'Venice, You Never Disappoint'; From Dries Van Noten to Dayanita Singh; What Made 61st Venice Biennale Feel Emotionally Charged

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that only the very best days produce — not the kind that empties you, but the kind that fills you so completely there is no room left for anything else. My final day at the Venice Biennale preview was precisely that.

By evening, I was so saturated with beauty and feeling that I could barely speak. Which is, I think, exactly as it should be. 

We began at the Fondazione Dries Van Noten, installed within the magnificent Palazzo Pisani Moretta on the Grand Canal, and I must confess I was not prepared for what awaited inside. The queue outside told its own story — people waiting patiently, willingly, because something inside was worth that patience. And it was.

Titled The Only True Protest Is Beauty and curated by Van Noten together with Geert Bruloot, the exhibition frames beauty as a force of provocation and transformation, with works from fashion, jewellery, design, art, photography, glass, and ceramics moving beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries to reveal the profoundly human dimension of making.

This is not a space you pass through. You inhabit it, slowly, gratefully. The rooms — their historic interiors preserving original furnishings and paintings by Tiepolo and others — frame unexpected encounters between artworks and objects, so that centuries speak to the present without any sense of strain. And then, at the end, I met Dries himself. I shook his hand. I told him what his foundation meant. It was, unabashedly, a fangirl moment, and I am not remotely sorry.

Ca' Riviera came next — a welcome exhale from the intensity of the city. Set within two 16th-century villas along the Riviera del Brenta in Mira, this new cultural space founded by Leonardo Tiezzi and Riccardo Corò offered a gentle brunch, a walkthrough of its inaugural exhibition The Shape of the Self, and a DJ who understood perfectly that art and pleasure are not opposites. It was civilised and warm and exactly the kind of breathing room a four-day sprint through the world's greatest art event demands.

Then, a revelation: Dayanita Singh's ARCHIVIO at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia — the first time in the institution's history that it has opened its doors as an exhibition venue.

Over 350 photographs distributed across 15 wooden structures, tracing Singh's decades-long conversation with Italian archives and spaces. I was fortunate enough to meet the mind behind this extraordinary endeavour, and I left with the peculiar sensation of having understood something new about memory. Photography as cataloguing. The archive not as storage but as a living, breathing organism.

At the Marinaressa Gardens, Paresh Maity's Equilibrium rose from the ground with quiet authority — a geometric brass sculpture grounded in the four cardinal directions and the cosmic corners of ancient Indian spatial philosophy.

Presented by Art Alive Gallery's Sunaina Anand as part of Personal Structures: Confluences, it was India again, showing up where it belongs: on the world stage, unapologetically itself.

Ocean Space at the Church of San Lorenzo was grand in the truest sense — the Repatriates Collective's Tide of Returns transforming the nave into a landscape of sand dunes, textile, sound, and ancestral memory. And finally, San Clemente Island at golden hour, where Vladimir Kartashov's Parallel Lives — monumental wall-mounted works suspended in the island church's chapel, caught between painting and sculpture, the sacred and the contemporary — offered the perfect, quietly devastating close.

Four days. A full life's worth of feeling. Venice, you never disappoint.