A preview of India Art Fair 2026: Personal histories meet material memory

Layered narratives come to the forefront at the NSIC Grounds, Okhla, New Delhi. Resurgence and renewal form the basis of Paresh Maity’s large-scale Recycle of Life, an outdoor project, made from burnt wood and recycled metal pipes. Comprising 27 sculptural forms, the artist focuses on recycling both as a process and philosophical inquiry. In another part of the space, Kulpreet Singh foregrounds violence on the land and its biodiversity in his outdoor installation, Extinction Archive. The Patiala-based artist has, over a period of time, looked at animal, fungal and plant species across the world, which are extinct or are on the brink.

At the 17th edition of the India Art Fair (5-8 February), visitors can experience the depth of artistic practices from the Global south and beyond— in terms of themes, treatments and materiality. Take, for instance, Wandering Wisdom, a solo presentation by Afghan-Australian artist Khadim Ali, by Latitude 28. The work stands out for its interpretation of miniature painting traditions and Persian, Indian, and Afghan visual histories. But look closer, and enter Ali’s lived experience of exile and cultural survival.

This interplay of personal history and material memory is coming through in several works on display at the fair this year. There is also a blurring of lines between different disciplines. In Impermeable, showcased as part of the Focus section by Art Alive, Jayasri Burman expands a verse from her poetry collection, Tumi, Maa (You, Mother) into an immersive installation. In another part of the fair, textile narratives, particularly centred around the East African Kanga fabric, become a site of inquiry into culture and gender in Thandiwe Muriu’s A Gathering Welcome. This work by the Kenyan artist is so striking that it beckons you from afar. Using the photonarrative technique of inserting the female figure within a textile, she brings together “historical references and contemporary aesthetics”, while also questioning the social expectations surrounding women.

This year marks the debut of the Sabyasachi Art Foundation at the fair. Founded in 2014 in response to the financial fragility facing artisans, the foundation is presenting a solo of Atish Mukherjee, its longest-mentored artist. “His practice articulates a renewed contemporary expression of the Bengal School of Art,” states the foundation’s note.

These works offer a glimpse of the annual event’s engagement with art, design and culture while responding to pertinent issues of the times. This year, the fair has expanded its programming even further this year with 135 exhibitors, including 27 new exhibitors, to make space for diverse artistic inquiries. In an interview with Lounge, fair director Jaya Asokan, elaborates on the role of the fair as a bridge during these tumultuous times, greater emphasis on design-led conversations, and taking the year-long outreach programme to different regional hubs. Edited excerpts:

Is the growth in the number of exhibitors also being reflected in depth of programming?

As the fair grows, it becomes equally important for us to deepen the conversations, and to create multiple points of engagement for different audiences. This time around, this process extended well beyond the fair dates. With the launch of IAF EDI+IONS, with the 2025 edition held in Hyderabad, our year-round programme expanded significantly, allowing us to remain engaged with artistic communities across the country.

At the fair, this is being complemented by the introduction of our inaugural OPEN Design Talks, curated by Border & Fall, which respond to increasingly blurred boundaries between art, design, craft, architecture, and technology. Our programming has also grown substantially. We have seen a threefold increase in the number of events we are co-hosting across the city, alongside expanded programming within the fair itself—including a more robust schedule of talks, performances, and design-led conversations. Together, these initiatives create space for exchange, collaboration, and cross-cultural networks to form organically.

What are the themes that the talks programme touches upon?

As is the case every year, this year too the programme brings together voices from across South Asia and beyond—artists, institutional leaders, curators, writers, designers, and patrons, to consider how regional art ecologies are evolving, and how they remain deeply interconnected. A key focus area is the role of institutions in shaping solidarities and supporting emerging practices.

These discussions sit alongside presentations by artists and collectives working within inherited traditions, craft-based practices, and contemporary forms, reflecting the layered realities of artistic production in the region. At the same time, the programme engages with questions of creativity in the age of AI and technological change. Rather than positioning technology in opposition to tradition, these conversations explore how artists and designers are working across hand and machine, material knowledge and digital tools, and how these intersections are reshaping processes, authorship, and modes of making today.

Performance art has always been a highlight of the fair programming. What are the forms and themes that one is seeing this year?

