After seven years, the Indian Pavilion returns to the Venice Biennale. Alma Feigis asks the five artists about home as a construct shaped by mobility, how material practices can retain or reconstruct place, and the tension between permanence and impermanence in art and architecture.
Your exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale, Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home, explores the idea of home as both place and condition. What does home mean to you at this point in your life and career?
Skarma Sonam Tashi: I come from Ladakh, where houses are built in close relationship with the mountains, climate, and community. As my work and life take me to different places, I’m realising that home is not only where I live, but also something I carry with me through memories, materials, and cultural practices. I often recreate textures and forms inspired by Ladakhi architecture and landscape using discarded cardboard, paper mâché, and natural pigments, materials which allow me to reconstruct fragments of home wherever I am. Home has become a shifting condition, rooted in Ladakh but expanding through my experiences across different geographies.
Sumakshi Singh: I have lived across many places – growing up in ten different states across India, spending seven years in Chicago teaching, and later living for long stretches in Italy and France. A life lived among shifting addresses often unfolds in compartmentalised fragments: different languages, cultures, cuisines, friendships, value systems, and rhythms of living that do not always overlap. I began to experience home not as something that resides in rooms or streets, but as something carried within, where disparate experiences can coexist and even find integration; while the first few weeks in a new place are often filled with the excitement of difference and discovery, I found that before long something within begins to search again for familiarity, rootedness, intimacy, for a point of orientation surrounded by walls weathered by memories and objects that hold symbolic value – a sense of being home.
There is something so vulnerable about this need. We move through the world as though our homes, our loved ones, our symbolic anchors will endure, all the while holding within us the truth of their impermanence. For me, that anchor was 33 Link Road – my grandparents’ home in Delhi, built shortly after the partition of India and Pakistan. It was our family home for seventy-four years before its recent demolition.
Alwar Balasubramaniam: Home is both physical and internal. It is the land around my studio in Tamil Nadu, where the soil carries the memory of generations before me. It is also a condition of awareness. I was born there, left, returned, and eventually settled again near my ancestral village. Over time, I have come to understand that home is not only where one lives, but where one recognises continuity. The earth I work with existed before me and will remain after me. Home, in that sense, extends beyond a house or a boundary – it feels less like a fixed location and more like an alignment with natural cycles. When I work with soil, water, and sunlight, I feel grounded in something.
Biennales often create temporary communities of artists. Has the exchange with the other participants influenced your thinking or approach?
Ranjani Shettar: I think of this work as orchestral, and I like that image because it allows many voices to coexist without competing for the same space. The kind of exchange I value is attentive and porous, where you remain open.
Skarma Sonam Tashi: Yes, biennales create a very unique environment where artists from different cultures and backgrounds come together. Even informal conversations can open new perspectives. Listening to how other artists think about themes like home, migration, or identity makes me reflect on my own experiences in a broader context. It reminds me that while our geographies are different, many of our concerns are shared. For me, these exchanges are less about changing my practice and more about expanding my understanding of how different artistic languages approach similar ideas. Such interactions create a temporary community where ideas travel freely, and that energy often stays with you long after the exhibition ends.
Tashi, your practice draws on the mountainscapes and building traditions of Ladakh – a place with a very distinct altitude and light. How do you translate that into the work shown so far from its geographical origins?
Skarma Sonam Tashi: Ladakh has a very particular physical and sensory atmosphere. The altitude, the dry air, the sharp sunlight, and the silence of the mountains create a strong presence in the body. Growing up there, these sensations become part of your memory and perception of space. When I create work away from Ladakh, I try to translate those experiences through texture, material, and form. The layered surfaces of cardboard, papier-mache and clay often echo the rugged landscape or the surfaces of traditional houses. Natural pigments help me bring the colours of earth and stone into the work. Rather than literally recreating the place, I try to evoke its feeling of quietness, fragility, and resilience.
You work with papier-mâché, glue, and natural pigments. These materials feel mutable. What draws you to these processes of transformation?
Skarma Sonam Tashi: I enjoy how these humble materials can slowly transform into something meaningful. The process of layering, cutting, and scratching the surfaces creates textures that resemble landscapes, walls, or architectural forms. I am drawn to materials that can transform and carry traces of time. Papier-mâché made from old books and papers allows me to recycle something that already holds memory and knowledge. When combined with cardboard and natural pigments, these materials become strong yet still fragile.
There’s something poetic about using lightweight, fragile materials to evoke monumental landscapes.
The landscapes and mountains of Ladakh are fragile in many ways—affected by climate change, erosion, and human intervention. Using lightweight and delicate materials reflects this paradox; what looks solid and eternal may actually be vulnerable. It allows the work to carry a sense of fragility while still suggesting larger forms. The contrast also invites viewers to think about how memory and place are constructed. Even something that feels monumental in our minds can be built from small, fragile fragments.
Asim, your installations address overconsumption and sustainability. How do you negotiate these themes within the inherently resource-intensive context of a biennale?
Asim Waqif: I find that, today, the appearance of something has become more valued than its inherent quality; it is not well-meaning products that become successful, but well-marketed ones. I fear that my project here may suffer a similar fate. Bamboo has a very sustainable image and will be hailed as a critique of industrial overconsumption. However, in essence, this project is not sustainable. Not enough thought and effort have gone into making the production process sustainable. There are some minimal things we have been able to do: we have tried to do sustainable and ecologically conscious harvesting in Assam, India. We also hope to find an end user for all the materials at the end of the exhibition period.
