India returns to Venice with Geographies of Distance
India’s National Pavilion returns to Venice Art Biennale at the Arsenale with Geographies of Distance: we remember home, a group exhibition tracing how memory, materiality and migration shape the idea of home. Edited by Dr. Amin Jaffer and presented by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, the pavilion marks India’s first national presentation at Biennale Arte since 2019, bringing together five artists whose practices move through soil, thread, bamboo, paper, waste and architectural memory.
THE report opens into a raw Venetian interior of exposed wood, brick and industrial scale, where each work seems to test how fragile structures can hold emotional weight. Throughout the India pavilion, the house appears as a partial image: a cracked earthen wall, a transparent facade, a suspended botanical figure, a bamboo structure assembled from fragments. The rooms carry the feeling of places remembered through touch before they are understood as images.
National Pavilion of India, Venice Art Biennale 2026
The house as material memory
The exhibition features Alwar Balasubramaniam, Sumakshi Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Asim Waqif and Skarma Sonam Tashi, artists working in different regions of India and in different material languages. Their practices share an interest in organic and traditional materials, which the National Pavilion of India frames through a larger question during the Venice Art Biennale: what remains at home when physical spaces change, expand or disappear.
This question is especially present in Sumakshi Singhhis semi-transparent architectural installation, where embroidered thread renders fragments of domestic and urban space at full scale. Walls, windows, grills and doors appear in pale lines, floating in the air with the precision of a drawing and the vulnerability of a memory. The work invites movement through its openings, turning the architecture into something porous and phantasmal, a place you can enter while staying away.
Permanent Address, Sumakshi Singh
Fragility on an architectural scale
Sharma Sonam TashiHis work brings another register to the India Pavilion, drawing from the landscape and architecture of Ladakh through recycled materials and traditional techniques such as paper maché. Its clustered architectural forms appear solid and earthy, stacked like a settlement shaped by climate and terrain. Up close, the surfaces have a grainy texture, with small windows and projections giving the work the intimacy of a model and the presence of a built landscape.
A large cracked wall pushes this sense of fragility into an immediate spatial encounter. Illuminated from above, its dry surface breaks into irregular slabs, reminiscent of parched soil as much as ruined architecture. The piece holds ecological stress and cultural memory on a par, using a familiar earthy language to suggest how landscapes and homes can be altered by forces beyond context.
Echoes of Home, Skarma Sonam Tashi
Hanging forms and handmade time
Ranjani ShettarHis floating sculpture introduces another rhythm. Her handcrafted organic shapes drift across the pavilion’s upper volume, their pale and amber surfaces catching the light on the dark ceiling. The forms evoke flowers, seed pods and marine life without settling on a single reference, giving the space a sense of growth that has been slowed and lifted into the air.
Shettar’s work has long explored natural materials and craft processes, and here this approach gives the India Pavilion a softness of touch without losing structural intent. Each element appears to be created through repetition and patience, but the installation reads as a continuous movement across the room. It carries the house into the air, away from the wall and floor, where memory can float as long as it can settle.
Under the same sky, Ranjani Shettar
Bamboo, movement and participation
Asim VakifHis installation occupies the pavilion with a dense bamboo structure that feels temporary, energetic and alive in its environment. Trained as an architect, Waqif works with organic and discarded materials, creating structures that ask visitors to move through them. Here, bamboo poles are gathered in an expansive frame under the wooden roof, echoing scaffolding, shelter and makeshift construction.
The work gives the presentation of the Venice Biennale an intensely natural rhythm. It does not sit apart from the body at a distance. It calls for proximity, scale and navigation. Within Geographies of Distance, Waqif’s installation suggests the home as something assembled through use, pressure and repair, a structure held together by touch as well as material.
Chaal, Asim Waqif
A national pavilion shaped by distance
For the curator Dr. Amin Jaffer, the exhibition responds to the theme of the 61st International Art Exhibition, In Minor Keys, through “the nuances of distance and the enduring power of memories of home.He describes the booth as an exploration of the home asan emotional space within the self,shaped through culture, personal mythology and emotion.
This framing gives the India Pavilion at the Venice Biennale its strongest line. The exhibition does not treat the house as a fixed image or a nostalgic destination. He approaches it through traces of materials, hand-made systems and structures that seem to remember touch. At a time of rapid urban development and global movement, Geographies of Distance gives the idea of home a physical presence in Venice, one built of fragments, craftsmanship and the fragile insistence of belonging.
