The 2026 India Art Fair features South Asia’s leading contemporary, modern, experimental, and performance art. It offers landmark commissions and innovative solo displays. Here’s a guide to what to see at the India Art Fair this year.
India Art Fair 2026 marks one of the largest editions of South Asia’s leading contemporary art event, bringing together 135 exhibitors from India and around the world at the NSIC Exhibition Grounds in New Delhi. Running from February 5 to 8, the fair features a wide range of creative practices — from modern masters and cutting-edge contemporary work to performance, film, craft, design, and outdoor installations. Along with its gallery sections, the fair offers a lively program of talks, workshops, performances, and citywide collaborations that reflect South Asia’s evolving cultural landscape.
As a major gathering for artists, collectors, curators, and institutions, the 2026 edition emphasizes India’s growing role in the global art scene while showcasing the depth and diversity of South Asian art today. The 2026 India Art Fair brings together some of South Asia’s most exciting voices across contemporary, modern, experimental, and performance art. From landmark institutional commissions to innovative solo presentations, here's what to look for at the India Art Fair this year:
Mehak Garg transforms domestic interiors into luminous psychological spaces. Her small-format paintings continue her exploration of light as an emotive architecture: soft, radiant, and disorienting. Rooted in everyday observation yet drifting toward the ethereal, her works invite viewers into intimate zones of stillness and interiority. Look out for the painterly glow, the attention to thresholds, and her ability to turn the familiar into something almost devotional as part of Gallery Dotwalk’s presentation at Booth K06.
Part of Wribhu Borphukon’s brilliant light-inspired curation '(Mal)functions of Light' for the Young Collectors’ Programme, The Back Studio brings a technologically attuned, conceptually meticulous approach to perception. The works on view break light into functional parts that flow through their structures and bodies, bounce off surfaces and skin, and reshape how space is perceived and used. The works follow strict engineering principles, making them deeply emotional, while also creating moments of leaks and slippages, hallucinations, and speculation. Within these carefully balanced systems, intentionally exposed infrastructures also appear, creating a choreography between what is seen and what is missed. Working at the edge of sound, light, and engineered environments, their industrial light installations examine how attention itself is structured. Learn more here.
“The work (Gul Posh) mediates between these two extremes, how we perceive women in a domestic setting vs how they perceive themselves when one is not limiting them to one. I feel if we look at women as individuals, and not as assigned roles in a familial setting, it eliminates the burden, and gives space for new dreams and for one to be themselves.”Aakriti Chandervanshi
Using windows adorned with flowers as a metaphor for women’s inner lives, multidisciplinary visual artist Aakriti Chandervanshi’s project ‘Gul-posh’ explores rosy depictions of women looking outward as an escape from their assigned roles. Curated from the artist’s family archives of images made in and around homes — a space for women to dream and be themselves — these photographs capture women as they both express and camouflage themselves from their confined roles. Look for ‘Gul-posh’ in Apre Art House’s presentation at Booth K07.
Shailesh B.R.’s sculptures, drawings, and machine-assembled devices grow out of a sustained engagement with the everyday objects, ritual, and logics through which people make sense of the world. The new BMW Artist Film, ‘The Logics of Wonder’, offers a measured look into his practice, observing the ways he constructs mechanisms that probe questions of belief, decision-making, and the often-unseen systems that shape daily life. Rather than presenting invention as spectacle, the film traces Shailesh’s careful processes and dry, understated humour, situating his work within a broader inquiry into how mechanical, social, or symbolic structures influence how we think and act. Learn more here.
Bangladeshi multi-disciplinary artist Ashfika Rahman’s ‘Of Land, River, and Body (Mati, Nodi, Deho)’ marks the 2024 Future Generation Art Prize winner’s first solo exhibition in India and a powerful reflection on power, memory, and survival in South Asia. Featuring three interconnected ongoing bodies of work — ‘Than Para: No Land Without Us’, ‘Files of the Disappeared’, and ‘Behula These Days’ — the exhibition creates an immersive archive of lives shaped by dispossession, erasure, and fear. “Influenced by my mother’s work as a social worker, this exhibition revisits marginalized communities and the systemic suppression they face, re-archiving voices long unseen and unheard,” Rahman explains. Learn more here.
Paresh Maity’s large-scale outdoor installation ‘Recycle of Life’ juxtaposes charred wood and recycled metal pipes to bring natural decay and environmental degradation into conversation with renewal and human invention. Drawing from his childhood memories of observing small-town street hawkers in India who barter metal for a living, Maity’s work is inspired by similar stories of renewal. It suggests a new ecosystem based on harmony and peaceful coexistence where recycling becomes a metaphor for the life cycle.
At Focus Booth A13, curated by Girish Shahane, Gallerie Splash presents a rare, career-spanning exhibition of Naina Dalal, one of India’s most under-recognised modernists and first female printmakers whose practice spans over six decades across painting and printmaking. The presentation includes drawings, screen prints, linocuts, collagraphs, and works on paper — many shown publicly for the first time.
The selection features early pieces from Dalal’s student years, works created during her formative period in London, and later compositions that refine her lyrical visual language. Together, they trace significant shifts in technique, touch, and iconography, offering a rare opportunity to understand the evolution of an artist whose contribution to Indian modernism has long deserved greater visibility. Learn more here.
Set within an open-air kitchen designed to host but never serve food, this performance series supported by Soho House invites artists to offer forms of nourishment beyond the edible. Curated by HH Art Spaces and led by Yuko Kaseki (Japan/Berlin), Uriel Barthélémi (Paris), and Suman Sridhar & The Black Mamba (Mumbai), the performance unfolds as a conceptual cook-off: part ritual, part potluck. Kaseki’s Butoh-rooted practice meditates on presence and outsiderhood; Barthélémi probes the political and psychological charge of sound; and Sridhar blends experimental music with cinematic influences to explore healing. Together, their performances evoke feeding as metaphor and communion — an offering for the grieving, the ecstatic, and the love-stricken alike. Learn more here.
India Art Fair 2026 (17th edition) runs from 5 to 8 February 2026 at the NSIC Exhibition Grounds, New Delhi, India. Explore the full programme of IAF 2026 here.
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