I took the train from Milan this morning, which is the only right way to arrive — crossing the lagoon as the city appears like something your eyes have invented, impossible and entirely real.
Venice during the Biennale is already its own species of experience, but as a collector, as someone for whom art is not a pastime but a way of being in the world, it hits differently. You arrive electric!
Glimpses of Tommaso Calabro's See You |
The day moved beautifully. Tommaso Calabro's See You — conceived as their final exhibition — gathers portraits spanning from the 16th century to today, painting as a thread through time.
There is something quietly devastating about looking at centuries of faces and understanding that the need to be truly seen has never changed.
From there to DRIFT — the Amsterdam studio of Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta — which took over a private palazzo directly on the Grand Canal for Shy Society, the experience was poetic, immersive, and from an extraordinary vantage point that only Venice can give you.
Shy Society, an outdoor installation of multiple moving textile elements, is visible by boat |
Charlotte Colbert's Possible Landscapes, curated by Yasmine Helou, spread across the magnificent Palazzo Corner della Ca' Granda and Aman Venice at Palazzo Papadopoli — and lived up to every syllable of its name.
And threading through all of it, all evening, were the Chihuly installations. They are scattered through the city like gifts — glorious, luminous, impossible glass blooms that begin to glow as the light drops and burn through the night. Walking past them at dusk, then again after dark, each time a different feeling.
(left) Deviina Dalmia with artist Sujata Bajaj, (right) the Indian delegation at the opening reception of the National Pavilion of India |
Above it all — literally — Chris Levine's Higher Power. A military-grade laser, repurposed, oscillating at 432Hz, projected from San Clemente Island as a single green line rising from the rooftops into the sky. You cannot look away from it. Reportedly visible even from the International Space Station during testing. Its message: 'Make light, not war'.
In this particular moment in the world, there is nothing more needed, and nothing more Venetian, than a gesture that transforms an instrument of conflict into an act of collective contemplation.
Anjana Padmanabhan serenades the audience with her performance |
The evening reached its crescendo in the courtyard of Palazzo Pisani for the opening reception of the National Pavilion of India at the 61st Biennale — Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home.
It began with an invocation by Anjana Padmanabhan, voices coming together in a moment of collective intention that set the tone perfectly for everything that followed. There was music, there were performances by Indian musicians that filled that extraordinary courtyard and made the stone walls feel warm. And there was a candle lighting ceremony — held by Vivek Aggarwal, Secretary of the Ministry of Culture; Shri Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, the Hon'ble Minister of Culture and Tourism; Ambassador Vani Rao; and Sunil Kant Munjal of Serendipity Arts — a gesture of illumination that felt entirely right for a night about distance, memory, and homecoming.
Dr. Amin Jaffer with Sunil Kant Munjal of Serendipity Arts, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Hon'ble Minister of Culture and Tourism, Ambassador Vani Rao and Vivek Aggarwal, Secretary of the Ministry of Culture |
Dr. Amin Jaffer, who has curated the pavilion with such vision, was brimming with pride. The whole room was. The pavilion brings together five extraordinary artists — Alwar Balasubramaniam, Sumakshi Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Skarma Sonam Tashi, and Asim Waqif — each interrogating what it means to remember a place you carry inside you.
The formal inauguration is today, May 6, at 3:30 pm at the Isolotto, Arsenale, and it will remain open for all to see until the Biennale closes. Please attend it if you are in Venice.
There is something particular about being Indian, living between worlds, and watching your country's pavilion return to this stage with this much intention and this much beauty. The pride in that courtyard was not abstract. It was in the air you breathed. What a day to be in Venice. What a day to love art.
