From Venice with love: India at the Venice Biennale

Why in the News

India has returned to the Venice Biennale with a national pavilion after seven years, presenting ‘Geographies of Distance: Returning Home’ under the curator Amin Jaffer. The pavilion carries five artworks, all rooted in Indian craft traditions and all built around the idea of home. Critics, patrons and the global media have called it dazzling and spectacular. The contested point is that India has mounted a national pavilion only three times in the event’s history, so the question raised by the praise is whether a strong showing becomes a standing presence or remains an occasional one.

What is a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale?

1. The Venice Biennale: Begun in 1895, it is among the oldest, largest and most prestigious contemporary art events, and is called the Olympics of the art world. In its current format it hosts the International Art Biennale, the International Architecture Biennale, national pavilions and collateral events.
2. A national pavilion: This is a presentation organised and funded by a government to showcase its own artists, which makes it an exercise in soft power and cultural diplomacy rather than a private exhibition.
3. Giardini and Arsenale: Thirty countries own permanent buildings at the historic Giardini park. The Arsenale rents space for the six-month-long biennale, and India’s pavilion sits there in a brick-walled former maritime warehouse, a five-minute walk from China’s pavilion.

What does the India pavilion put on display?

1. Permanent Address, by Sumakshi Singh: White threads hold up fragments of a broken home, an embroidered recreation of 33 Link Road in Delhi, the artist’s now-demolished house that her grandparents, Partition refugees from Pakistan, built in 1951. The house was embroidered on water-soluble fabric down to its gates, stairs, walls, doors, windows and door bolts.
2. Chaal, by Asim Waqif: A bamboo scaffolding 30 feet high, using 12 tonnes of bamboo sourced largely from Assam and West Bengal, stands as a commentary on the erosion of rural architecture under construction rules that favour steel and aluminium. It uses a single lashing technique, two lengths of bamboo tied with a composite nylon shipping strap, with no holes, joinery, nuts or bolts.
3. Echoes of Home, by Skarma Sonam Tashi: A prototype of a Ladakhi settlement recalls homes traditionally built from earth, stone, timber and collective knowledge passed down generations. It was made from recycled material, including papier-mache, egg trays, cardboard and old paper.
4. Under the Same Sky, by Ranjani Shettar: A monumental floral vine is suspended from the ceiling as a floating garden.
5. Cracked soil, by Alwar Balasubramaniam: A two-panelled installation of cracked soil sourced from rural Tamil Nadu, one panel covering an entire wall of the pavilion.

How was the 2026 pavilion put together?

1. Selection process: The Culture Ministry received multiple expressions of interest and assessed proposals against the vision it sought to present at Venice, over months of discussion and evaluation.
2. Curatorial brief widened: The selected proposal was initially for a single artist. The ministry held that India’s diversity called for a multi-artist presentation, and the curator expanded the narrative to five.
3. The question the theme asks: The curation treats Indians as migrants and asks whether belonging is determined solely by geography, or can be sustained through memory, practice and emotional attachment.
4. Institutional partners: The government delivered the pavilion with two institutional partners, the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) and Serendipity Arts.
5. What a Venice presence demands: Beyond selecting artists, a pavilion requires curatorial expertise, production capability, international partnerships, sustained funding and the ability to build audiences and relationships around the work.
6. Official reception: The biennale’s President described India’s presentation as grounded in its ancient heritage while looking to the future.

Why has India’s presence at Venice been episodic rather than sustained?

1. Three pavilions in 131 years: India has participated with a national pavilion only in 2011, 2019 and 2026, even as Indian artists have regularly shown in their individual capacities at the biennale’s central exhibitions.
2. The gaps between them: India reportedly failed to accept the biennale’s invitation in 2007, and returned only after eight years following its 2011 debut.
3. Absence as a signal: In 2015 an Indian artist said she felt ashamed at the absence of a national pavilion, because the absence showed where India placed its contemporary art.
4. How others do it: China has showcased its pavilion since 2005 from a permanent home at the Arsenale, and smaller countries such as Uruguay and Angola either hold permanent pavilions or participate consistently.

What did the 2011 and 2019 pavilions do differently?

1. 2011, a free curatorial hand: The Culture Ministry chose the historian and art critic Ranjit Hoskote, who was left free to set the concept and pick the artists. He asked who had the right to call themselves Indian and left out some of the biggest names.
2. 2011, a critical work: The debut showed Desire Machine Collective’s Residue, a short film shot in a defunct thermal power plant outside Guwahati, which took a dig at the Indian State’s thoughtless industrialisation.
3. 2019, a commemoration as the brief: The pavilion was mounted around the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi and explored his continued relevance in a world navigating conflict, with works by Jitish Kallat, Atul Dodiya, MF Husain and Shakuntala Kulkarni.
4. 2019, the curatorial constraint: The curator was told the funds came from the Gandhi 150 commemoration, and secured agreement that the curation would carry a critical lens. Critics still dismissed the pavilion as government-mandated, unoriginal and bureaucratic.
5. 2019, the delivery model: The Ministry of Culture worked with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) as principal partner and financial backer, and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) on co-organisation, corporate advocacy and execution.
6. The platform’s own tradition: The biennale has a rich record of artists using a State-funded platform to challenge governments. Eg. Hans Haacke’s Germania in 1993 was an indictment of the German government’s inaction over racial violence against immigrants.

Challenges to a sustained Indian presence at the Venice Biennale

1. Renting rather than owning a space: Participation has to be renegotiated each edition because India holds no permanent building at the biennale. Eg. Entering the Giardini park requires navigating a labyrinth of diplomatic, legal and administrative clearances, which Qatar completed in 2025 and South Korea last did in 1995.
   The Fix: Pursue a permanent space, which is cheaper over time and compels a return at every edition.
2. Occasion-driven funding: A pavilion financed out of a commemoration ties its theme to the reason the money was released. Eg. The 2019 curation was fixed to an anniversary rather than chosen curatorially.
   The Fix: Fund the pavilion as a standing budget line, so the theme is set by the curator and not by the source of the grant.
3. Capability that does not accumulate: Each pavilion is delivered by a fresh set of partners, so production and curatorial knowledge does not carry across editions. Eg. The 2019 and 2026 pavilions were built by entirely different institutional partners.
   The Fix: Retain a standing organising body across editions, so what one pavilion learns is available to the next.
4. Freight exposure on craft-based work: Large installations in natural material need long lead times that a sudden conflict can destroy. Eg. Several species of bamboo had to reach Venice on fixed timelines, and the outbreak of the US-Iran war in February forced the artworks to be flown in instead of shipped.
   The Fix: Budget an air freight contingency into the production plan from the outset for bulky and perishable material.

Conclusion

The pavilion has been received as a success, and the success is being read as evidence of a change in how India treats contemporary art abroad. The record does not yet support that reading, because every Indian pavilion so far has followed a specific occasion rather than a standing commitment. India has confirmed a return at the next edition and is preparing to host a biennale of its own in Delhi, which gives the current momentum somewhere to go. What to watch is whether India moves from renting space each time to holding one, since renting keeps participation a decision that has to be taken again and owning makes it an obligation.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2018, GS1, 10 marks] Safeguarding the Indian art heritage is the need of the moment. Discuss.”