After a seven-year absence, India returns to the La Biennale di Venezia with Geographies of Distance: remembering home, a pavilion that reflects a nation in transition. Opening at the Arsenale, this marks India’s first participation since 2019 and signals a renewed engagement with global contemporary art.
Presented by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, in partnership with the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) and Serendipity Arts Foundation, the pavilion arrives at a moment when India is both economically ascendant and culturally expansive. The exhibition examines how mobility, migration and rapid urban transformation are reshaping the idea of home.
Curated by Amin Jaffer, the project takes its cue from the Biennale’s theme, ‘In Minor Keys’, conceived by the late curator Koyo Kouoh. For Jaffer, this idea is deeply emotional. “Minor keys refer to the chords on a piano keyboard that are elegiac, tender, self-reflective, and perhaps even melancholic,” he says. “The emotion we feel when the home that is familiar is far away or no longer exists” becomes the starting point of the pavilion. This emphasis on quiet intensity shapes the exhibition’s tone, privileging intimacy, subtlety, and material presence.
The curatorial framework is anchored by Sumakshi Singh’s ‘Permanent Address’, a reconstruction of her demolished family home rendered in embroidered thread. From this centre, Jaffer builds a constellation of practices that approach the idea of home from different vantage points. Alwar Balasubramaniam, Ranjani Shettar, Asim Waqif and Skarma Sonam Tashi each transform traditional materials to express their relationship to place.
Material here is a repository of memory. Balasubramaniam works with clay and soil from his surroundings. Singh turns thread into architecture, giving form to absence. Shettar creates suspended sculptures that appear weightless yet are deeply rooted in labour-intensive craft traditions. For Shettar, this tension between rootedness and change defines her understanding of home. “Home, for me, is both anchored and shifting,” she says. “It lives in the memory of materials and gestures, even as the form keeps changing.” She insists on slowness: “Working slowly is deliberate, a way of staying attentive to time and to the materials while discovering what is being revealed.”
A more urban dimension emerges in the work of Waqif, whose installations repurpose discarded materials and invite public interaction. In contrast, Tashi’s work reflects the ecological and cultural realities of Ladakh, where home is inseparable from land and community. “In Ladakh, home is built with the earth, shaped by weather, and sustained through collective care,” he says. While urban life often renders home temporary, in Ladakh, he says, “home does not disappear but shifts into memory and feeling.” With fragile and recycled materials, his work reflects this tension.
The pavilion extends beyond the gallery through a programme of music, performance and poetry unfolding across Venice. These interventions integrate into the city’s daily rhythms, dissolving boundaries between art and lived experience. This approach reflects the ethos of the Serendipity Arts Foundation. India’s return to Venice is also a moment of cultural positioning. As Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Union minister of culture, notes, the pavilion presents “a contemporary India that is deeply rooted in its civilisational memory while fully engaged with the world today”.
The involvement of the NMACC underscores the growing role of private institutions in shaping India’s cultural reach. Together with state support, this collaboration reflects a hybrid model that combines institutional backing with curatorial ambition. Rather than asserting itself through spectacle, the 2026 pavilion embraces nuance and restraint. In Venice, a city defined by movement and impermanence, Geographies of Distance: remembering home offers a quieter proposition. Home is no longer a fixed place, but something carried through memory, material and time.