Art or spectacle? Decoding the viewer at the Kochi Muziris Biennale

At the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025-26 last weekend, a group of young people stepped out of the late Vivan Sundaram’s darkly autobiographical exhibit, Six Stations of a Life Pursued, into the late-afternoon sun and gathered on top of a flight of stairs at Cube artSpace on Mattancherry Road in Fort Kochi.

Minutes before, we had walked past a series of staged photographs of a man trapped in an iron cage, exuding helplessness and claustrophobia. Some of us had lowered our eyes as we were confronted by another sequence of images, of the artist’s back, scarred after a surgery. Stitched with pins, metal bits sticking out of the flesh, these photographs look back at the viewer boldly, like defiant self-portraits.

This isn’t exactly material for Instagram photos or selfies, but outside, among potted flowers and vibrant graffiti, is the perfect stage for self-indulgence. One young woman beckoned a security personnel to take a photo as her friends arranged themselves on the steps. Their smiles summed it all up: We came, we saw, we posed. The art, with its graphic imagery of the body in pain, felt like a blip in an uninterrupted stream of photos, reels and live videos that trailed me throughout the two days I spent at the biennale. Inside, images had been made thoughtfully to endure and move the viewer. Outside, the image making was just as carefully curated, but not to move people, except maybe to envy.

In the last 20 years, as a regular at art events, I have been witness to the cognitive dissonance that has entered our collective field of vision as newer technologies have emerged. Armed with smartphones, the viewer of art has turned into a “consumer,” eager to stamp their imprimatur on the moment of their encounter with a work, be it by taking selfies with, or standalone photographs of, it and posting on social media platforms. The tendency isn’t just endemic to India, it’s universal. Anyone who has entered the Mona Lisa room at the Louvre in Paris has had a taste of this collective hysteria at its wildest.

At a public event like the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, installed in an ancient neighbourhood steeped in history and visual appeal, it is easy to give in to the temptation to document instead of focusing on the act of looking. With so much sculptural, performance and installation art on offer, this edition of the biennale makes it especially easy for the visitor to succumb to the allure of spectacle, often with ironic consequences.

At Aspinwall House, one of the focal points of the biennale, the effect is starkly obvious. The centrepiece of this venue is Birender Yadav’s expansive installation, Only the Earth Knows their Labour, which seeks to make visible the toil and trouble of the lives of brick kiln workers. The concept is powerful, the execution inventive. Bodies eroded by heat and dust, alongside their crude tools of trade, lie next to brick walls. The idea, ostensibly, is to memorialise the unseen struggles of migrant labourers. But the sprawling scale of the work turns it more into a site of personal memory-making for the viewer. Each time visitors paused to take photos with the exhibit before walking on to the next new thing in their line of sight, their tiny acts of nonchalance seemed to dim the gravity of the subject a little. And so it was with many other exhibits at the biennale.

One of the great pleasures of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, especially for those mostly habituated to seeing art inside the white cube, is the freedom of the outdoors. The backwaters flank many of the venues, with the occasional breeze or hoot of a passing ship wafting in. Walking along Mattancherry Road, you pass trucks of spices waiting to be unloaded, people queuing up to buy mutton for their Sunday lunch, and sundry vendors hawking their wares. This seamless traffic between life and art gives the Kochi-Muziris Biennale its unique character, facilitating an encounter between artists and the general public—not just with insiders in the art world. The egalitarian spirit is also manifested in the different ways in which artists engage their public—from the playful tactility of Shilpa Gupta’s interactive work Breathe at Ginger House Museum to savouring the quiet awe of Ibrahim Mahama’s Parliament of Ghosts at Anand Warehouse. Somewhere in the interstices of this range of gestures lies the artist’s intention, usually framed in the form of a concept note, which often feels over-editorialised.

Instead of letting the viewer engage with a work on their own terms, the texts tend to run the risk of becoming encumbrances—fussy attempts to micromanage the viewer’s response by telling them, in language not always easy to decode, what to make of each piece. The problem is exacerbated by the overtly political framing of many of the artists. (One ludicrous exhibit had a chair with the letters A, R, and T pasted on its arms and seat—in case you mistake it for something more obvious.) It’s as if only by turning art into a hot take, or forcibly fitting it into frameworks that address the Big Questions of our times, that an artist can secure the legitimacy to continue with their practice.

While some sense of an artist’s background can put a work in its context, over-explaining the process can lead to an erosion of wonder and expose the banality of ideas. At Anand Warehouse, Jamaican-American artist Nari Ward’s Divine Smiles hangs like a giant disco ball. It is, we read, a repository of smiles crowdsourced from strangers. The gimmick lands insofar as the piece becomes a trigger for photo ops, but does not elevate the work beyond facile spectacle.

In contrast, South African artist Dineo Seshee Bopape’s site-specific work at Island Warehouse on Willingdon Island, Mme, Mmu, Bhumi, Bhumi (2025), transforms linguistic and human histories into metaphors of interconnectedness. Like some of the best works at the biennale (such as Salman Lone’s sketchbooks at the students’ biennale in BMS Warehouse), it demands active participation from the viewer, urging them to touch, feel, and become part of the art. In Bopape’s work, the call to the viewer is to take off their shoes and crawl into her hollow, anthill-like structures—not just for the novelty of the experience, but as a means to an end. It acts as a quiet ritual of grounding, letting the body be embraced by a womb-like shell and its fetal darkness. The work rests too heavily on the viewer’s consciousness to simply take a photo and walk past it.

The most arresting works, for me, straddled this delicate balance between existing as objects of pure spectacle, sometimes overwhelming for their aesthetic bravado, and as receptacles of thought, forcing the viewer to pause, reflect, and react, instead of capturing just another Instagrammable moment. One of the best examples of such a work is Jayashree Chakravarty’s installation, Shelter: For the Time Being, at Anand Warehouse, which invites the viewer to enter its cocoon-like enclosure. Once in, you’re encouraged to turn on the torch on your mobile phone to look at the intricate shapes and patterns all along the tissue-like structures, hanging from ceiling to floor. It is difficult to fully record the elusive beauty of this work in a photo, unless you have experienced the sheer physicality of it in slow time.

If there is one work that stood out for me at the end of two packed days, it is Kulpreet Singh’s video installation of crop burning in Punjab—as much a comment on Delhi-NCR’s problem of air pollution as a snapshot of the bloodied history of the state, cleaved by violence and militancy. The artist’s body, as well as remains from the burnt fields, come together to evoke loss and destruction. As a sequence of moving images, the work is too transient and rugged to be Instagrammed. All it demands from the viewer, and all that the latter can give it, is the grace of undivided attention and remembrance afterwards.

Arguably, social media platforms have helped art reach a wider audience than ever before, thanks to the visual traces left behind by millions of public chroniclers. But it has also radically changed the rules of engagement. In thrall of the tyranny of mindless scrolling, our eyes have forgotten what it is like to look deeply at a work, rather than skim its surface for instant gratification. By falling for the spectacle alone instead of the inner core, the viewer ends up missing the forest for the trees.