After a seven-year hiatus, the India Pavilion returns to the 61st Venice Biennale, claiming a place on the world’s most influential art stage. Helmed by Dr. Amin Jaffer, senior curator of the Al Thani Collection and formerly of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the pavilion takes on the theme, Geographies of Distance: remembering home. Backed by India’s Ministry of Culture, alongside the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre and Serendipity Arts Foundation, the alliance signals public and private patronage.
The India Pavilion explores the polyglot essence of ‘home’ and the questions that shape it: Is home defined by physical rootedness or by something more intimate? Is it not the rituals, fragrances, inherited tongue, shared stories, sounds and memories that we all carry within us? Home is where we are our most vulnerable selves; it’s where we peel away layers of the mask we wear in public.
“Indians are more mobile than ever,” notes Jaffer. “As they move across the country and the world, their childhood cities transform and familiar spaces disappear. The diaspora often carries home within them – their Indianness endures wherever they go. So, the question of where home truly resides is at the heart of the pavilion.” The poignant theme is deeply universal, resonating with the Venice Biennale’s overarching title, In Minor Keys. Here, Jaffer reflects on the subtle ache of leaving home – “the minor sentiment of displacement”. Five artists present idiosyncratic yet interconnected responses to the theme.
The fragility of soil
Alwar Balasubramaniam
Alwar Balasubramanium (or Bala) works with raw earth and resin, drawing our attention to the soil beneath our feet and the planet’s fragility. Titled Not just for us, the work has been created in “collaboration with nature,” he explains. It was made in his studio, near Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, before making its way to Venice, where it will be mounted against a freestanding wall. Measuring 18 by 10 feet, with a depth of just half a foot, it occupies a curious space between monumentality and fragility.
Soil is the primary medium; where cracks formed under the sun mark the nostalgic departure of water. These fissures, formed across the soil in an irregular pattern, resemble the cartographic lines on our palms. Or, they can be likened to the scars we carry within ourselves. “The earthen cracks hold memory. They are like the grain in the wood, the lines in stone or the layers of a shell,” explains Bala. “The way the land shifts and separates becomes a metaphor for fragmentation, for the distances we create between ourselves and others, and from what we consider home.”
Soil is the primary medium; where cracks formed under the sun mark the nostalgic departure of water. These fissures, formed across the soil in an irregular pattern, resemble the cartographic lines on our palms. Or, they can be likened to the scars we carry within ourselves. “The earthen cracks hold memory. They are like the grain in the wood, the lines in stone or the layers of a shell,” explains Bala. “The way the land shifts and separates becomes a metaphor for fragmentation, for the distances we create between ourselves and others, and from what we consider home.”
A floating garden
Ranjani Shettar
Bengaluru-based Ranjani Shettar conjures an organic, suspended garden, working with natural materials to craft delicate biomorphic forms through a process akin to papier-mâché. Titled Under the same sky, Shettar’s installation levitates. “The viewer can move through it, beneath it and around it, becoming aware of their own body in relation to the work,” she says. The installation, made painstakingly overtime by hand, could be imagined as a floating sanctuary – a safe space where viewers can slow down, be vulnerable and cherish a pause or two – much like a home. “For me, home is not just a physical place. It is a sense of belonging and ease: it is a state of mind,” says Shettar, describing home to be an emotion rather than a fixed location.
Like Bala, she too is drawn to natural materials, often sourcing elements from near her studio in rural Karnataka. In the past, Shettar has engaged with materials such as hand-moulded beeswax and rosewood. In a similar vein, the installation, Under the same sky in Venice is made of handwoven cotton fabric, lacquer and steel. “My engagement with material is very physical, I am doing everything by hand. That direct contact is essential. It is through touch that I come to know the material; its possibilities and its limits,” she explains. “Sensory experiences, like the smell of earth, the texture of surfaces, or the humidity in the air, are not something I consciously translate, but they are always present in the way I respond to material.”
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