Many international biennales have come to replace the single artistic director with a curatorial collective, ostensibly to decentralize authority. Yet a change in structure alone does not guarantee meaningful transformation. Selecting the artists for the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, India, were ten curators, all of whom belong to HH Art Spaces, an artist-run movement cofounded by Nikhil Chopra, Romain Loustau, and Mahavi Gore, and operated alongside Alex Xela Alphonso, Madhurjya Dey, Mario D’Souza, Shivani Gupta, Shruthi Pawels, Shaira Sequeira Shetty, and Divyesh Undaviya. Together, they contributed artist suggestions to a shared pool and then selected the final group of sixty-six.
The collective’s curatorial statement echoed this commitment to decentralization. Rather than advancing a coherent thesis, the biennale was built around the idea of the “unfinished spectacle” where viewers were invited to embrace “process as methodology” and “friendship as the very scaffolding of the exhibition” (emphasis theirs). Taken together, these values framed for the time being as a proposition about how a biennale might be made, sustained, and inhabited over time, across the main exhibition’s eight warehouse venues—Aspinwall House (a spacious property that includes the Coir Godown warehouse and the Bastion Bungalow), Pepper House, SMS Hall, Anand Warehouse, Markaz, Island Warehouse, and Space Gallery.
Yet this expansive framing felt insufficient when set against the lived realities of production. According to many artists I spoke to during my visit, they raced against time to complete their work under tight deadlines, often without information about available resources or clarity around who had the authority to allocate them. The biennale foundation clarified that the problems were not due to any “reported funding delays” and that the “production-related” issues were “due to the ambition of the commissions.” However, similar concerns were raised during the 2022–23 Biennale, when an open letter from participating artists pointed to systemic organizational failures and called for the institution to move “towards an environment of mutual respect, honesty, and care.”
Many of these problems can be attributed to organizational failure on the part of the Kochi Biennale Foundation, which has not fully bought into the collective model—it appears to have initially tapped Nikhil Chopra, who brought his collective along, and from the first announcement onward it has referred to “Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces.” The foundation has also experienced internal tumult, with the president abruptly resigning a month after the opening following sexual harassment allegations. But the problems also point to a fundamental gap between the curatorial language of shared process and friendship on the one hand, and the infrastructural conditions required to sustain such claims on the other. The curatorial statement related collectivity and friendship to process and scaffolding, suggesting, rightly, that they were inseparable from the material circumstances of production. For this reason, dismissing infrastructural failures as merely logistical contradicts the exhibition’s stated commitments.
What follows, then, is not a critique of decentralization, fragmentation, or openness as curatorial strategies, but an examination of how claims of collectivity do—or do not—rest on the necessary organizational conditions. The Kochi Biennale Foundation is not a neutral host: Since its inception in 2010, it has been repeatedly entangled in controversies around structural opacity and financial mismanagement shaping the material circumstances under which each edition is produced. These issues surfaced with particular force in 2019, some years before the open letter, when numerous vendors and contractors reported non-payment for their labor. Against this backdrop, the appointment of HH at the curatorial helm raised expectations that the group’s long-standing commitment to collective authorship and shared process might signal a substantive departure from the entrenched neglect of artists’ real needs.
At its strongest, for the time being offers glimpses of what a truly collaborative model might enable. Several projects demonstrate how collectivity could be enacted not only thematically but structurally. A notable example is the presentation by the Panjeri Artists’ Union, a community of fourteen practitioners working across disciplines, shown at the Coir Godown in Aspinwall, where their contribution unfolds as an exhibition within an exhibition, through activations, gatherings, and a shifting sequence of installations. Beyond presenting the work of its members, the union has redistributed its allotted resources in phases to a rotating group of more than ten additional artists whose concerns include maritime trade, peasant uprisings, anti-caste struggles, and ongoing crises of labor migration.
Among this presentation are powerful works such as Deucha; Behind an Indifferent Screen, a black-and-white film made by Tanmay Das along with Anupam Roy and Subhankar Sengupta. Unfolding with a spare, insistent rhythm, the film braids songs, testimonies, and prolonged moments of stillness to evoke the slow violence toward nature and laborers enacted by the owners of one of the world’s largest coal mines, and the local community’s resistance against its extraction and exploitation. Yet the force of the Panjeri Artists’ Union’s presentation does not depend on singular works alone.
