Impressive, Not Impactful: Notes from Kochi Biennale

by Renu Pokharna

This was my first biennale, so there was no precedent from which I could derive my conclusions. A chance absence in a group got me in, at a massive subsidy, as part of an elite group of visitors travelling together from Ahmedabad. Funnily enough, it took me a while to get used to pronouncing the word “biennale”. I had to Google it a few times and watch one of those YouTube videos where a large pair of lips pronounces the word for you. I had heard about it from friends visiting it, the same friends who could also pronounce it effortlessly.

The Kochi Biennale had intrigued me, but not to the extent that I would plan a visit. I generally stay away from most gatherings where I fear being either too incompetent compared to the accomplished others, or too sensitive to the unequal environments in which they operate, oblivious to everything around them.

And yet, here I was, entering the Biennale among people speaking accented English, staying in ₹20,000-a-night hotels, and wearing expensive outfits. Conversations slid easily from art and expression, and how powerfully oppression was rendered in mixed media, to planning meals and coffees at the best cafés in Fort Kochi.

The Good: Access, Ease, and the City as Canvas

Arriving in Kochi, however, I realized I loved what the Biennale had done to the city, or parts of it. The city had become a canvas, with walls covered in giant murals, cafes doubling up as art spaces, and installations and sculptures tucked into street corners that delight you. It had served Indian art to an international audience and put Kochi on the global cultural map.

It was also one of the few places where you weren’t frisked at any of the galleries or had your bags checked repeatedly after walking through a nonfunctioning metal detector. You were allowed to take photographs, there was an ease of movement, and art felt accessible to one and all. Clay pots of water with glasses made the space plastic-bottle-free. Accessible bathrooms with well-thought-out signs were placed strategically as well.

It was an organisational marvel and had undeniably altered the character of the city. Young students paced the galleries as volunteers. The local economy surged.

The Bad: Excess Without Coherence

And yet, when it came to the art itself, I felt there was a massive disconnect between what was displayed, who consumed it, and the lived realities of those it claimed to represent.

Without a coherent curatorial theme, the thousands of artworks felt chaotic. Not everyone can afford or has the time to spend a month in Kochi. So you try to see at least some galleries in three or four days. But moving from Palestine to the insurgency in Assam to sexuality to labour rights, all in a few hours, leaves you reeling and overwhelmed. It is a lot to take in.

Too many causes. Too many mediums. Mixed media has become the default way to signal modern art. And unless executed with restraint, it leaves you feeling confused, wondering what the artist was really trying to say.

Art does not need to be complex for it to be good. Gallery after gallery sought to shock or impress with scale, but the narrative depth was missing. Like a big-budget Bollywood film with beautiful sets but a weak storyline.

The gallery featuring works of Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh stood out precisely because it resisted this impulse. It had two floors of his artwork in a single medium. So I could focus, see a pattern in what he painted, read about him, stare at a two-dimensional painting for a few minutes, and make some sense of it. He didn’t try to cram every single medium, from paintings to sculpture to digital to movable pieces, into one artwork.

Buffet Politics and the Fatigue of Choice

There was little connectivity between art pieces. You wondered why stubble burning sat next to African American activism, followed by industrial waste and casteism. What was the logic?

It’s easy to say one can engage in what interests them, but buffets by definition create fatigue. They leave you too full, unsatisfied, and riddled with FOMO:

“Have you seen this gallery?”

“Did you finish the first floor in Aspinwall?”

“Could you see Marina Abramović in so-and-so part of town?”

It was also striking how many works returned to familiar, safer themes. There was little engagement with more contemporary fault lines. There could have been art on the incarcerations of anti-CAA activists, or Bhima Koregaon, or the plain old tribulations of being an ordinary Indian. Instead, most works took on the easy scapegoat: colonial oppression.

The Commodification of Pain

So much art here also felt like cultural appropriation. Two gigantic rooms filled with everyday objects related to Bengali migrants made me wonder what was being narrated. Migration? Labour rights? Nostalgia? And how many visitors who saw this would treat the Bengali migrant any better, or even notice them at a café sipping coffee as he served?

A friend called it the “commodification of pain.” Their pain had become a product. Whether the proceeds reached those it claimed to represent remained unclear.

Modern art, at least in this avatar, often feels like a capitalistic intellectual complex where the interpretation of a small, educated, wealthy class is treated as superior. Art becomes a language of status. If someone says a banana should cost $6.4 million, we are too scared to disagree for fear of being marked unsophisticated.

