Dr. Amin Jaffer, an internationally celebrated curator with a career spanning institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Al Thani Collection, and major biennials, brings a deeply transnational perspective to his role as curator of the India Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. His practice has consistently explored how objects, materials, and histories travel across geographies, shaping identities that are both rooted and mobile.
At Venice, Jaffer curates Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home, a pavilion that reflects on migration, memory, and the shifting idea of home in contemporary India. Drawing on materials embedded in the subcontinent’s long material history, including soil, bamboo, textiles, and paper, the exhibition creates an immersive dialogue between past and future, intimacy and displacement. Set within the historic Arsenale, the pavilion brings together five artists whose works resonate with the Biennale’s theme In Minor Keys, inviting viewers to engage with quieter, affective registers of belonging and loss.
In this conversation with Abir Pothi’s Editorial Team, Jaffer touches upon his curatorial vision and insights.
1. You’ve moved between the V&A, The Al Thani Collection and biennials like the Islamic Arts Biennale before curating the India Pavilion in Venice. How has this trajectory shaped the way you think about what a “national” pavilion should do today?
Across institutions and geographies, the exhibitions that I have curated aim to engage and inspire the widest possible public, whether they are already familiar with the works of art on view or are newcomers to the subject. The role of a pavilion at the Biennale Arte is to reflect national contemporary visual culture in line with the overall theme. As the pavilion curator I proposed exhibiting projects that employ materials and techniques which have played a significant role in Indian material culture across millennia.
2. You’ve described home becoming a “portable condition” for people whose lives are shaped by change and distance. What was the moment or image that first crystallised that idea for you in relation to India today or was it a process of becoming?
Born into an Indian family that has been in Africa over many generations, I have been raised with the notion that cultural identity is remembered and preserved wherever on is physically.
3. In conceptualising and realising “Geographies of Distance: remembering home”, what kinds of risks or experiments did you allow yourself?
Until it is fully realised and installed there is always a risk that the aesthetics of a group exhibition will not meet the artistic vision and impulse when the curator conceived the project. In the case of the India Pavilion, the dialogue between the five artworks and their rapport with the building’s interior space exceeded my expectations.
Artworks featured: Alwar Balasubramaniam, Not Just for Us (2026). Pavilion of India at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2026 © Andrea Avezzù | Asim Waqif, Chaal. (c) Joe Habben | Ranjani Shettar – Under the same sky. (c) Joe Habben | Skarma Sonam Tashi, Echoes of Home (2026). Pavilion of India at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2026 © Andrea Avezzù | Sumakshi Singh, Permanent Address (c) Joe Habben
4. India is undergoing rapid urban transformation, especially in secondary and tertiary cities, with neighbourhoods being erased and remade at unprecedented speed. How did this awareness of physical change in India’s built environment shape the emotional register of the pavilion?
The awareness of physical change determined the mood of the Pavilion, the organic hand-worked materials evoking India’s roots. The various aspects of the project – house, garden, earth – invite visitors to reflect on home as it was, while the dynamic bamboo scaffolding that rises above the other artworks reveals how the physical environment of future Indian cities supersedes that of the past.
5. At the same time, you speak of migration as being “in the DNA” of Indians, from ancient trading networks to today’s globally mobile diaspora. How did you want the pavilion to hold both internal mobility and external migration together, rather than treating them as separate stories?
The Pavilion project may be read in different ways. On one hand, it represents the transformation of towns and cities in Indian today and the disappearance of the physical home as it was known. In the case of the diaspora, an Indian home becomes physically inaccessible because of geographic distance. In many ways the experiences of distance and departure are the same.
6. Koyo Kouoh’s “In Minor Keys” asks us to tune into quieter frequencies of whispers, laments, oases, and meditating on the intangible. How did you translate that musical and affective metaphor into the language of this pavilion?
The use of organic materials transformed by hand introduces a minor register, as does the India Pavilion’s theme of remembering home.
7. You’ve brought together five artists working with soil, thread, floral forms, bamboo and paper mâché, materials rooted in everyday Indian life. What did “material culture” mean for you in this project, beyond a simple turn to the “handmade”?
It meant using materials and techniques that have been used in India well before the European presence. In this sense the Pavilion truly represents India’s own visual traditions.
8. How are you using sound, movement, poetry and performance to extend the idea of home beyond the walls of the pavilion and into Venice’s own rhythms as a port city? Also, what does curating look like in terms of spatial design and pacing?
One of the Pavilion partners, Serendipity Arts, has expanded the Pavilion outside of its walls with a programme of performances of Indian music, dance, recital and poetry throughout Venice. There is a gentle harmony between this live element and the works of art in the pavilion itself, reflecting the role that performance plays in the conceptualization of art in Indian civilisation. Curating this dimension collaboratively has come very naturally to Serendipity Arts, in discussion with their impressive network of performers and the India Pavilion team. The spatial design of the Pavilion and the dialogue between the five projects formed a key element of the curation of the project. Much was determined by the Isolotto space in which it exists: a fourteenth-century warehouse in the Arsenale of Venice. The space was not designed for display, it was a place where materials once arrived, were stocked, and departed again and contains a complex interior architecture: a mezzanine, three staircases, a lift and multiple entrances. Within this complex space it was important that the five artworks deliver a coherent narrative both in content and aesthetics. This was achieved in many ways, particularly in the dialogue of form, materiality and colour.
9. What do you think about the pavilion’s afterlife? How hopeful are you about bringing it back to India so that audiences here can encounter a project originally conceived for an international art circuit?
The Ministry of Culture and Partners are already discussing the exhibition of the Pavilion projects in India.
10.This Biennale brings together over a hundred artists and collectives under “In Minor Keys,” with a strong presence from the Global South. Are there particular artists or national pavilions you’re especially keen to see?
I have not seen all of the projects on view but particularly enjoyed the national pavilions of Argentina, Belgium, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Spain and projects at Palazzo Polignac, Prada Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection and San Marco Art Center.
Cover Image: Dr. Amin Jaffer, pictured with Ranjani Shettar’s Under the same sky. © Andrea Avezzù
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
