artistic practice shape your approach?

Nikhil: If I were to trace a line to the core of my artistic and curatorial inquiry, it would be the body—soft, ever-transforming, ephemeral and inconsistent. I see bodies as sites, as landscapes: as clay and water, skin and organ, alive and dead. We wear our bodies, yet they shape who we are and what we can or cannot do. Like frameworks, our bodies are fragile and vulnerable, centred on care—feeding, shedding, washing, resting and loving. They are not truly ours; we are shaped by those who nurtured us and those who did not. Bodies hold memory, functioning as embodied archives, bearing muscle memory and the inscriptions of time. Scars, wrinkles, smiles, laughter lines, worries and frowns—all these belong to us. To think with the body and feel with the mind is the challenge—and the shift—we seek to embrace.

Instead of perceiving the precarity and vulnerability of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale as limitations, we propose to embrace them as unique conditions. For KMB 2025/26, we imagine the biennale as moments—not confined to a single site, but manifesting through time, incidents and acts of becoming. We see Kerala and India as spaces of creation, abundant with layered histories, cultural and intellectual richness and inherent limits. This framework will guide artists as they navigate these resources and conditions, not by resisting them, but by working alongside them.

This is the shift we envision for the biennale in this new phase: to evolve from a temporary collectivity to a lasting community, shaping a Biennale that is not only in flux but in constant dialogue—transforming, exchanging and growing.

Ranjana: Kochi has always been an artist-led biennale. How has that parallel perspective of the artist/ curator informed the biennale’s previous editions, in your view?

Nikhil: I was invited by artist Jitish Kallat in 2014 to be part of the 2nd Kochi Biennale. It was early in my years as an artist/  co-producer in the newly created HH Art Spaces in Goa. ‘Artist for artist’ is a role I believed in. As artists, we work for artists from a place of empathy. Without undermining the enormity of a curator’s role in making an exhibition, I feel an artist/curator comes to an exhibition from the place of a co-maker and is no stranger to processes. And this is exactly what I found in Jitish. He approached his Biennale with the thoroughness of a cultural scientist and the compassion of a fellow creator. His vision for me and what context he would place my practice in was perhaps better conceived than what I would have done. I was able to stretch my proposal beyond what I had imagined and was able to, with trust, enter the project with a calm and collected confidence only because I knew I had a co-conspirator who was taking care of me, while being aware of how my work fit within the larger more ambitious whole. I came away with admiration for what the Biennale had created and the feeling that the winds of soft cultural power and agency had changed in the subcontinent. And it was thrilling to be part of that change.

For our Biennale, we have spent some time thinking about the past few editions and the challenges faced and feel there is a need to develop honest conversations with the artists that are invited—our proposal is not only to think about ‘what’ but also ‘how’ and ‘why’. How can we work with the context and its conditions? Our invitation is to produce encounters that resonate, challenge and endure—grounded in dialogue, collaboration and a shared commitment to thoughtful creation.

Ranjana: Biennales are, by nature, collective endeavours. This is the first time the KMB has appointed a collective to curate the biennale. What are some of the concerns that have shaped your work at HH Art Spaces, and how do they shape your approach to the biennale?

Nikhil: Art, in my practice, is inherently a collective endeavour. It cannot exist in a vacuum; context is everything. Our work is rooted in dialogue and the creation of ecosystems that extend into communities. Together, we make, learn and evolve. To dismantle the dominant discourse around the singularity of the author, we must move beyond the individual.

Empathy and care—for both artists and audiences—are integral to this process. This understanding has been shaped by over a decade of working within and learning from the residency model at HH Art Spaces in Goa. The incredible team behind HH [includes] co-founders and partners Romain Loustau, Madhavi Gore and I, along with partners Shivani Gupta and Shaira Sequeira. Our producers, Madhurjya Dey, Divyesh Undaviya, Shruthi Pawels, and Alex Alphonso, are essential to our efforts, as is Mario D’Souza, who has brought a vital edge to our programming as curator for the past two years.

In a world increasingly marked by perpetual states of aggression and the long-lasting repercussions of our fraught relationship with the natural world, a deeper understanding emerges—a need to think and act collectively. Our focus is on process and making, including the seemingly unseen, rather than adhering to industrial ideals of perfection or the finished product. The space between work and play must be nurtured with resilience and tenderness.