At the Venice Biennale, Sumakshi Singh will present the soft power that women thread together

Within the quiet gallery space, Sumakshi Singh’s work doesn’t immediately assert itself. At first glance, it appears almost like a draw ing suspended in air—light, porous, and translucent. Architectural fragments of staircases, railings, and edges appear as if in a dream. When you go closer, you start to notice the threads in these diaphanous constructions. 2025-26 has been a defining period in Singh’s practice.

An iteration of her project, Monuments, won her a special mention at last year’s Loewe Foundation Craft Prize—a Madrid-based platform that recognises innovation and artistic vision in modern craft. And now she is set to present her work, Permanent Address, at the Indian Pavilion of Venice Biennale (9 May–22 November), marking the country’s third official participation at the event.

The project is an extension of an earlier work, 33 Link Road, in which the artist recreated her grandparents’ Delhi home. The national pavilion, curated by Amin Jaffer and titled Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home, will bring together artists Alwar Balasubramaniam (Bala), Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Asim Waqif, and Skarma Sonam Tashi. In the last few years, there has been growing conversation around embroidered art. By moving embroidery from surface embellishment to structural form, Singh creates architecture-like installations from a medium as soft and fluid as thread. Using water-soluble fabric as a temporary base, she embroiders on it with cotton, nylon, or metal thread, slowly building up forms that are both dense and delicate. Once the fabric is dissolved, what remains is a self-supporting network of thread; light, almost skeletal, suspended in space, yet holding its own form.

Through this process, her practice attempts to overturn hierarchies of labour and comment on gendered ways of seeing craft. In many parts of India, weaving has historically been associated with men and valued as a technical skill. Embroidery, on the other hand, has long been held as the domain of women and treated as ornamental or secondary. As Singh puts it, this “mirrors the way women’s labour has been seen as supplementary rather than foundational—as something extra.” In her work, that hierarchy is reversed. Once the base dissolves, the embroidery itself becomes the structure that holds the piece together. Subtly, Singh draws attention to the unseen labour of women, often dismissed, but crucial to how homes, families, and cultures are held together.

As an artist trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, and later at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Singh’s early explorations moved across sculpture, painting, and spatial drawing. Her current practice of embroidery connects back to inherited ways of making. “The women in my family would spend many afternoons knitting and embroidering together,” says Singh. For her, embroidering and knitting with her grandmothers, aunts, and mother forms a significant memory. The act of stitching, mending, repeating and holding together, becomes central.

Singh speaks of these as “softer histories”. These are not the dominant narratives that usually get passed down in culture but the ones that move quietly between women while sitting together. While women practitioners may not always work within commercial frame works, the practice carries immense intangible value within the community. Across India, many embroidery traditions have been sustained in this way. These embroideries find place in bridal trousseau, rituals, and moments such as birth and coming of age, thus becoming part of both personal and collective memory.

Such making is rarely done in isolation. Women often gather to stitch, spin, sing, talk, and share stories, turning the act of making into a space of expression and community. In Punjab, you can see this in the trinjan, or gatherings where women came together around the charkha, keep ing folk songs, traditional knowledge, and stories alive. In many ways, these gatherings offered women a quiet form of agency. As Singh suggests, the soft power women held in such spaces has rarely received its due in formal documented histories.

For Singh, home is an important concept not only as a physical space that one inhabits, but something that inhabits us as well. Her practice seems to move between attachment and release. With three of her grandparents finding their origins on the other side of the border, Singh grew up with stories of lost homelands, and broken communities. These stories of homes that once existed, continue to shape her thinking and making. Speaking of her grand parents, she imagines their experience through the letters they wrote to each other. “My grandparents got married three months before Partition. While leaving home, they thought things would stabilise and they would come back home. So they buried their gold in their backyard and left most of their belongings,” she says. The permanence of that move was realised only much later.

In reflecting on these stories, Singh returns not only to the fragility of home and belonging, but also to the softer dimensions of community, culture, care, and memory that are carried within homes. It is from this space that 33 Link Road, and its subsequent iteration, emerged. A reimagining of her grandparents’ Delhi home, rendered to-scale entirely in delicate thread, it is not merely a reconstruction of architecture but of memory itself, holding within it histories of migration, family, and loss. Before translating it into thread, she returned to the empty house and spent long hours recording it with almost obsessive care. Because the house had been built over the years and lived in over decades, no two details matched. That accumulated life, with all its imperfections, became part of the work itself.

Singh speaks of the creative process as alchemical. In spending so much time with the house, and in reconstructing it through thread, grief slowly transformed into gratitude. “Going into the studio, holding those... states (of fear or grief or dissonance or rawness) and then watching them get refined and transformed through the process of making into some thing much lighter, it’s a form of healing,” she says. What stays with her, then, is the paradox of human attachment itself. Everything in the world is shaped by transience, and yet there remains a deeply human desire for stability. That tension runs through 33 Link Road. The work does not attempt to restore the house in any literal sense. Instead, it asks what remains once form is gone. In Singh’s work, the answer lies in trace, memory, and emotional residue. Within the curation at the India Pavilion, her work feels especially apt. The exhibition treats home not as a fixed address but as something carried through memory, material, ritual, and longing. What Singh brings to the Biennale is not only a material language rooted in living traditions, but also a way of thinking through home, loss, and remembrance through the quieter histories of women’s making.

Supriya Lahoti is an independent researcher and art historian based in Delhi.