Today marks the opening of the Pavilion of India’s historic exhibition, Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home, at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The show, which is organised by Dr Amin Jaffer and presented by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, features five prominent modern artists whose works explore what it means to be at home in a period of significant change. The Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre and Serendipity Arts are partners in presenting the India Pavilion. The exhibition, which is housed in the Arsenale’s historic Isolotto warehouse, explores memory and metamorphosis in response to the Biennale’s main topic, “In Minor Keys.”
Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home illustrates how home becomes less of a permanent location and more of a mobile state for people whose lives are impacted by change or distance: a combination of memory, material, ritual, and personal mythology. Alwar Balasubramaniam (Bala), Ranjani Shettar, Sumakshi Singh, Skarma Sonam Tashi, and Asim Waqif are five artists who represent India’s geographical diversity. The exhibition is unified by the use of materials deeply ingrained in Indian civilisation, such as clay, thread, bamboo, and papier-mâché, each of which carries cultural memory while responding to contemporary contexts.
Home appears broken, suspended, scaffolded, and recreated throughout the Pavilion. Together, the artists create a collective voice that is both profoundly ingrained in Indian identity and universally relatable, and the pieces represent a common state of flux.
Exhibition Highlights
Not Just for Us, Alwar Balasubramaniam (Bala)
Balasubramaniam presents sculptural panels formed from clay and soil drawn directly from the land of rural Tamil Nadu, where he works. Marked by natural fissures and fractures, the works register the passage of time and environmental forces, evoking both the fragility and endurance of the earth beneath us, which itself becomes a record of memory and transformation.
Under the same sky, Ranjani Shettar
Shettar’s sculptural installation comprises intricately crafted, suspended forms inspired by flowers and natural growth. Made by hand using traditional processes, the works appear weightless, forming a conceptual garden that visitors move through. Her practice reflects the rhythms of making and tending, positioning nature and craft as integral to the emotional landscape of home.
Permanent Address, Sumakshi Singh
Singh has created an immersive, life-sized reconstruction of her demolished family home in New Delhi using delicate embroidered thread. Suspended in space, the structure appears as a ghostly architectural trace rather than a solid form. In part a meditation on domestic space and domestic labour, the work transforms absence into presence, suggesting that home survives not in a physical structure but through remembrance.
Echoes of Home, Skarma Sonam Tashi
Tashi’s work reflects on the architecture and ecology of Ladakh, using fragile materials such as papier-mâché to evoke traditional dwellings impacted by climate and landscape. His installation highlights the vulnerability of these practices in the face of modern construction, raising urgent questions about sustainability, community, and cultural continuity.
Chaal, Asim Waqif
Waqif’s large-scale bamboo installation draws on the visual language of scaffolding found across Indian cities. Constructed from a material long embedded in vernacular architecture, the work suggests a structure in the process of becoming. It signals both renewal and disruption, foregrounding the inevitability of change in the urban environment.
Performance Programme
An extended performance programme produced by Serendipity Arts will activate the Pavilion and the city of Venice through music, movement, storytelling, and interdisciplinary interventions throughout the Biennale from May to November 2026. Programming features intimate, site-responsive performances that unfold across the city, inspired by Venice’s environment and the Biennale theme In Minor Keys, and rooted in Indian cultural forms.
The first performances will take place during the Vernissage week, when the India Pavilion will present a cross-cultural programme drawing on the discipline of Indian classical music, directed by renowned composer and tabla player Bickram Ghosh. From the 6th to the 9th of May, performances will take place across the city and on the water, starting at Mercato di Rialto, with additional performances presented in partnership with the Palazzo Diedo – Berggruen Arts and Culture and the Fondazione dell’Albero d’Oro. The full schedule is enclosed.
Feature Image: (L-R) Shefali Munjal, Co-Founder and Patron, Serendipity Arts; Sunil Kant Munjal, Founder Patron, Serendipity Arts; Dr. Amin Jaffer, Curator; Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Union Minister of Culture and Tourism of India.
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