What is the purpose of art after all? To resonate? To disturb? If art claims politics, it must move people beyond private reflection. Impact matters.

For a multimillion-dollar event claiming to represent oppression, climate change, and activism, did visitors leave wanting to act? Or was designing mixed-media installations on oppression easier than actually paying your staff more, or ensuring dignity for the workers around you?

Because these same people would go from one biennale to another, one literature festival to another, one music festival to another, and have eloquent discussions on Gaza while the person picking up their lipstick-stained coffee cup would be working a twelve-hour shift without pensions or paid medical leave.

This disconnect between global moral concern and local indifference is what makes the spectacle hollow. The world’s pain becomes a theme. A curatorial concept. A talking point. And then we return to our hotels, our cafés, our next cultural pilgrimage.

Labour, Made Invisible

What I wanted instead were panels with the names of all the carpenters, welders, fabrication experts, embroiderers, and painters who helped build each artwork. Not one name, but all of them. Because that is what correcting oppression begins with: acknowledging labour.

Just because they did not have the means to become “artists” did not mean they were not creators. Imagine putting up the photographs and names of every worker next to the artist plaque. It would have drawn locals to the Biennale too, to see their own people represented, not only artists flown in from abroad.

And nowhere did this irony feel sharper than at KM House Gallery. The security guard cabins there are tiny, airless boxes. No fans in the sultry heat of Kochi. Cardboard sheets on the floor resembling a mattress for rest. Hooks on the walls for their change of clothes, exactly like the ones I had seen in an art piece a few minutes earlier.

This could easily have been mistaken for an exhibit had it not been for two actual security guards in thick black uniforms sitting there. When entire galleries can be dedicated to oppression, perhaps a better cabin design with more space would not be too much to ask.

What Would Radical Art Actually Demand?

If you ask me, as a labour rights advocate, what kind of art I would like to see, it would begin with something simple. Open up homes of the local migrants. Designate routes where visitors walk through actual living spaces. What was the size of the home? How many people share a room? Is there running water? Electricity?

Or consider performance art where mounds of trash are brought in for the audience to segregate. Since most of us depend on a massive network of rag pickers who do this work, it would be interesting for us to experience it ourselves, preferably without gloves.

Or simply stand somewhere quietly for five minutes observing while others pass you, to experience what it is like to be a security guard at a venue, unnoticed, invisible, unacknowledged.

The Biennale also made me think of how deeply colonial our aesthetic desires still are. The rich continue to stay in old palaces, zamindari homes, colonial bungalows converted into luxury hotels. We did the same. One of my own attractions was staying at the Towers, which used to be a Dutch home. The irony did not escape me. We critique colonialism in galleries while seeking pleasure in its architecture.

The cafés around the venues served the same internationalised menu you would find at any literature or music festival. Tiny glasses of cold-pressed orange juice for ₹250. The same template of cultural consumption transplanted from city to city.

One evening, tired of galleries and conversations, I sat with some of the cleaners at Aspinwall who were celebrating Pongal. We danced. They shared sweet pongal with me, free of cost. I did not have to buy a postcard for ₹150. I took a photograph with them instead. It remains my most honest memory of the Biennale.

The elitism of the art world is no longer Western alone. The top five percent of Indians now inhabit it comfortably. Art, and the ability to speak its language, has become another way to signal class.

But if art on oppression does not lead to action, then it risks becoming theatre. How many architects who attend the Biennale will go back and convince builders to create dignified housing for labourers? How many will question why their buildings have two lifts, one for them and one for “service”? How many will demand the implementation of labour laws instead of simply discussing injustice over coffee?

Or will they go back home and plan the next trip to Serendipity Arts Festival?

The Kochi Biennale is impressive. It has transformed a city, created a global cultural moment, and showcased extraordinary technical skill. But impact is something else. Impact is what lingers after the spectacle fades. Impact is what alters how one sees, acts, and lives.

Without that, even the most powerful images risk becoming just that: images. Beautiful, complex, well-funded, and finally, contained.

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Renu Pokharna runs India Recycles, a zero waste enterprise that provides affordable markets for the underprivileged. She has been published by the Wall Street Journal and MINT and uses her writing to provoke urban India. Prior to this, she worked briefly in East Africa, and graduated with a degree in policy from Columbia University.