India, presenting a curated show at Venice Biennale 2026, one of the most significant exhibitions in the world of contemporary art, with a powerful collective presentation titled ‘Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home’. Five of India’s most vibrant contemporary artists—Alwar Balasubramaniam (Bala), Sumakshi Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Asim Waqif, and Skarma Sonam Tashi—will collaborate on the project, curated by Amin Jaffer, which will take place at the Arsenale in Venice from May 9 to November 22, 2026.
India’s Ministry of Culture presents the pavilion in partnership with the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) and Serendipity Arts Foundation.
Memory, Movement, and Home
In an era of quick urban change and global diaspora, the exhibition’s central theme is that home is no longer a permanent, physical location but a multi-layered emotional and cultural construct shaped by memory, migration, geography, and transition. Through practices based on organic, traditional materials and processes, each participating artist connects India’s old material culture with modern experience.
Alwar Balasubramaniam
Renowned Tamil Nadu sculptor Alwar Balasubramaniam, often known as Bala, studies perception, the body, and the relationship between the material and the immaterial. Through control and accuracy, he creates intricate pieces that experiment with texture, contour, and the language of abstraction. His work frequently uses organic materials like clay and soil, obscuring the distinction between sculpture and the natural world, and produces complex works that experiment with texture, contour, and the language of abstraction through control and precision. He views art as a means of comprehending life. His installations, sculptures, and paintings, however, often merge and confound expectations. They are poetic and whimsical, challenging our preconceptions of Buddhist and Hindu thought.
Sumakshi Singh
Sumakshi Singh was born in 1980 and resides and works in New Delhi, India. As a multidisciplinary artist and educator, her work explores materiality, temporality, and the interaction between physical and transient locations. She explores materiality, memory, and perception through interactive installations, paintings, drawings, and sculptures. To produce intangible shapes that entice spectators into transforming spaces where individual and societal histories meet. She often uses intricate methods, like fine surface modifications and stitched threads.
Singh’s thread drawing, Untitled, invites the visitor to explore an ethereal labyrinth of transparent building facades from her family’s Delhi home at 33 Link Road, constructed soon after the partition, when her grandparents immigrated to India from Pakistan. Even though Singh has lived in numerous states and countries, this address has always been part of her sense of home.
Ranjani Shettar
Renowned Karnataka sculptor Ranjani Shettar is renowned for his expansive, handcrafted installations that blend industrial and natural elements, such as thread, cloth, beeswax, wood, and vegetal pastes, into elaborate, floating shapes. Her work frequently suggests connectivity, growth, and impermanence, reflecting an instinctive relationship with craft history and the ecological environment. Ranjani established a distinct niche for herself: She works with traditional materials, draws inspiration from India’s endangered natural environments rather than its urban context, and examines the social and ecological effects of the country’s rapid urbanisation through the lens of non-figurative art.
Asim Waqif
Asim Waqif, a New Delhi-based artist, began his career as an architect before pursuing contemporary art. His work includes environmental sculpture and site-specific installations, often made from natural, repurposed, or discarded materials such as bamboo, rope, and metal. Waqif frequently invites spectators to connect directly with the structures in his work, which address concerns of sustainability, urban ecologies, consumption, and public involvement.
The core of the artist’s work is a complex negotiation with the material he employs. His work with bamboo is his best-known medium, but he also uses garbage to create beautiful sculptures. Waqif’s bamboo work is his most famous creation. But his most ambitious endeavour is Bamsera Bamsi, a bamboo plantation near Sylhet, Bangladesh. The plantation, which is about to enter its seventh year and is supported by the Samdani Art Foundation, is a living artwork that Waqif visits on occasion to mould and shape into new forms, creating bridges, buildings, and shapes into an increasingly dense grove.
Skarma Sonam Tashi
Skarma Sonam Tashi, a native of Ladakh, infuses his artwork with a mountain-inspired sensibility rooted in the region’s high-altitude scenery and traditional construction methods. His pieces reflect on ecological vulnerability and creative preservation by evoking delicate ecologies and cultural memory through organic and recyclable materials, including papier-mâché, natural pigments, and regional craft techniques.
Because of his upbringing in the sacred (and occasionally harsh) terrain of Ladakh, Tashi’s art is deeply personal. All of the buildings use canvas, which provides both shelter and an exotic adventure while also referencing the area’s traditional architectural forms. They are constructed from locally sourced materials, including stone, rammed earth, and sun-dried bricks. His artwork aims to connect contemporary ecological issues with Ladakh’s sustainable legacy.
A Pavilion in Conversation
These five artists weave personal stories with more general societal and environmental issues to create a pluralistic conversation about home, distance, memory, and belonging. Notwithstanding their differences, their methods are deeply rooted in materials that speak to millennia of Indian craftsmanship and cultural knowledge, connecting regional customs with international artistic discourse.
Feature Image: Untitled, Skarma Sonam Tashi |Courtesy: Skarma Sonam Tashi
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