Beginning February 5, 2026, the India Art Fair programme unfolds across cities in India and abroad, presenting exhibitions, group shows, and educational initiatives. Spanning New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Paris, and Milan, it highlights emerging and established voices while fostering global cultural dialogue.
The India Art Fair’s cultural programme, kicking off alongside the 17th edition of the main fair from February 5, 2026, reveals a vibrant mosaic of contemporary artistic life that extends far beyond the walls of a conventional gallery. South Asia’s leading platform for modern and contemporary art prepares to unfold an ambitious series of exhibitions, group shows and site-specific projects across cities, reflecting an ever-expanding ecosystem of creative practice that pulses with diversity, experimentation and dialogue.
Across India and abroad, a rich lineage of artistic expression is on display. In New Delhi, the exhibition A Space Between Selves invites audiences into layered explorations of identity through photography and painting by alumni of the Mittal Institute’s Visiting Artist Fellowship, weaving together narrative threads of selfhood and community. In Mumbai, Nature Morte’s presentation of OVERKILL: Asim Waqif challenges architectural conventions with works that interrogate materiality and form, while 47A Design Gallery’s Seen Unseen: Zainab Tambawalla captures the hidden rhythms of urban life in fluid watercolours that seize the everyday with lyrical subtlety.
From Kolkata to Paris, the programme crosses geographic and cultural borders. In Kolkata, ADDA: The Third Space conjures the sensory vocabularies of street culture to imagine new urban imaginaries, and The Line is Time by Radhika Khimji expands spatial perception through mixed media and sculpture. Meanwhile in Paris, Galerie des Gobelins’ Ce qui se trame. Histoires tissées entre l’Inde et la France reflects centuries of cultural entanglement through textiles, revealing how shared histories of craftsmanship and artistic exchange endure across continents.
The fair’s New on New · Edition 2 group show in New Delhi exemplifies India Art Fair’s commitment to fostering emerging voices, bringing together twenty artists whose practices span painting, sculpture, installation and mixed media. By foregrounding voices still developing their visual languages, the programme underscores the dynamism and breadth of contemporary South Asian art.
This programme is not confined to metro galleries. Parallel exhibitions such as India. Of Glimmers and Getaways, hosted at Palaistro 14 in Milan, unfolds India’s artistic narratives on an international stage, situating Indian creativity within global cultural conversations. Curated by the Raqs Media Collective and Ferran Barenblit, the show features an expansive roster of artists whose works traverse mediums from painting and photography to video and performance, evoking both possibility and resilience in the face of complex social realities.
The programme also embraces educational initiatives that catalyse learning and engagement. India Art Fair’s Art Tour Guides Training Programme, now in its second year, offers an immersive training experience for aspiring guides, equipping them to lead diverse audiences through the fair’s labyrinthine offerings and to articulate the histories and contexts that shape them. Alongside this, open calls like microSPILLS invite young artists from India’s Northeast to break from convention and collaboratively imagine new artistic horizons, culminating in pop-up exhibitions that amplify voices often marginalised in mainstream art circuits.
What emerges across this constellation of exhibitions, workshops, tours and international off-site shows is a portrait of an art world that is simultaneously rooted and global, reflective and forward-looking. The India Art Fair programme illustrates an expansive cultural conversation—one that positions artistic practice as vital to understanding our social landscapes, reimagining established narratives, and fostering exchanges that transcend borders and disciplines.
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