Having announced the first list of 25 participating artists in July this year, Rao, artist and curator of this year’s edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and the biennale’s cofounder, director and president of the board, Krishnamachari, announced its postponement this October from December this year to next November. Despite that, the artist-led biennial remains an influential model for similar largescale shows outside the global north. In the meantime, the biennial distributed works made by artist friends during lockdown on its social media platforms, while the Students’ Biennale (normally concurrent with Kochi-Muziris) will now run online in February – so there’s plenty still to do. Earlier this year, Rao, who won the Singapore Literature Prize for the second volume of Pulp, her ongoing project tracing the history of banned books, wrote that the 5th edition of the biennale will embody ‘the joy of experiencing practices of divergent sensibilities, under conditions both joyful and grim’, and now has extra time to mull this over for the 2021 exhibition.
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