India at Homo Faber 2026: 29 Makers Take Venice

Homo Faber is specific about what it is not. The biennial, organised by the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, is not a trade fair and not a cultural exchange programme in the diplomatic sense. It is an exhibition of exceptional craftsmanship—process as much as object, hand as much as material. This year's fourth edition, themed An Island of Light and led by artistic director Es Devlin, runs from 1 to 30 September 2026. Twenty-nine Indian makers are participating, supported by JSW Foundation, which collaborated with the Michelangelo Foundation to bring them.

What India Is Showing

The range is considerable. Vikram Goyal presents selections from his Bagh collection—branching, vine-like brass forms inspired by the geometry of India's historic gardens, in collaboration with Nilufar Gallery—placing freeform casting and sheet metal work in conversation with craft traditions from across the world. Klove Studio's Prateek Jain and Gautam Seth bring Enchanted Forest Lamp, built by 50 glassblowers from Ambala—a town historically associated with laboratory glassware, not art glass—each element hand-assembled around metal armatures. The Chanakya School of Craft, which has trained over 1,400 women since its founding in 2016, presents Origin 1, an embroidered piece working across more than 300 Indian traditions. Sumakshi Singh and Mohan Kumar Verma—a thread and textile installation artist and a fourth-generation Sanjhi paper-cutting practitioner from the Braj region—collaborate on two works in banana fibre paper. Kinkar Ghosh and Inderjeet Sandhu present Tidal Fragments, a mother-of-pearl vessel that won the ADxJSW Prize for Contemporary Craftsmanship in 2025.

The Live Demonstrations

Two of the 29 participants will be working in front of visitors rather than simply exhibiting finished objects. Mohammed Abdul Bari, a fourth-generation Bidri artisan from Bidar, Karnataka, demonstrates the 500-year-old technique of silver inlay into oxidised metal from 2 to 5 September at An Atelier Alive. Kanday Anjanappa, a seventh-generation Tholu Bommalata leather shadow puppet artist from Andhra Pradesh, performs and demonstrates from 18 to 21 September at the same exhibition. Both carry GI-tagged craft traditions; both are practicing them in a form that a Venice audience will not have seen before.

The Breadth of the Showing

The remaining participants span Jaipur blue pottery, Mysuru wood inlay, Lucknow pashmina, Nagaland loin-loom weaving, Kashmiri papier-mâché, pinch pottery from West Bengal, cane furniture from the northeast, and paper sculptures of individual bird species built from 20-plus layers of archival paper. Between them, they represent a cross-section of what Indian craft looks like when it is held to the same standard as anything else in the room.

Homo Faber 2026: An Island of Light runs from 1 to 30 September 2026 at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice.