National Pavilion of India
About

National Pavilion of
India 2026

La Biennale di Venezia, founded in 1895, is one of the world’s oldest, largest, and most prestigious cultural institutions, featuring major international exhibitions of contemporary art.

In Minor Keys is the theme chosen by
Koyo Kouoh for the Biennale Arte 2026.

“It is an exhibition permeated with spirit, with a sacredness that puts the person, the human being, back at the heart of things, rediscovering the sense of being in the world by reacquiring a sense of proportion with respect to all earthly elements, and by looking to the sky once more.”

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

President of La Biennale di Venezia

India returns to the 61^st International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia with the pavilion curated by Dr. Amin Jaffer

Pavilion vision in response to In Minor Keys

India today is in a state of accelerated change, with sustained economic and demographic growth accompanied by a boom in technology. Neighbourhoods are renewed, cities are reshaped, and new ways of living and working succeed those of the past. The physical transformation of space is accompanied by greater physical movement within and outside the country, which sees millions of Indians leaving their places of origin to lead new lives.

In response to the Biennale Arte 2026 theme 'In minor keys', the National Pavilion of India invites visitors to reflect on these conditions of change, and asks how we define home when the places in which we grew up are far away or no longer exist.

Curator’s Vision

“My own relationship to home is shaped by distance. I was born in Rwanda to an Indian merchant family that decisively left the subcontinent in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Like many families of the Indian Ocean world, ours carried India across continents through recollection and practice rather than physical presence.My mother raised me with a description of her father’s family house in Jamnagar.Although she did not know it, she knew its configuration – down to the location of a courtyard swing or Jhoola.So firmly rooted was the house in my identity that I tried to find it when I started to travel in India for my field research on domestic interiors.

This exhibition emerges not just as autobiography, but as an enquiry into how – in a rapidly changing environment - each of us defines home.

Geographies of Distance: remembering home offers no singular image of India or the Indian experience. Instead, it proposes a way of understanding — through material, through ritual, through memory — about what it means to belong. Across the exhibition, distance is not treated as rupture, but as a space in which belonging is continually reconstructed.”

Pavilion Artists

The India Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia brings together five contemporary artists whose practices engage deeply with material traditions that span millennia. Working with clay and soil, thread and embroidery, natural fibres, bamboo, and papier-mâché, these artists draw upon materials that have shaped India’s domestic, architectural, and devotional cultures over centuries. Their works do not simply evoke the idea of home; they enact it through material and labour.