We are delighted to announce the selection of
Alwar Balasubramaniam & Ranjani Shettar
for the India Pavilion curated by Amin Jaffer
at the 61st Venice Biennale
The Pavilion will be presented by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, in partnership with the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) and Serendipity Arts Foundation.
Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home will express how, for those whose lives are shaped by change or distance, home becomes less a fixed place and more a portable condition: part memory, part material, part ritual, part personal mythology.
Dr. Amin Jaffer, Curator and Director of the Al Thani Collection, said: "The 61st International Art Exhibition, themed 'In Minor Keys', offers a poignant opportunity to explore the nuances of distance and the enduring power of memories of home. The India Pavilion brings together artists whose practices reflect the experience of a world in constant change. The pavilion explores home not as a fixed physical location, but as an emotional space carried within the self, a repository of culture, personal mythology and emotion. Using materials associated closely with Indian civilisation, the chosen artists create a singular meditation on the fragile nature of home, which is both personal and universal, quiet and resolute. Through this work, our artists come together to form a collective Indian voice that resonates with Koyo Kouoh's vision for this Biennale.”
Alwar Balasubramaniam, also known as Bala, deeply engages with the natural world with a continuous inquiry into its internal cadences, its potencies, and its personalities, that has come to characterize his practice. Working alongside nature as much as on or within it, Bala reveals the beauty and systems governing even the smallest, least perceptible shifts in our environment. In his work, he literally incorporates soil from his surroundings — drawing upon the well-defined hues of orange, red, brown, and black — to build textured paintings and sculptural surfaces. These earth-derived pigments and forms evoke natural processes like erosion, gravity, and evaporation, encouraging viewers to reflect on the invisible forces shaping our planet and ourselves.
Bala’s collaboration with nature reveals itself in a form of striking abstraction—one which remains materially, even elementally, grounded in the air, land, and soil it represents.
Ranjani’s practice takes its rhythm from nature, while many of its methods are drawn from India’s centuries-old craft traditions. Taking the specificity of her materials as her springboard, Shettar’s imbues a sensitive dialogue with the spaces they inhabit in which naturally dyed hand-woven cloth, wrapped around steel armatures, seem like floating notes of a symphony, both earthly and celestial. Her work may be whimsical, entrancing, beautiful—but they are not Romantic in their conceptions of nature. Hers is an ethical as much as an aesthetic commitment to the natural world, a philosophical framework as well as a way of life. Appearing as a kind of catalyst for the entrancing systems of energy that she activates, Ranjani challenges us to bring new awareness to every interaction with the world around us, small and large.
Created entirely by hand in a digital era, wrapped within Ranjani’s installation, one senses an embrace of nature and potential of humanity.
