India Returns to Venice with Geographies of Distance

Walking into the India Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale is something quite remarkable. You step into the historical Isolotto warehouse at the Arsenale — a building created from exposed timber, bricks and industrial lights — where no sound is present. There’s no spectacle waiting to attract your attention.

Instead, you feel stillness and an unexplainable weight when entering the pavilion. The exhibition includes five Indian artists who each practise differently; all five have one fundamental question: What is home? What remains after home has disappeared?

India has returned to La Biennale di Venezia for the first time since 2019 and officially rejoined La Biennale di Venezia (61st edition) after many years. India’s official participation in La Biennale di Venezia started in 1954; this is India’s fourth official participation in La Biennale di Venezia.

The India Pavilion, titled Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home, is hosted by the Ministry of Culture of the Government of India, which partnered with Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre and Serendipity Arts, and was curated by Dr Amin Jaffer. The pavilion opened on May 6 with many diplomats, curators and collectors in attendance, as well as the entire Ambani family.

The post made on NMACC’s Instagram (nmacc.india) captures the spirit of the event, stating, “The Ambani family have come together to celebrate another milestone in their vision to present India’s cultural heritage on the world stage.” Isha Ambani was representing NMACC at the September 4th opening of the National Pavilion of India at the 61st Venice Biennale. Isha said, “It is a real privilege to stand here today sharing this moment with all of you and supporting India’s National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

” At the ceremony, Union Minister of Culture & Tourism Gajendra Singh Shekhawat said without embellishment, “Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home” presents a contemporary representation of an India that is firmly connected to its past while also transformed. As we move forward as a nation, the Pavilion represents the strength of India’s cultural memory and the ability of artistic expressions to connect India to the globe.”

What the Exhibition Is Actually About The overarching theme for the Biennale is “In Minor Keys” for 2026; this theme encourages us to tell quieter stories about fragile environments and small, extremely personal moments. The Indian Pavilion, created by curator Dr Amin Jaffer, takes that invitation one step further than most pavilions. Dr Amin Jaffer describes the pavilion’s purpose as exploring home as a “space of emotion that resides within you” and is created from culture, personal mythology, and time, rather than by physical walls and addresses.

What separates this pavilion and makes it so intellectually appealing is the rejection of nostalgia. What no one asks of these five artists is for us to view or celebrate what we miss. They are asking the more profound question of what remains. The remains of a home that was demolished seven decades ago live on through the precise angle of a recreated window frame made out of thread. A home in a landscape that has been overtaken by concrete is memorialised in the scaffold of bamboo that makes up the artist’s vision.

Although the materials being used are traditional and even have historical value – clay, dirt, papier-mâché, woven cotton, and natural fibre – the discussions being created through the use of these materials by many artists from around the world are very contemporary. You can see that through the entire pavilion, a vision of home exists as fractured, suspended, scaffolded, and reimagined. Home itself is not a fixed image; it is carried with you.

Five Artists, Five Languages

Bala Alwar Balasubramaniam (Bala) uses clay and soil sourced from Tamil Nadu. His cracked-earth surfaces have been shaped by the forces of nature through the processes of evaporation and time. The fissures that run through these surfaces tell a story of droughts, displacement and the long-ago notion of land as ancestry rather than property. By allowing for the natural processes to create the work, Balasubramaniam references centuries of terracotta traditions found throughout India – embracing imperfection as an integral part of the process of making rather than something that detracts from it.

Sumakshi Singh has recreated her childhood home (33 Link Road), which was demolished after 74 years of continuous use, using translucent threads of white finer than that of human hair. The structure is suspended in mid-air with a precision similar to that found in technical drawings and the fragility associated with half-remembered dreams. The viewer can walk through the work; this only adds to the disconcerting nature of this experience. Singh herself has noted that this piece is “in conversation with Venice itself, where transience and fragility coexist with the extraordinary beauty of human life and art”.

Ranjani Shettar, an artist from Karnataka, creates interpretations of the world around us in the form of suspended, organic sculpture made from natural materials such as hand-woven cotton fabric and steel. In addition to representing flowers, seeds, and tree canopies through her work, Under the Same Sky, she sees nature as a home. This is where she finds both inspiration and uses materials to create pieces of art that involve or connect with nature. “Nature is abundant. It inspires me and provides me with the means to make and relate to my work (she uses nature as a part of her work),” she says. “It also serves as a mental state of being, something that is sensed and felt and not just a permanent address.”

In contrast to Shettar’s installation, Asim Waqif has filled the pavilion with a massive bamboo scaffold, Chaal. The density and energy of this structure force the audience to physically interact with it, not just view it passively as they would a traditional sculpture. Inspired by the temporary scaffolding commonly assembled and disassembled at construction sites in urban areas throughout India, Waqif has used his nearly 30 years of experience working with bamboo to create this piece as a tribute to a dying craft. “The craft of bamboo construction is becoming a thing of the past; it is fading into the past,” says Waqif. “The traditional uses of bamboo for creating utensils, baskets, and buildings are disappearing, as people continue to develop and build.” In essence, Waqif’s installation serves as both an elegy and an admonition.

Skarma Sonam Tashi’s presentation in Venice features the delicate landscape of Ladakh through a Buddhist lens, creating small-scale homes from papier-mâché constructed from waste products. Tashi’s work, “Echoes of Home”, draws global attention to the fragile ecosystem, spiritual beliefs and sustainable lifestyles that have existed in the Himalayas for many years. As one of the 5 artists in the exhibition, his work contains an important environmental subtext — it serves as a gentle reminder that sustainability has existed long before this modern-day trend; it was simply given to us to carry on as part of our heritage.

Why This Matters Beyond Art For India, the Venice Biennale has always offered a platform to showcase much more than simply its visual art creations. The Biennale is an example of soft power in one of its clearest forms; through exhibiting artwork created by artists from all over India, the country showcases both culture and creativity without a podium and an associated press conference. Use of organic, humble, handmade materials is what sets this pavilion apart from other pavilions represented at the 2026 Venice Biennale. There is no use of digital spectacle (e.g., LED walls or algorithmic installations), and there is only the use of bamboo, string, earth, and papier-mâché — examples of materials that are imbued with hundreds of years of indigenous knowledge — to create highly visible, large-scale works of art that will have an impact within one of the most competitive art contexts in the world. The fact that they use those materials is not an accident; rather, the use of those materials serves as the basis for an extremely articulate argument that supports their artistic legitimacy.

While those countries that are exhibiting at the Venice Biennale are still trying to find the biggest and loudest visual metaphors for their exhibitions, India has arrived only whispering. Yet, somehow, that whisper is heard from further away.

What Comes Next

The pavilion will not end after just one evening. For six months after the exhibition opens, Serendipity Arts will continue to host performances around Venice, such as music, dance, and interdisciplinary events that expand India’s cultural dialogue beyond the Isolotto warehouse. The pavilion will remain open to the public from now until November 2026 in the Arsenale in Venice.

Dr Jaffer said that home is “an emotional space held within the individual”. The five artists who created this exhibition have created an emotional “home” inside a shipping warehouse in Venice — not due to the physical structure of the building or because of where it exists geographically, but due to the emotional connection to that space. It does not matter if someone has a passport or an address; it is about the fact that they will travel with it.