Making Time: A conversation between Natalie King, Nikhil Chopra and John Tain is about lost, pending and deferred biennials. This discussion took place in October 2025 in the context of the Kathmandu Triennale, Kochi-Muziris Biennale and Lahore Biennale. 

Natalie King (NK): Thank you for making time to converse across continents, waterways and conditions.

Nikhil, you're in Kerala in the lead up to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), Kathmandu Triennale (KT) didn't go ahead and John's curation of the Lahore Biennale (LB) was deferred due to various contingencies. It seems we are all working out of time, on time, trying to make time, or for the first time with Nikhil’s timely title: For The Time Being. While we are located within different coordinates or reference points, we are coming together as colleagues to discuss the friendships, the frictions, the fault-lines, and to talk openly about working in the biennale space from the Global South. What are our shared ideas around togetherness and collectivity?

This discussion is for a special issue of Art + Australia called Every Heart Sings, derived from a work by Australian artist Patricia Piccinini and the name of a children's book that she wrote. It conjures how all sentient beings have their own beat, cadence and rhythm: how the human and the non-human might conjoin synchronously, in symphony.

I want to reference Raqs Media Collective’s prescient 2009 essay for e-flux: ‘Earthworms dancing, notes for a biennial in slow motion’, about co-inhabiting time, syncopation, structures and processes with different rhythms that relate to place rather than bureaucratic and clock time. What happens in our current time when we're trying to work under these conditions and the urge to take downtime?

Nikhil Chopra (NC): I think the predicament that we three find ourselves in is that we are making these incredible events of scale and ambition within the South Asian context. What are these conditions of the South Asian predicament, connected to empire and fighting a colonial construct in the way in which we see the world? We have got to move away from aspiration to where there is some fracturing, which is why I want to question: Do certain cultures need biennales of this scale at all?

NK: Why a biennial? Or is there a transformed methodology that we could be thinking about together? Could we consider economies of scale as I note that the Lahore Biennale had 61 artists and KMB has 66. What is possible with fewer artists? Are there expanded possibilities for co-commissioning, resource sharing, co-creation, co-producing, and also working with local materials and artisans so a biennial is grounded in locality of place?

JT: Nikhil’s question resonates with  biennials across Asia. The longest-running ones in the region, such as the Asian Art Biennial in Dhaka (est. 1981), Istanbul (1987), Gwangju (1995), or Yokohama (2001), have relatively stable support, unlike the many that faded away.               

Kochi has been successful as it shows a certain determination to operate within limits, to not be Venice. In the case of Lahore, the answer to ‘why a biennial?’ is because while there historically has been a large community of artists there is no museum infrastructure. So, the biennial was actually a more agile and sustainable alternative to the museum.

NC: These gatherings happen because there is a deep sense of need for us to collect and reflect together. How do we subvert hegemonic powers that disempower us? How do we create within these cultural and political frameworks? The tightrope that we walk in these places and how it upsets conditions is evident in places like Germany with Documenta, such as when ruangrupa curated a world-class, massive scale exhibition. How can we be sensitive about these shifting winds? Often, what we do is emerging from the underground to the overground, right? A lot of the practices that we are bringing here are from neighborhoods and communities. 

One has to be very careful about how that provocation is presented by allowing the aesthetic to precede the politics, and underneath that veneer, we slip in our politics, through our poetics. Therefore it becomes important for us to look at Kerala and within Kerala to look at Kochi, within Pakistan, to look at Lahore and then to look at the institutions and the academies that have made and given spaces to people to think and express themselves freely or within Nepal to see how Kathmandu perhaps was not ready for this moment, and to see that there was some deep-seated issues within the fabric of that community that disallowed us to experience a biennale together. In the case of the Kochi Biennale, an artist has always been invited to curate the biennale. We need to appear disarmed and open-armed. Natalie was caught in that space in between what was possible and what was impossible.

NK: The locality of a biennial is bound to the rhythms of life in that actual place.

I wonder if biennials in South Asia need to be more embedded in everyday life, whether for example, in Kathmandu there are resting houses called patis and they're built into the Nawari architecture, outdoor open pavilions where travellers used to stop and pause. I considered these sites for the Kathmandu Triennale that was sadly cancelled but the methodology might still be resonant. There are places that we can find where people are already circulating in. What if biennials take place across a city in waterways, cafes, and resting houses?

NC: It's important to weave yourself within the existing ecosystem of a place, whether it's a market or a place of rest or a place of refuge, where life happens such as the fish market in Kochi. What about the people that are living here? Are they going to get disturbed? Are we going to be intruding on your lives? It's the people that occupy those places that you need to forge partnerships with, to build trust, in order to sustain an idea.

