{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/the-politics-of-belonging-at-the-india-pavilion-venice-biennale-opinion-pallavi-surana/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":124079,"slug":"the-politics-of-belonging-at-the-india-pavilion-venice-biennale-opinion-pallavi-surana","title":"The Politics of Belonging at the India Pavilion","excerpt":"For Pallavi Surana, the Indian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale raises both intended and unintended questions about what constitutes ‘home’","content":"\n

For Pallavi Surana, the Indian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale raises both intended and unintended questions about what constitutes ‘home’

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National pavilions have long occupied an uneasy position within the Venice Biennale. Part exhibition, part diplomatic exercise, they offer nations an opportunity to project carefully constructed images of themselves onto a global cultural stage. The India Pavilion at this year’s Biennale embraces this representational function with unusual clarity. As Vivek Aggarwal, Secretary of Culture, and co-commissioner of the India Pavilion writes in the accompanying catalogue, the exhibition foregrounds artistic practices ‘rooted in India’s civilizational ethos’ through ‘traditional materials such as bamboo, thread, and earth’, carrying ‘the textures, memory, and quiet fragrance of the land itself’. 

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Titled Geographies of Distance: remembering home, the exhibition is jointly commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, and private foundations associated with two of India’s most powerful industrial families – the Ambanis, who run the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) in Mumbai, and the Munjals, who oversee the New Delhi-based Serendipity Arts Foundation, best known for the annual arts festival it organises in Goa. Uniting state patronage and corporate philanthropy, the pavilion arrives embedded within a broader project of cultural diplomacy, one that seeks to foreground continuity, heritage and national identity on an international stage. 

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Curated by Amin Jaffer, whose scholarship has long focused on the material and design histories of the subcontinent, the presentation gathers six newly commissioned works that meditate on ideas of home, memory, displacement and belonging. Throughout the exhibition, home appears not as a fixed geography but as a fragile condition capable of surviving the loss of physical structures. Jaffer has described this framework as autobiographical, reflecting his own diasporic relationship to India as ‘an inheritance of the spirit’ carried through beauty and material culture rather than physical presence. 

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Alwar Balasubramaniam, Not Just for Us, 2026 (installation view, National Pavilion of India, 61st Venice Biennale, 2026). Photo: Andrea Avezzù
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This logic becomes apparent upon entering the pavilion. A monumental semi-circular disk of cracked earth greets visitors in the first gallery. Titled Not Just for Us (2026), Alwar Balasubramaniam’s sculptural panel is formed from clay and soil sourced from rural Tamil Nadu. According to the accompanying wall text, its fissured surface records the passage of time and environmental forces, evoking ‘both the fragility and endurance of the earth beneath us’. Yet the cracks remain curiously unmoored from the conditions that produce them. Rather than pointing toward specific histories of environmental change, extraction, displacement, drought, or agrarian crisis, the fractured earth is presented as a universal metaphor for endurance. 

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Beyond Balasubramaniam’s earthwork unfolds a sequence of immersive installations. Ranjani Shettar’s bulbous floral sculptures are suspended from the ceiling, appearing, as per the wall text, as a ‘conceptual garden’ hovering overhead. Asim Waqif’s bamboo structure, Chaal (2026), a version of it first seen at the Kochi Biennale in 2022 and then at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2023, stretches upward into the architecture itself, and invites visitors to drum upon it, recline within it and physically inhabit it. Sumakshi Singh reconstructs her ancestral home through dense networks of suspended embroidered threads and lacework. Above, hidden on the mezzanine level, Skarma Sonam Tashi’s stacked papier-mâché houses recall vernacular architecture in Ladakh. A second monumental soil work by Balasubramaniam marks the exhibition’s exit. 

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(top) Ranjani Shettar, Under the same sky (detail), 2026, handwoven cotton fabric, steel, lacquer. Photo: Andrea Avezzù
(above) Asim Waqif, Chaal, 2026 (installation view, National Pavilion of India, 61st Venice Biennale, 2026). Photo: Joe Habben
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Each installation is dramatically spotlit and staged as a self-contained sensory environment within the pavilion’s darkened interior, with works suspended, elevated, or otherwise carefully choreographed to accentuate their apparent delicacy. Visitors weave between hanging forms, look up at precariously balanced structures, and move through spaces where shadows, textures and scale heighten an awareness of material vulnerability. The exhibition design repeatedly directs attention toward the physical properties of its materials – the brittleness of dried earth, the tensile fragility of thread, the flexibility of bamboo, the impermanence of paper – encouraging viewers to experience precarity as an embodied, sensory condition rather than as the consequence of specific political, social, or economic forces. The result is an exhibition in which instability becomes an aesthetic form: something to be encountered sensorially. 

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The limits of this formulation become apparent when placed against the realities of contemporary India, where the question of home is not merely emotional or metaphysical but intensely political. Attempting to define ‘home’ in India today is fraught precisely because the conditions of belonging remain deeply contested along lines of religion, caste and class. Across the country, domestic space is being violently remapped through religious majoritarianism, aggressive redevelopment, extractive infrastructure projects and accelerated industrial expansion. Muslim neighbourhoods are demolished as spectacles of punishment; informal settlements are erased in the name of modernisation; entire communities are displaced through corporateled development and ecological transformation. Against this backdrop, the question is not simply how ‘home’ survives loss, but who is permitted to remain, whose homes are protected and whose are rendered disposable. 

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Skarma Sonam Tashi, Echoes of Home (detail), 2026, papier-mâché, clay, MDF board. Photo: Andrea Avezzù
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Several of the works contain more specific social, ecological, and regional histories than the curatorial framing allows. Tashi’s suspended papier-mâché dwellings, for instance, draw on the architecture of Leh and the rapidly transforming landscapes of Ladakh, a region marked by militarisation, tourism-driven overdevelopment, environmental precarity and ongoing debates over political representation following the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status in 2019. The problem, then, lies not in the pavilion’s engagement with craft traditions or vernacular material vocabularies, but in the way vastly different material histories are flattened into a coherent and aestheticised image of India: ancient yet contemporary, spiritual yet modern, fragile yet enduring. 

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What makes this image feel particularly indigestible is the way the pavilion aestheticised precisely those material vocabularies most vulnerable to the conditions of contemporary Indian development. Earth, bamboo, embroidery, handmade paper, thread and craft labour appear throughout the exhibition as signs of continuity and civilisational depth. Yet many of the communities – rural, lower-caste, tribal, migrant and economically precarious – historically sustaining these artisanal traditions are also among those most exposed to displacement through infrastructural expansion, extractive industry, aggressive redevelopment and uneven modernisation. 

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India’s return to the Venice Biennale after a seven-year absence arrives at a moment when the country is increasingly invested in projecting itself as a global cultural and economic power, one defined not only by technological advancement and fiscal growth but also by a renewed emphasis on civilisational heritage. Within Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of a ‘New India’, culture has become an increasingly important instrument of soft power, mobilised to communicate continuity, confidence and national pride on the international stage. Under the patronage of India’s most powerful corporate dynasties, the language of craft becomes detached from the social and material conditions that sustain it and repurposed as an instrument of cultural diplomacy. What emerges is an art-washed image of contemporary India: one in which vulnerability appears as material texture and the fractures of the present are absorbed into a reassuring narrative of national belonging.

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From the Summer 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.

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Read next The 2026 Venice Biennale Is Quintessential Biennial Art

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