This year it reflects a field that has grown more expansive, collaborative, and socially-embedded. The vocabularies we are seeing today draw on action, sound, movement, ritual, and participation, with performance operating as a space of proximity—where shared presence becomes central to meaning-making. Curated by HH Art Spaces and led by Yuko Kaseki, Uriel Barthélémi, and Suman Sridhar / Black Mamba, the programme brings together distinct yet intersecting practices. Kaseki’s Butoh-based work inhabits the space between physical and spiritual presence, embodying the figure of the outsider through poetic gesture. Barthélémi’s polymorphic practice explores improvisation, the act of listening, and sound as a political and psychological force, while Sridhar moves fluidly between experimental music and popular cinema, fusing jazz, Indian classical, opera, and spoken word to explore transformation through sound. Together, these performances frame the act of feeding—ideas, bodies, and forms—as a powerful gesture of connection and communication.

Are there new entrants to the design section?

The design section is returning this year with 14 studios and two galleries from India for the first time ever. These include Galerie Maria Wettengren, Kunal Maniar, Kohelika Kohli Karkhana, Morii Designs, and SHED. The section also features a special institutional collaboration between French designer Marie Gastini, the French Institute’s residency programme and the Mumbai-based design gallery Æquō, to explore a cross-cultural dialogue between traditional Indian textile techniques and contemporary sceneography.

What is the kind of materiality that designers are focusing on?

In the World Map, Ashiesh Shah’s studio explores an ancient Indian metal craft, dhokra (or dokra), employing the use of intricate wax casting to create a piece shaped by the political moment and fragility of belonging. The Chanakya School of Craft, under the direction of Karishma Swali, will focus on hand-embroidered textile practices of women, from weaving to lacemaking, along with stone carvings as a tactile form of expression. Galerie Maria Wettergren from Paris, a first-time participant, is presenting a solo show by Indian designer Dhruv Agarwwal, who received India’s Best Design Award in 2021 for his chandelier, Bloom. Ghiora Aharoni Design Studio (New York) is reimagining brass and gold in a contemporary context. Highlights of this booth include the presentation of an ancient emerald reliquary reimagined with new technology, along with wall sculptures showcasing Hindru©, a script of their own melding Hindu and Urdu.

Nitush-Aroosh from New Delhi looks at stainless steel as a material capable of softness, movement, and atmosphere. Kohelika Kohli Karkhana, also from the Capital, explores contrasting materials and transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. They value minimalism, sustainability, and the repurposing of materials. In focus will be their Plateau Coffee Table series.

Women artists take centre stage in the ‘Focus’ section this year…

This segment brings together mixed-media presentations by both emerging and veteran practitioners, curated by participating galleries and institutions. The 2026 edition features artists such as Bharti Kher, Jayasri Burman, Thandiwe Muriu, Naina Dalal and Marina Abramović. The range allows audiences to trace how subject matter and artistic vocabularies shift across generations while remaining rooted in lived experience. Dalal’s work, shaped by the period of the Indian freedom struggle, carries a historical consciousness, while Muriu’s practice engages with contemporary image-making to foreground marginalised identities in the present. Seen together, these practices reveal how women artists continue to respond to their contexts with distinct, evolving languages—shaped by history, place, and personal perspective.

Speculative fiction, meeting of tradition and technology has been a focus area at the fair for some time now. How do some of the outdoor projects and works by artists-in-residence tackle these?

Afrah Shafiq’s A Giant Sampler, commissioned by BMW and realised on the fair’s facade, approaches digital technology as an extension of craft. Drawing on embroidery motifs from across cultures, the work becomes interactive—inviting viewers to scan the surface to unlock layered histories rooted in oral storytelling, labour, and memory. A similar speculative sensibility shapes Shreni Sanghvi’s Stand Here, Forget, which imagines Mumbai as a ‘remembering body’. By translating foraged urban textures and unseen mycelial networks into an audio-reactive digital ecosystem, the work sits between the organic and the technological, the familiar and the alien. It asks what forms of intelligence exist beneath the city’s surfaces, and how futures are shaped by what urban environments choose to remember, or erase.

In FOREST II, Raki Nikahetiya extends this thinking into lived ecology. Using reclaimed construction materials and native vegetation, the installation reimagines “home” as a living, regenerative ecosystem inspired by the Miyawaki method. Its speculative power lies not only in imagining future habitats but in ensuring that the work continues beyond the fair itself through relocation and community-led stewardship. Together, these projects demonstrate how speculation at the fair is grounded in continuity rather than contrast.