ARTSKONNECT 

eep inside the Arsenale in Venice, suspended from the ceiling of the India Pavilion, is a ghost. Not a metaphor — something almost physical. Artist Sumakshi Singh has reconstructed, entirely from thread, a full-scale replica of the house her grandparents built in Delhi as refugees of Partition. The walls are there. The windows. The doorways. All of it weightless, transparent, as if memory itself has taken architectural form. You can walk through it. You cannot hold it.

This is Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home — India's pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2026. After a seven-year absence from the world's most prestigious art exhibition, India is back. And what it has brought to Venice is not a celebration of arrival. It is a meditation on what disappears.

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"What remains of home when physical places change, expand, or disappear?"

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The pavilion, curated by Dr. Amin Jaffer and presented by India's Ministry of Culture in partnership with the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre and Serendipity Arts Foundation, brings together five artists whose practices span radically different regions and materials — but who share a single, urgent preoccupation. Home, they each seem to say, is not a fixed address. It is something carried. Something endangered.

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Karnataka on the World Stage

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For readers of ArtsKonnect, one name in this quintet deserves particular attention: Ranjani Shettar, who lives and works in Karnataka.

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Shettar trained at the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, earning both her BFA and MFA there. For nearly two decades, she has lived and worked in rural Karnataka, where her studio practice is shaped as much by the world outside her window as by the work on her hands. Her sculptures — painstaking, slow to build, constructed from handwoven cotton fabric, steel, lacquer, beeswax, and vegetal pastes — look like nothing else in contemporary Indian art. They float. They drift. They recall flowers, seed pods, marine organisms, without ever quite settling into one reference.

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Her installation at Venice, Under the Same Sky, was made by her entirely, element by element, over months. "Every element of this installation was made by her, slowly, over months," says the official pavilion statement — "assembled the way she thinks of all her work, as an orchestra."

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"I cannot think of anywhere other than nature where I feel truly at home," Shettar has said.

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Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has shown at the Barbican in London, in galleries across India, and in international exhibitions for two decades. Venice, for her, is not a debut. It is a conversation that has been building for years — between craft and ecology, between Karnataka's material traditions and a global contemporary art conversation.

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The Five Artists

• 01

  Ranjani ShettarKarnataka —
  hand-crafted sculptural installations using natural and industrial materials; Under the Same Sky, 2026

• 02

  Sumakshi SinghNew Delhi —
  thread-based architectural reconstructions of demolished and remembered spaces; Permanent Address, 2026

• 03

  Asim WaqifNew Delhi —
  architect and artist working with bamboo and discarded materials; critical commentary on disappearing craft traditions

• 04

  Alwar BalasubramaniamRural Tamil Nadu —

• sustained engagement with the natural world; work rooted in a deepening relationship with place and material

• 05

  Skarma Sonam TashiLadakh —

• recycled materials and paper mâché; Echoes of Home, drawing on traditional Ladakhi earth-and-timber construction
   

The Question That Travels

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​What makes India's return to Venice resonant — not just in a diplomatic sense, but in an artistic one — is the specificity of what the pavilion refuses to do. It does not present a fixed image of India. It does not celebrate heritage as something safely archived. Instead, it asks what happens to culture when the physical containers of that culture are removed.

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Asim Waqif's bamboo installation makes this explicit. "This craft is fading to a memory," he has said of the traditional bamboo-working traditions he works with. "In India, traditional use of bamboo in utensils, baskets, ikra and construction is disappearing under the pressure of developmental aspiration and the lure to participate in the market economy. Often, artisans don't want the younger generation to continue their work."

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At Venice, Sumakshi Singh builds a house out of thread because the original house no longer exists. Skarma Sonam Tashi recreates the earth-and-timber architecture of a Ladakh that is fast changing. Ranjani Shettar weaves cotton by hand because that slowness is itself a statement — a refusal to let making become mechanical, a memory held in the body. Across five very different practices, the pavilion arrives at the same place: that home is not a location. It is a practice. Something you keep doing, or lose.
 

Ranjani Shettar's answer is in the work itself: craft made by hand, from organic materials, slow to build and fragile to preserve, suspended in the air of a palazzo in Venice — still here, still visible, still making its claim on the world.

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The pavilion's argument travels well. It lands in Bengaluru with particular force.

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At Venice, Sumakshi Singh builds a house out of thread because the original house no longer exists. Skarma Sonam Tashi recreates the earth-and-timber architecture of a Ladakh that is fast changing. Ranjani Shettar weaves cotton by hand because that slowness is itself a statement — a refusal to let making become mechanical, a memory held in the body. Across five very different practices, the pavilion arrives at the same place: that home is not a location. It is a practice. Something you keep doing, or lose.

Ranjani Shettar's answer is in the work itself: craft made by hand, from organic materials, slow to build and fragile to preserve, suspended in the air of a palazzo in Venice — still here, still visible, still making its claim on the world.

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Details

India Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale
Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home
Curated by Dr. Amin Jaffer
Arsenale, Venice
Open: May 9 – November 22, 2026
Presented by Ministry of Culture, Government of India, in partnership with NMACC and Serendipity Arts Foundation.
 

Photography by @joe.habben & @ave_zz. Follow the official pavilion account at @indiainvenice for updates from the exhibition.