The Free Press Journal reports: Outside, Venice was flooding. Inside the Arsenale, India arrived. There was torrential rain during the inauguration — the kind Venice produces without warning, that turns the city dark and wild.
Inside the Arsenale, the energy was electric. Every Indian and indophile in Venice had come, and they had come dressed for a celebration. Amin Jaffer opened the pavilion alongside the President of the Biennale, and the room had the quality of a moment that people will remember as having been present for.
Background
The Ambanis arrived and were given a walkthrough through each work in turn, the golden canopy of Ranjani Shettar's suspended installation above the entire gathering like a second ceiling, breathing with the movement below. A post shared by India in Venice (@indiainvenice) The works are extraordinary. Ranjani Shettar has filled the Arsenale's great nave with suspended botanical forms — enormous translucent structures in white and amber gold, pods and leaves and flowers and spiraling tendrils, all floating, all lit from within by the material itself, tissue-thin and luminous.
Key facts
- There was torrential rain during the inauguration — the kind Venice produces without warning, that turns the city dark and wild.
- Inside the Arsenale, the energy was electric.
- Every Indian and indophile in Venice had come, and they had come dressed for a celebration.
What this means
The scale is unlike anything else in the Biennale — standing beneath it, you are inside a garden that has been lifted into the air and made permanent. Asim Waqif's bamboo installation is its complement and counterpoint: a dense, vertiginous tangle of bamboo poles, rattan, cane, and woven baskets, structural and chaotic, a material record of making and accumulation that demands you look closely at how things are held together. A post shared by India in Venice (@indiainvenice) Sumakshi Singh's ghostly white thread and lace architectural forms — fragile, precise, spectral — create spaces within spaces, architectures of absence.
Skarma Sonam Tashi's compressed-earth city: stacked vernacular buildings in the muted pinks and greys of Himalayan adobe, hundreds of them, dense as a lived settlement, the accumulated weight of place made tangible on the Arsenale floor. Every person I have spoken to since has said the same thing without being prompted: it is the finest pavilion at this Biennale. It is the finest pavilion at this Biennale.
Originally reported by The Free Press Journal. This story has been edited and re-presented by BRIC Team.