The installation feels deliberately cacophonous and defiantly anti-hierarchal, with individual authorship blurred. Works bleed into one another, signage is minimal or absent, and distinctions between makers are difficult to parse. This refusal of clear attribution feels integral to the group’s ethos, allowing the works to register as part of a shared political proposition. Additionally, collectively developed reproducible forms, such as flags, banners, and black-and-white relief posters featuring hybrid figures, circulate throughout the space. These materialize the group’s investment in shared labor and process. Their reproducibility mirrors the infrastructural model underpinning the project, where the artists retained control over sequencing of artworks as well as funds.
In the larger presentation of for the time being, however, the curatorial goal of decentralizing the mega-exhibition often felt less genuinely collective than loosely aggregated. Works appeared as self-contained islands, frequently confined to individual rooms and connected to one another by proximity rather than any sustained curatorial articulation. Transitions between works registered less as deliberate friction than as curatorial withdrawal. Consider, for instance, the abrupt sequencing of Naeem Mohaiemen, Mandeep Raikhy, and Niroj Satpathy at SMS Hall, each compelling in its own right but confounding together, as the energy and political register of Mohaiemen’s somber, minimal reconsideration of a martyr’s life jarringly contrasts Satpathy’s multisensory installation, built from landfill refuse. This is not the generative openness of multiplicity, but a condition in which authorship feels so dispersed that responsibility becomes difficult to locate—because, I suspect, the curators, like the artists, did not have the time or support to realize their vision.
The gap between vision and resources became materially undeniable in Barakah (2025), a newly commissioned thatched structure by Bani Abidi and Anupama Kundoo situated on the waterfront between Aspinwall’s two main venues. Conceived as a commons—a place to eat, rest, and gather—the structure was built on site using locally sourced roundwood, thatch, and rope joinery, and was intended to serve affordable Kerala-style meals.
Yet until early January, even though the structure of Barakah was physically in place, its promised function remained only partially realized. A small stall for tea and coffee operated on the side, but the larger promise of shared meals, hospitality, and sustained conviviality hadn’t yet materialized, as no one was making or serving food. This gap between the work’s stated intention, articulated in the exhibition’s didactics and brochures, and its uneven realization prompts closer scrutiny of the conditions under which it was produced.
According to my conversations with artists and production staff involved in the biennale, repeated production delays left the structure too instable to stand even up until the exhibition’s opening. Responsibility was deliberately dispersed across multiple actors. The artists submitted a detailed diagram for the work, which the curators approved as achievable; the production team then assigned workers to begin construction. Once on site, however, workers quickly realized that the proposal could not be executed as drawn, given practical constraints, like the location of trees, that should have been flagged far earlier. Rather than prompting a collective reassessment, this impasse produced a cycle of miscommunications among artists, curators, and workers. Compounding these difficulties, the appointment of food vendors was delayed, preventing meals from being served at the structure during the first month of the exhibition.
Instead of serving as a commons, Barakah functions as a site where the disconnect between curatorial openness and institutional dysfunction becomes particularly blatant, as workers bore prolonged uncertainty without access to the resources or power needed to resolve it. In the context of a curatorial framework that valorizes process and collectivity, non-functionality cannot be understood only as a logistical setback. The rhetoric of “process” begins to read as a smoke screen for infrastructural failure when curators do not specify how their values can be sustained in the face of material limits.
For curatorial projects grounded in friendship and collectivity, the manner in which artists and workers are supported becomes crucial, even an ethical obligation. When an artist-run initiative becomes subsumed by bureaucratic structures that undermine its values, it risks reproducing the very systems it sought to resist—regardless of how convincingly solidarity is articulated in curatorial texts.
Here, Irit Rogoff’s notion of “re-occupying infrastructure” becomes instructive. For Rogoff, practices that mobilize the language of collectivity do not simply operate within existing institutional frameworks but intervene in their material and organizational conditions, temporarily redistributing agency, responsibility, and resources. The question, then, is not whether an exhibition claims solidarity, but whether those who propose such a framework are able to create and maintain organizational structures that meaningfully enact it. Organization, not representation, is central: how labor is distributed, how resources circulate, and how care is sustained.
for the time being exposes a fault line—particularly visible in this edition of the Kochi biennale but not unique to it. As exhibitions increasingly claim collectivity, care, and process as curatorial positions, these terms risk hardening into aesthetic gestures rather than organizational commitments. Collectivity cannot be staged. It must be built, maintained, and accounted for. Without this, even the most generous curatorial ambitions risk reproducing the very hierarchies they seek to undo.
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