What is at the core of “Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home”?

The India pavilion addresses the concept of a physical home and questions what happens when that no longer exists, or you’re far away from it, or when you have changed and the imagined home or the perceived home is no longer your real emotional home.

What led you to this subject?

It’s partly a personal narrative. It also draws from India’s demographic and economic growth and [carries] the direct influence of [the] artist Sumakshi Singh’s work.

How does it draw from your life?

This inquiry comes from my long-standing interest in where I am from, where I belong, how I am physically within my home and my way of living.

I have Kutchi Gujarati origins. I was born in central Africa. My mother is an Anglophone; my father is a Francophone. There were many different ways of living all around me in my childhood, which made me feel included at times and excluded at others, making me think a lot about the concept of home.

Visitors explore the India Pavilion at Arsenale during a press preview for the 61st Veince Biennale on May 7 in Venice, Italy. | Photo Credit: Simone Padovani/Getty Images

How does India’s growth feature in the curation?

I am looking at the dramatic changes in the way people wish to live and work because of India’s ongoing demographic and economic boom and technological changes. The home of yesterday may not exist in the same way today. That’s often because we now have new ways of living, which attract people, or there are fewer possibilities to live in the same way because of the pressures and opportunities that come with the change. For example, see how Bengaluru has been completely transformed, or newer cities such as Gurgaon and Noida have taken shape.

The second story here is about physical movement in India. While we know that Indians have always been a mobile people—there are references to India in artefacts from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia—today, we are more mobile than ever before, within the country and across the world. You go to any advanced economy of the world, and Indians play a role there, whether it’s in America, Europe, East Asia, or South-East Asia.

The question then is, for an Indian from abroad or one who goes abroad, how long does it take to cease to think of India as your home? How many years? If you’re an Indian who goes to study in America and marries and settles there, India may still be your home, but is it the home of your children? When they come to India, do they come as tourists or do they come as Indians who are returning to their home?

How did Sumakshi Singh’s work influence you?

In 33 Link Road, Sumakshi recreates her demolished family home through threadwork. [She embroiders on water-soluble fabric with cotton, copper, silk, and nylon threads. Once the fabric dissolves, the threads remain. She uses this technique to make life-sized components of a house, including a spiral staircase, gates, walls, etc.] Born in Delhi, Sumakshi has lived in many different places across the country because of her father’s work. But her emotional home was the house of her grandparents, built after Partition. It’s where she communed with her family, where birthdays and weddings were celebrated.

When this single-residence house was demolished, she suffered pain and dislocation. The home where she was formed emotionally was disappearing. But, of course, it’s bound to disappear because the intensity of demand on space in Delhi has changed. So, over time, a single-family bungalow has become more and more rare. The same applies to Manhattan and London.

I wanted to capture the emotional repercussion of the physical disappearance of home. While Sumakshi’s project is autobiographical, it’s intended to be understood and felt by every human being because home is at the core of it, which is not unique to India.

Sumakshi Singh with her artwork. | Photo Credit: Tanya Singh 

What aspects of her work appealed to you?

I don’t look at a work of art as just a physical thing. It needs to touch me emotionally. It needs to be original and intellectually compelling. It must resonate at many levels, and Sumakshi’s work does that, especially her use of thread and embroidery. Her grandmother and aunts used to stitch and embroider together. It was a pastime, a recreation and labour which showed commitment and devotion. When you stitch or embroider something, you put your heart into it. Sumakshi used that material and medium to recreate her demolished home because they were deeply tied to the physical activities of the women of her family.

Also, thread and textile have been the foundation of the Indian economy. Sumakshi’s project strikes a chord with our collective Indian home because textiles are at the basis of our identity. I, too, come from a family where women, including my mother, were skilled at embroidery. But the art of stitching as a domestic pastime is getting rarer.

Also, these activities are reminiscent of the times when we were not leading hectic lives with lots of distractions. They were the productive output of a human being who had time to fill. Hence, they also represent the changes in how we live. Sumakshi’s project crystallised many aspects of “remembering home” because it’s not just the memory of the house; it’s the memory of what happened in the house that is no longer happening in any house.

The Indian group at the Venice Biennale. Left to right: Alwar Balasubramaniam, Skarma Sonam Tashi, Amin Jaffer, Sumakshi Singh, Asim Waqif and Ranjani Shettar. | Photo Credit: Joe Habben

How do the five artists’ varied practices come together in the pavilion?

For me as a curator, the selection of the artists involved various criteria, from aesthetics to the artist’s engagement with the theme, the materiality of the work, and the complementarity of the works with each other and with the space. Working on a national pavilion means representing an entire nation. It was also important to show artists who reflect the full geographic and cultural diversity of India and the country’s visual traditions.

Bala’s [Alwar Balasubramaniam] work with soil and fractured earth is deeply resonant because the house is built on earth. His practice is also rooted to the landscape, to the place of his origin [Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu]. He closely observes the fragile nature of the soil and the changes in the land because of climate change, erosion, farming, and other stresses.

Ranjani Shettar and her floral suspensions are important too, particularly because as children we are very sensitive to nature, flowers, and their scent. I was quite impacted by the gardens in my parents’ family homes. So, I felt that we cannot evoke home without evoking the flower. Her work is also a reflection of the role flowers play in Indian civilisation. It’s not like in the West, where you just buy flowers and display them. Flowers have sacred and cultural significance for us.

Skarma Sonam Tashi’s work takes the element of the fragility of home to a community level. He is interested in ecology and in how communities in Ladakh that have traditionally built into the mountainscape using local, organic materials are changing how they build, using concrete and steel with glass windows. It represents a new way of being, which can be a voluntary or economic shift, but it’s less sustainable and much less in harmony with the environment.

Asim Waqif’s project is evocative of bamboo scaffolding. When you see one in a town or a city, you wonder, what’s the future? What’s going to come? What’s going to be behind this? What was there before? His project points towards the future, towards the erasure of Sumakshi’s house, of the garden, of the soil, and of Tashi’s mountain living.

How does the India pavilion situate itself in the overall biennale theme, “In Minor Keys”?

The India project’s materiality and message reflect minor keys because the idea of home is anchored in the heart. To me, the theme refers to the minor keys on the piano keyboard, which are not the triumphant, noisy keys, but the soft ones. They are introspective, elegiac, tender, and that is the undertone. I felt that the pavilion must have materials that are soft, natural, and organic, and projects that are formed by hand. They come out of traditions that are timeless. It’s, above all, a project that touches you. It evokes tenderness and introspection.

What would be a viewer’s takeaway from the India pavilion?

While it’s rooted in Indian culture, its theme is universal. The experience should invite introspection, evoking thoughts about the visitor’s own home, whether it is a physical space or an emotional condition.