JT: I agree, the starting point for our biennials are not the standard white cube or museum, because these spaces don’t exist. Art is instead sited in everyday places. Thus, a precursor for Lahore was a project that situated art in a hospital, with projects addressing the needs of the people navigating that environment. Each edition of the Biennale has likewise been situated in the city, bringing art to the people rather than imposing it on them. Because the Biennale’s audience numbers over a million (out of a city of twelve million), its mode of address has to be appealing to the public, and there has to be an element of seduction. Certainly, the availability of popular heritage sites like Shalimar Gardens or Lahore Fort helps, but it is also about luring people. Not all urban spaces are used because some spaces from the Mughal period have fallen into decrepitude. It's also true for Kochi. Part of the pleasure for a curator is working within the urban fabric in a way that brings people together so spaces are rediscovered in their own city to lesser-known or forgotten places.

NC: I was invited to be part of that edition of Lahore Biennale but couldn’t get a visa. I had this performance with me and my father crossing the border together, entering Pakistan, as he was one year old when he left Lahore during partition.

He was born in Srinagar in Kashmir, but then my grandfather was working there. We are neighbours, South Asians, but we're having trouble bringing our Bangladeshi artists and we've given up on trying to bring Pakistani artists to Kochi. These are real conditions.

John, I enjoyed how you invite the city in physically, but I also love that idea of reframing the street. Even though you've often walked on the street before, the pavement has never been beneath your feet. What happens when the conversation becomes about love and solidarity, and when our relationship to places associated with sickness and trauma, like a hospital, can also be understood as a place where people go to heal their wounds, scars and injuries.

Ports are generally dark, haunted places and spaces that are used for labouring bodies and moving goods. We can imagine shipments leaving late, arguments, fights, exploitation, indentured labor moving through these ports. What happens when art comes into these spaces?

JT: We walk a fine line between gentrification and preservation. For instance, the Biennale’s featuring of Bradlaugh Hall, a historic site of the postcolonial movement that had become a ruin in the last few decades, has led to its rediscovery, but now it is threatened by too much redevelopment. How do you give love to a site without it becoming the ruin of the rest of the neighborhood?

One way is to use non-sites—ports as Nikhil mentioned, or the metro for LB03. Since the Biennale was about ecologies, I wanted people to not have to drive around to see art. Thus, the metro line, opened during the pandemic, became a key site. And as almost none of the people I was working with had ridden the metro, part of the goal was to get people out of their cars, and to ride with workers and students, and to discover that the metro was actually very modern and efficient. To entice people onboard, we featured Imran Qureshi’s work at different points on the line.

NK: Maybe we're all formulating the same methodology as we build local itineraries and think about competing claims on places and spaces, and look to overlooked or hidden practices, but also alternative ways of navigating biennials. So I had a bus project with Yoko Ono with her slogan 'Peace' emblazoned across buses as part of the lost Kathmandu Triennale.

NC: I'm in this position where I'm an artist as curator. The demand on what you do professionally as curators is to think artistically about how to create meaning by placing things in places, more than half the work is the placement. There is immense demand on your creative muscle as much as your intellectual muscle. I get to appreciate what curators undertake.

NK: Sometimes our role can be less visible, as it should be, but the enormous effort, whether it's positioning works, allowing for a frisson, or in the case of Kathmandu, shipping is complicated as Nepal is a landlocked country. So instead I tried to bring people rather than crates. In fact, Nikhil, you were my first artist, because I wanted artists to explore the materiality of place and see how what's already there can be reimagined or redeployed. If you set yourself certain conditions, how can we work within these parameters that could be liberating?

Actually, John, I found a lovely quote when you were talking about heritage at home and the idea of South Asia, the resilience and the resourcefulness of the people who have called it home. Could you elaborate on the idea of coming home?

JT: Perhaps because I am not from South Asia, I was very curious about the history of places, about the way that architecture could archive ways of living, and tell us something about their ecologies. How does the city fabric bear witness  to how inhabitants adapted to intense summers, the wet and dry of the annual monsoons, and periods of drought and flood over millennia? The traditional courtyard house, with its shade and open structure, was one domestic solution.

Or Shalimar Gardens, renowned for its Mughal splendor and its paradisiacal Islamic gardens, was also designed to bring relief from scorching heat, with its four hundred fountains and abundant plants encouraging air flow and lower temperatures. So the architectural heritage of South Asia, where environmental extremities are a fact of life, also contains clues to ancient technologies and wisdom that are relevant to climate challenges today. It's akin to Indigenous practices, which draw our attention to ancient knowledge that is not obsolete.

NC: Going backwards to go forwards. How can we look at ancient systems, like mud, which is a part of traditional architecture yet amid the current ecosystem, climate change and unpredictable weather patterns it takes on new meanings. I really appreciate the dialoguing that is happening between the past and the present, all collapsing in the now. Ancient systems contemporising ancient ways. 

