India participates in the Venice Art Biennale 2026 with the exhibition “Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home”. The show features works by the artists Alwar Balasubramaniam, Sumakshi Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Asim Waqif, and Skarma Sonam Tashi.
Official description:
Home is not always the place where we live today. Sometimes it is a place where we once lived, or one reconstructed through memory and feeling. For lives shaped by movement across regions and generations, home becomes less a fixed location than a portable condition: part material, part ritual and part personal mythology. Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home proposes home not as a stable structure but as an idea continually remade in response to change. The exhibition reflects a moment of transformation in India, where cities expand at an unprecedented speed. Five artists, rooted in India’s material cultures, give form to this condition. Alwar Balasubramaniam’s clay works register the fragility of the land. Sumakshi Singh reconstructs a demolished family house in thread, rendering home as a delicate structure sustained by care. Ranjani Shettar transforms organic materials into a suspended garden, addressing the importance of flora in the Indian psyche. Skarma Sonam Tashi’s papier-mâché dwellings recall Ladakh, where traditional architecture is threatened by development. In contrast, Asim Waqif’s bamboo installation signals the frantic growth of modern cities, which inevitably displaces our collective past. For curator Amin Jaffer, home is a fragment residing in gesture and memory. The exhibition invites us to reflect on a condition felt across all humanity.
Alwar Balasubramaniam (Bala)
Drift, 2026, Earth and resin; Not just for us, 2026, Earth, resin, and paddy grains.
These two panels are created from earth sourced from the artist’s rural Tamil Nadu home, shaped through a collaboration with nature that he carefully initiates and guides. Formed by natural processes of drying and evaporation, their fractured surfaces record, over time, the dialogue between soil and water. The fissures speak of separation and renewal, echoing cycles of loss and return. The work reminds us that the ground beneath us is enduring yet vulnerable.
Sumakshi Singh
Permanent Address, 2026. Silk, cotton, and nylon thread stretched on steel frames.
This installation recreates in thread the demolished family home at 33 Link Road, New Delhi, where the artist spent formative moments of her childhood. The lace-like structures render walls, hinges, and brickwork as translucent, spectral outlines, revealing how architecture has been recreated as an act of labor and memory. Rooted in the tradition of women in the family gathering to embroider together, the work reclaims domestic labor as foundational rather than decorative. What was once solid shelter becomes a weightless apparition, inviting visitors to reflect on loss, and to question what home means when its physical form has vanished entirely.
Ranjani Shettar
Under the same sky, 2026. Handwoven cotton fabric, steel, and lacquer.
This suspended sculptural garden unfolds as a lyrical composition of form, material, and movement, where hand-crafted elements hover in delicate equilibrium. Drawing on artisan traditions and her close observation of the natural world, the artist creates an immersive space that invites the viewer into an ethereal choreography. Inspired by organic forms across diverse landscapes, her work evokes a fragile yet resilient ecology – diverse, yet in harmony. In this installation, home becomes a sensory and contemplative condition: a place of balance achieved through thoughtful composition.
Skarma Sonam Tashi
Echoes of Home, 2026. Papier-mâché, clay, and MDF board.
Positioned on the mezzanine like a settlement on a mountain slope, this installation evokes the vernacular architecture of the artist’s native place, Ladakh, with earth-walled homes shaped by climate, community, and generations of accumulated building knowledge. Constructed from recycled cardboard, papier-mâché, and clay pigmented with natural binders, the structures mirror the vulnerability of traditional Ladakhi ways of life under pressure from urban migration and modern construction in steel, concrete, and industrially produced materials.
Asim Waqif
Chaal, 2026. Bamboo, cane, reed weaving, and various lashings.
This monumental scaffolding-inspired installation occupies a central position in the Pavilion, reflecting on the ubiquitous construction sites of Indian cities. Within the Pavilion, the resilient and invasive bamboo overwhelms in scale and durability the adjacent thread house and aerial garden. Once typical of Indian construction, the bamboo scaffolding invites visitors to reflect on how, all around us, new buildings supersede old ones. Scaffolding – and what lies behind it – reveals how home is in a perpetual state of becoming – provisional, and always under construction.
Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home. Alwar Balasubramaniam, Sumakshi Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Asim Waqif, and Skarma Sonam Tashi / Pavilion of India at Venice Art Biennale 2026, Arsenale. Venice (Italy), May 6, 2026.
