MATERIALS BECOME VESSELS OF MEMORY AT THE INDIA PAVILION
The India Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia turns to some of the country’s oldest materials to address the experience of distance. Titled Geographies of Distance: remembering home, the exhibition brings together artists Alwar Balasubramaniam, Sumakshi Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Skarma Sonam Tashi, and Asim Waqif, whose works transform earth, thread, bamboo, natural fibers, and papier-mâché into reflections on memory, migration, belonging, and change (find designboom’s previous coverage here)
Within the Arsenale’s Isolotto, fractured landscapes, suspended structures, vernacular dwellings, and evolving frameworks shape the exhibition. The ensemble of the works suggests that home is something continually reconstructed through memory, ritual, and making. For curator Amin Jaffer, craft became the conceptual and material foundation of the project.
‘Firstly, I felt that the materials used in the Pavilion should themselves evoke home,’ Jaffer tells designboom. ‘The choice of materials — earth, thread, cloth, bamboo, papier-mâché — is significant because they play a role in Indian culture, design and decorative arts.’
CRAFTS AS AN ARCHIVE OF BELONGING
Apart from presenting craft as heritage alone, the pavilion positions material knowledge as a living archive capable of carrying personal and collective histories across generations. Each artist draws from materials rooted in everyday Indian life, using them to consider how home is remembered when places transform, disappear, or become increasingly distant. ‘Materiality plays a central role in the project,’ Jaffer explains. ‘I very much wanted visitors to the Pavilion to understand that the five artworks are not just made of Indian materials, but of materials that have a deep significance in Indian civilisation and identity.’
Home appears in multiple forms in the India Pavilion exhibition, through cracked earth and remembered architecture, through suspended gardens and fragile settlements, and through scaffolding that points toward an uncertain future. Visitors encounter home as a collection of fragments. ‘Within the pavilion, each work contributes to a landscape in which home is fractured, suspended or unstable,’ says the curator. ‘Visitors move between different manifestations of home: the fractured ground beneath our feet, the fragmented thread house, immersive suspended garden, the cluster of vernacular houses — and finally the bamboo scaffolding which symbolizes change.’
EARTH, MEMORY, AND NATURAL FORCES
Through his contribution to the exhibition, artist Alwar Balasubramaniam turns to the ground itself. His monumental earthworks take shape through the bonding and separation of soil and water, allowing natural forces to actively participate in the making process. ‘Not just for us, artwork is made in a collaboration with natural forces,’ shares Balasubramaniam. ‘Through a process of bonding and separating earth and water, a cracked surface emerges, one that reflects both material behavior, the changes in the environment and a sense of our own fragmentation.’ The artist allows the material itself to carry traces of time, erosion, and continuity.
For Ranjani Shettar, home emerges through the engagement with nature and handmade processes. Her installation, ‘Under the same sky’, assembles handwoven cotton, steel, and lacquer into a hovering installation. ‘My work, ”Under the same sky”, brings together strands of my practice from across the years,’ Shettar explains. ‘I am interested in how form, space, and material come together to create a sense of balance and tension.’
Suspended above visitors, the work extends the artist’s long-standing dialogue with natural forms while preserving a slower rhythm of making at a moment defined by speed and automation.
Through earth, thread, bamboo, and recycled matter, Geographies of Distance: remembering home proposes that craft is a way of carrying knowledge across generations, sustaining cultural memory through periods of transformation, and reconstructing a sense of belonging when geography alone is no longer enough.