An old bicycle, a record player, a timepiece and a wall clock from decades ago adorn the colourful shelves of a shop in the loud and busy street cutting through a centuries-old market.
House of Repair announces a large board hanging inside the shop with its name, Casa Borges, in big, bold letters screaming at passers-by. At the Mattancherry market near Kerala’s heritage town of Fort Kochi, the unlikely outlet with outdated objects bearing the name of a celebrated South American writer hides more than it houses.
Casa Borges is, in fact, part of the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India’s biggest contemporary art festival that opened on December 12. Set up by Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle, who has named the incongruous store after the famous writer Jorge Luis Borges from neighbouring Argentina, the artwork reflects a recurring intent of artists from the Global South at the biennale this year to address the socio-economic and political crises gripping the world.
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“During my time in Kochi, especially in the neighbourhood of Mattancherry, I came across a very particular scene: damaged objects accumulating in the streets, left behind yet still full of use, memory, and a sense of future possibility,” recounts the São Paulo-based Marcelle about the point of departure of her installation, titled History.
What followed was an artistic process that visualises the possibilities for a better world in the streets with the help of ordinary people. “Through posters spread across the city, people were invited to lend broken objects—things that were never repaired, but also never thrown away,” says the artist.
“The repair process was coordinated in collaboration with local technicians and specialists, resulting in a set of 51 objects,” adds Marcelle, the biennale’s participating artist explaining her installation. “The collection of repaired objects disrupts the usual story of disposal and opens up a space for encounters between fragmented histories, told in unexpected ways yet deeply tied to Mattancherry’s social, economic, and emotional landscape,” says the artist.
“At the end of the project, the repaired objects are returned to their owners, along with a signed label marking their participation in the Kochi Biennale,” says Marcelle, adding: “As (Ghanaian artist) Ibrahim Mahama said: ‘Repairing is also a way of redistribution’.”
Solidarity and solutions
Marcelle, as well as Mahama, also a participating at the biennale this year, and many other artists from Asia, Africa and South America have made the current biennale edition a rallying point for artists from the Global South who have assembled artworks that offer solutions to the rampant consumption and consumerism that is emptying out the world’s scant resources, causing the West to further colonise countries with abundant natural resources.
Singaporean artist Zarina Muhammed, Indonesian artist Jompet Kuswidananto, Indian artists Utsa Hazarika, Abul Hisham and Anupama Kundoo, as well as Marcelle and Ibrahim Mahama lead an array of 66 participating artists whose works adorn multiple venues in Fort Kochi and nearby Mattancherry and Willingdon Island.
Paintings, photographs, poems, drawings, videos, performances and many other myriad mediums of art have a message of artists’ solidarity at the biennale, curated by Goa-based artist Nikhil Chopra and artists’ collective HH Art Spaces, exploring the theme, For The Time Being. The solutions offered in the histories, traditions and stories of the Global South are embedded in the works of artists from around the world at the current edition of the biennale, which will run up to March 31 next year.
Like Marcelle, who follows in the footsteps of her compatriot and celebrated artist Ernesto Neto, who is still remembered by Fort Kochi residents for his friendship with local tailors that led to a mammoth fabric-filled installation, Life is a River, in the first edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Mahama and many other participating artists have used material they found in Kochi for their works.
Mahama collected discarded chairs from government offices in Kochi to create his gigantic installation, Parliament of Ghosts, which reconnects memories of colonisation with the present to help repair and reimagine the history of a violent colonisation. “We should develop a much greater sense of empathy in order to be able to at least resolve some of the crisis we’ll find ourselves and extend that relationship to other places, to other people,” explains Mahama, who, like Neto in 2012 and Marcelle in 2025, has forged a lasting friendship with residents of Fort Kochi.
Probe and practice
The famed artists from the Global South embrace many materials and themes to address social crises in their works at the biennale, like the Honolulu-based artist Bhasha Chakrabarti, whose work Diasporic Transcriptions infuse stitching and singing to explore the life and labour of working women, Karachi-born Huma Mulji, whose red, glass blown sculpture, Bombay Duck, sits across the vast lake merging into the sea in Fort Kochi probing vestiges of colonialism in the subcontinent, and New York-based Utsa Hazarika, whose outdoor artwork, Yantra (32° N/ Horizon), aligns the protest site of Jantar Mantar in Delhi with the war-ravaged Palestine to probe political dissent.
Singapore-based Zarina Muhammad, one part of the artist-critic duo The White Pube, whose book Poor Artists created ripples in the art world when it was published late last year, offers important lessons for rethinking consumption, care and responsibility in an ecologically strained world in her work, Omens Drawn by Lightning, at the Aspinwall House main venue of the biennale.
“For me, the Global South doesn’t offer a single ‘solution’ to Western consumerism, and I’m wary of framing it that way. What it offers instead are ways of living with limits, and of acknowledging and paying attention to non-human/ more than human forces larger than ourselves,” says Muhammad, whose installations are borne out of years of research on traditions and communities. “My work looks at how communities have historically read storms, winds and lightning not as spectacles, but as knowledge, warnings, guides and reminders of interdependence,” says the artist.
“These practices foreground care, restraint and relational thinking, which feel deeply relevant in a moment shaped by overconsumption and ecological exhaustion. Rather than positioning the Global South as a source of ready-made solutions, the work points toward modes of attention (embodied, ancestral, and relational) that have endured despite colonial extraction and ongoing dispossession. It asks what becomes possible when we slow down, sense with the body, and accept indeterminacy as part of living,” explains Muhammad.
The repair of Marcelle, Muhammad and Mahama is complemented by healing, an aim several artists are attempting with their works to address a fractured world. Many works seek reflection from the viewers, such as the one by West Bengal-based Panjeri Artists’ Union, which runs a digital banner of philosopher-saint Sree Narayana Guru’s anti-caste poem about one human being and one god as an integral element of its installation. Kerala-born Ali Akbar PN tries to salvage secularism from the vestiges of religious harmony existed on the Gujarat coast centuries ago by reconstructing the old symbols of secularism from architectural sites in the state in his work, Reliquary, while Abul Hisham, another artist from Kerala, simply calls his work, Healing Room.
Faizal Khan is a freelancer