NK: In Kathmandu, there are hitis (or dhunge dhara), ancient canals and water systems with spouts. They're beautifully carved, but also have a strong functionality because Kathmandu's in a valley and the water comes from natural underground aquifers and springs. Planning KT, I was questioning what it means to have a city that's landlocked but has these waterway canals? It becomes a metaphor for how water and its flows can bring us together, separate us and hydrate us. Yet what are the challenges of water with mudslides and the monsoons in Kathmandu, or the catastrophic earthquake of 2015? Many of these places are sensitive to climate change.

NC: The Sufis believe that water carries memory, and in Kerala there is a kind of mysticism and we're surrounded by water in abundance. The wells are always full. The rain is always plenty. The rivers are perennially flowing. People's lives are deeply connected to water and water systems here but also to what lies beyond that water. Kerala has been trading with the world for millennia and that's why Muziris becomes an interesting aspect of Kochi, because Muziris is the ancient site where pottery shards, coins, votive objects connect Kochi all the way to ancient Rome. There are maps in ancient Rome that point to Muziris.

The memory of water over here goes very deep. It's also a fishing town connected to people's daily lives. There is a very deep sense of what is Malayali, and how that can be a form of resistance entwined with memory of the water and the land. It’s fascinating to bring contemporary artists to this waterscape, this landscape that has been with the water since time immemorial.

NK: The sea binds us, because if you think about Pakistan and India, while it's not possible to move across borders waterways navigate these places.

NC: One water and many lands.

NK: This reminds me of the Tongan writer, Epeli Hau'ofa, who wrote Our Sea of Islands, looking at Oceania not as a series of small islands, but the largesse of the water.¹ And he completely changed the orientation from an archipelago island way of thinking to a recalibration of place and time from a watery perspective. Nikhil, your title For the Time Being conjures being out of time, temporality, making time, making a biennial on time.

NC: At HH Art Spaces in Goa, we think a lot about time as a team since we work with live art and time-based work, so time is like clay for us. It is one of the materials and mediums that we work with, the framework within which we exist. It's also the time we share. We're all contemporaries of each other. We're all here at this moment within the history of this planet as sentient beings to share this time together. We will all leave together. I'm also thinking about time from the perspective of the biennale existing on a timeline. There's a beginning, there's an end, there's an entry, there's an exit. There are actors waiting on the wings. It's an orchestration of a set of experiences that will unfold over 110 days. Being is a noun and a verb, but it's also the idea of being a human being. We live in a difficult time for us as human beings. We are at a state of war. What does it mean then to be in this body in this moment of time? For the time being, the biennale is under construction but there's a feeling of continuation that this title allows us to have.

NK: John, what are your thoughts about the coordinates of time given the deferrals of Lahore Biennale?

JT: Well, for starters, I think the pandemic showed us all that what happens with the passage of time cannot be taken for granted.  In Pakistan, that delayed temporality was compounded by the 2022 floods, then the national drama over Imran Khan. Then came the particular seasonalities of the Punjabi calendar, with Eid, summer heat, and winter pollution all to be taken into account when scheduling a publicly-sited event. This meant that only one or two months out of the year were viable for the Biennale. I came to realise that locality was not only about place but also time, so that the regular recurrence of a biennial cannot be a neutral fact.

NK: I was just thinking about the whole idea of a biennial unfolding over time, a biennial in rehearsal, a biennial in recess, a biennial working overtime, like all of us have had to endure. A biennial in waiting, which is my case.

The whole idea of a slow motion biennale might help us rethink attachments to calendars, bureaucratic time, and thinking about seasonal biennials.

NC: For us, it's an attempt to counter certain Western models, which put this emphasis on the finished artwork, the white cube, the clean, hygienic conditions, where capital and money are not an issue. To counter that expectation, to say no to an emphasis on anything that's finished. You could walk into our spaces and things could still be unprocessed. In fact, we've invited artists that embrace that with an empty table, a piece of paper, and a pen and that is a finished work as far as I'm concerned. It’s a way for us to rethink our relationship to art objects and bring the emphasis on experiences and conditions. We invite imperfection, attributing perfection to the Swiss watch and the machines that are made in the West, as opposed to the way we make things here. I don’t want to attribute importance to models that are imposed on us in order for us to get validation from a world that has invented this idea of the biennale, triennale and this format of having exhibitions and art gatherings. I want to take the power back for the artist as the maker, the body that is present in the act of making. Many works in the biennale at Kochi will present processes as opposed to products.

NK: This reminds me of Rosie Braidotti, the Italian feminist who has developed an affirmative ethics, where she writes about thinking together. She says, ‘We are in this together, but we are not one and the same.’² Hopefully this conversation is showing us how we can think together.

JT: That's it.

NC: That's it. How can we think together?

NK: And how can we think with each other, a ‘think with’ approach that acknowledges our entanglements with other humans, non-humans, the planet and climates.