Architecture often aims for permanence, but your installations frequently feel temporary, even vulnerable. Is that shift deliberate?
I find that durability has become one of the most important criteria for evaluating architecture today. The rural housing scheme in India prioritises durable architectural materials that are often industrially produced using a lot of energy over softer, traditional, but also locally-available ones that create a low-energy footprint. I find that durability can be counterproductive to adaptability, especially in a world that is changing faster and faster, like South Asia. By the time an infrastructure project is designed and constructed, the city has already moved on to another reality, but the infrastructure is so durable that the city has to live with it – it’s unable to adapt to the changes in the city. Besides this, I find that there can be a lot more potential in the memory of an artwork than in the physical artwork itself. A permanent artwork tends to become part of the urbanity of a city, and a frequent visitor tends to discount it. However, a temporary artwork’s disappearance beckons for other interventions to be done in the new emptiness. The memory of what was there earlier transforms in people’s minds into new imaginations. I find this more interesting.
Sumakshi, when in your life did thread first become more than just thread?
Sumakshi Singh: I grew up watching the women in my family sit together in the garden, embroidering in companionship and exchanging stories. Thread came to signify intimacy, femininity, and softness for me. My mother was an accomplished embroiderer, and I spent many afternoons doing it with her. After she passed away in 2013, I traced out her letters to me and began embroidering them as an homage to her love for thread. Halfway through, I realised that the act of embroidery was fixing her words in place – tying them down. Had I simply written them in pencil, they could have been erased, but instead they were anchored to the fabric, secured front and back. I discovered that I had a subconscious desire to hold on to them. Ironically, once the letters were finished, the words themselves seemed to resist that containment, as if they needed space to breathe. I began experimenting, re-embroidering the text on translucent fabrics and testing different materials. An embroidery artisan who had worked with my mother visited my studio and suggested that I embroider the words onto soluble fabric. Once the stitching was complete, the base fabric dissolved, leaving behind web-like thread drawings that seem to levitate in space. These words, levitating in space – porous and permeated with a sense of lightness – seemed finally at rest.
Embroidery carries deep histories of domestic labour and storytelling. How do you reframe or expand these associations with your work?
Sumakshi Singh: The process is slow and repetitive, requiring patience and sustained attention. While working, I often reflect on how embroidery, so closely associated with women’s domestic labour, has historically been positioned within craft hierarchies. Practices like weaving, traditionally linked to male labour, are understood as structural and primary in India, while embroidery is often dismissed as decorative or ornamental. This distinction mirrors a broader cultural tendency to view women’s work as supplementary rather than foundational. When the base fabric disappears in my work, the embroidery shifts from embellishment to armature. It becomes the framework that holds everything together, carrying the form, the space, and the narrative.
How do you navigate the tension between fragility and monumentality in your work?
Sumakshi Singh: I am making a house that cannot offer shelter. The threaded architecture inhabits a tension between presence and disappearance. Small, intimate embroidered gestures accumulate slowly until they begin to take on a monumental presence. For me, it’s much like how a house becomes a home through quiet, repeated acts of care and attention that often pass almost unnoticed.
Alwar, your practice often investigates the relationship between the body and its surroundings. How does using soil and clay from Tamil Nadu shape the conceptual and emotional register of the work?
Alwar Balasubramaniam: The body is always in some degree of contact with the earth. When I use soil and clay from Tamil Nadu, I am working with material that I have known for many years, and I understand how it behaves in different conditions. This familiarity creates intimacy. The soil is not neutral material for me, and it comes from land near my ancestral village and from a place that has shaped my life. It carries agricultural history and rainfall patterns and seasons of drought and abundance.
Your work frequently engages with absence, imprint, and trace. How do these ideas connect to the exhibition’s theme of remembering home?
Alwar Balasubramaniam: When water evaporates, it leaves behind cracks, and when animals or people walk across wet soil, they leave imprints that remain after the moment has passed. In the same way, we leave a place and still carry its impressions within us. The earth records what has moved across it and holds memory in its surface. In the work, the fissures show where water once existed, and the imprints show where life once passed. Remembering home is like reading these surfaces and recognising what remains.
Ranjani, you often elevate humble, everyday materials such as wax, paper, cotton, and mud. What draws you to the overlooked?
Ranjani Shettar: I grew up watching people transform discarded materials into utilitarian objects, and that knowledge sits deep in my psyche. Tradition is a living resource for me. It holds ways of making that require sustained engagement, and it teaches patience and attention. I carry it forward by working through it, letting it meet experimentation and letting the material lead. Because of this, I do not separate sculptural materials from everyday ones. The overlooked is often where touch, skill, and intelligence are most present, and where a small shift can turn the mundane into something poetic and contemplative.
Your work is nonfigurative yet evocative. Do you see abstraction as a political or ecological language?
Ranjani Shettar: Abstraction allows me to take elements from nature without making direct representations. It can hold complexity, interdependence, and even competition – the way microcosms form in gardens and forests. In that sense, it becomes ecological, because it trains attention toward relationships and rhythms, not just images.
And what does it mean to represent India, or to resist that framing, within an international exhibition of this scale?
Ranjani Shettar: I carry where I come from in how I work. The long handwork, the intimacy with material, and the way my forms draw from flora without describing it literally are all shaped by my life in rural Karnataka. At the same time, I do not want the work to be reduced to merely a national expression. I am making an installation that asks for bodily encounter, for moving beneath and around it, and for feeling gravity, hovering, and space. Those are shared conditions.
