Rehearsing Utopia: Kochi-Muziris Biennale aims to become a true people’s festival

A biennale is designed to be for the people. But can it also be of the people and by the people, asks Premjish Achari.

The “people’s festivals” of the French Revolution drew thousands to Parisian squares. Through the open-air festivities, people of the newborn republic rehearsed what it meant for them, not the king, to be sovereign. These celebrations, these enactments, were theatrical machinations designed to make the “people” appear as a new political subject, visible to itself and to the world.

But it reveals a contradiction. Despite speaking the language of liberty, equality, and fraternity, a small group of revolutionary leaders controlled the script, symbolism, and choreography for this performance. The mass was called upon to embody the general will, but they were not empowered to decide the terms of its appearance or the use of its collective energy. The festival centred the people, but they were peripheral to its governance.

This rift was visible at the 2026 Venice Biennale – In Minor Keys, organised under the direction of the late curator Koyo Kouoh. The curatorial framework invited the audience to slow down and go on a sensorial journey, emphasising “time is not corporate property”. This was perhaps an effort to move against the loud, spectacular tropes that have come to define mega-biennales.

Still, the basic apparatus of Venice remained intact. The main venues, Arsenale and Giardini, featured a matrix of national pavilions, each erected as a cultural outpost competing for the spotlight of the global hierarchy of culture. The biennale is governed by a foundation. Its leadership is appointed by the Italian state. The decision-making structures of this foundation are far removed from the everyday public that queues in front of the pavilions. The visitor can wander, observe, and discuss, but does not participate in the governance of the biennale. Control remains concentrated.

Discussion on the Venice Biennale matters, not because of this flaw, but because it is a symptom of global biennale governance. It shows how centralised institutions invite the public to attend, but rarely to govern. What would it take to imagine festivals where the public is not a serialised visitor but a custodian of culture?

The Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) in India positions itself at this chasm between spectacle and governance. KMB has been described as a “people’s biennale”. This image mirrors its ideas of public engagement and democratic culture. Founded in 2012, with the support of the state government, it anchored itself in the lived experience of the port city, which has been historically shaped by maritime trade relations, migration, and its cosmopolitan demographics.

KMB is known for its unique engagement with the space. Its venues are carved out of abandoned warehouses, godowns, and dilapidated heritage structures around Fort Kochi and Mattancherry. These spaces host programmes beyond the main exhibition venues. The Student’s Biennale programme reaches out to art colleges across India, especially those outside the big cities, and allows students to co-create exhibitions and projects.

Another popular initiative, ABC – Art By Children, sets up long-term creative spaces – art rooms – in government schools where children can draw, perform, and experiment. Additionally, workshops, talks, screenings, and hands-on sessions unfold throughout the biennale duration.

This is a significant shift. The public is not just a visitor, but also a maker, learner, and local co-host. KMB departs from the French revolutionary model of festivals, where people appear one day for a theatrical spectacle and go back to their private lives. Kochi allows more. You can return week after week to the same art rooms, watch a warehouse slowly change through performances, see the installations evolve.

Despite this structure of participation, KMB’s governance sits within the familiar biennale models. It has insisted on being an artist-led biennale since its inception in 2012. This aligns KMB with the broad international trend of artist-curated biennials. How is it different from other biennales that have had artists lead them globally? The question remains whether the curator is an artist or not – does the governing body allow the public, workers, and local communities to participate in decision-making?

The biennale’s editions have been described as “governmental assemblages” where the hybrid of state policy, private investment, and tourism strategy converge with curatorial ambitions to influence cities and people. But KMB has faced accusations of mismanagement. Participants and practitioners have demanded to build a system of transparency and the establishment of accountable systems.

Similar issues have been reported at other international art festivals, from documenta to the Sydney Biennale. These reveal a structural problem. When the governance of cultural festivals remains closed to the public, and the public is only invited to consume, they are not allowed to shape the rules through which culture is produced and distributed. We are reproducing the same old models where people appear as protagonists in imagery and rhetoric, but seldom as keepers.

Voices from within India’s art festival scene make the structural flaw more evident. Satish Kumar, founder of Niracharthu, starts off with a paradox: Biennales operate at the centre of contemporary life’s most sought-after commodity – art – yet remain disconnected from its market. He makes a proposition – biennales should engage in the sale of artworks as a legitimate revenue mechanism. This will help reduce dependency on institutional patronage, which entangles curatorial programmes in external agendas.

Equally provocative is Kumar’s position on locality. Instead of importing methodologies from globalised curatorial circuits, he calls for a practice based on ground realities. He talks about how participations are reduced to mere numbers. For him, headcounts reveal nothing about the visitor, and he proposes a qualitative turn – reach out in person, through local associations and cooperatives, for feedback that deepens a biennale’s understanding of its reach.

Manuela Ciotti, professor of anthropology, University of Vienna, says the national pavilions of Global South countries at Venice, whose histories remain largely unknown even within the art world, have quietly shaped local art scenes and forged global connections. From the brief history of the KMB, there is much to learn about what it has contributed to art in India and to whom.

Collecting, analysing, and mobilising these histories, she says, would form the basis for reimagining and democratising these institutions and for building shared artistic futures. History, in other words, is not background – it is the ground on which governance can be contested and redesigned.

People as custodians of culture

It is important to take the idea of the public as custodians of culture seriously. A starting point would be to reimagine governance. It can become a negotiating table of different interests and ideas. Instead of occasionally inviting the public for consultation and crisis management, they should be given a seat at the table.

Too many biennales vanish after the closing day, leaving behind catalogues and digital traces that are difficult to access and easy to forget. Biennales should invest in the idea of open archives, in accessible languages, where artworks and documents are preserved for study and debate.

The French festivals were often described as “dress rehearsals for utopia”. Contemporary biennales have come to function similarly, showing us how we might live, think, and feel together. If they remain close to public governance, then the future they rehearse is the one in which the public is always invited, always visible, but never empowered.

Spaces like Venice and Kochi ought to be laboratories for shared governance, deep educational work, accountable systems, and a democratic cultural future. Across these disparate contexts, the question is the same: Will we stay with festivals that simply show us the people, or will we insist on active public participation in the shaping of culture and how it is governed?