Since its first participation in 1954, India’s appearance at the Venice biennial has been at best sporadic. The defining factor of Indian pavilion at the Venice Biennale is its absence. In 2011, after a significant effort, the State Lalit Kala Akademi mounted an Indian pavilion at the Venice biennale. The potential outcome of this event was quickly nullified as the Akademi failed to put up a secon
d showing in the next Biennale. The nation’s experience of the Indian pavilion then is one of ‘critical absence’. The outcry that arose regarding India's absence at the 2013 Venice Biennial underscored the Indian art community's anxiety over not utilizing art's 'soft power' as a mechanism for expanding international influence. India’s participation at a world platform reflects our ambitions, anxieties and insecurities regarding the status of our country, and consequently the status of Indian art and culture. There is also an underlying nationalist ambition of raising India to its perceived 'historical' eminence. From the ground however, the Indian Pavilion and its fraught history represents a curatorial possibility. Since it is missing, how may it be imagined, constructed, negated or even demolished? This exhibition is dedicated to the absent India pavilion at the Venice Biennial. If we had the facility, how would the pavilion appear? Is the pavilion an aggregation of desires or a disaggregation of cultural expectations? Finally can we argue for the reconfiguration of the notion of the pavilion in itself?
