At the upcoming India Art Fair (IAF), to be held in New Delhi from February 5-8, the facade, titled Giant Sampler, becomes a site of convergence—where distant geographies and shared craft traditions are stitched together. Indian Kasuti deer and mango motifs appear alongside Mexican toads and Egyptian Mamluk designs dating from the 13th to the 16th centuries in a monumental intervention by artist Afrah Shafiq. Marking a decade of collaboration between India Art Fair and BMW, the iconic The Future is Born of Art commission brings a mammoth facade of artwork, rising beyond the tents and into the public face of the fair.
From 13th-Century Motifs to AR
Interactivity is one of the focus areas at the 17th edition of IAF, considered the largest art fair in the country. The idea is to engage, participate and shape the experience beyond passive viewing.
Shafiq’s work, for instance, transforms intimate embroidery motifs into an expansive textile surface, foregrounding the labour, memory and ritual embedded in women’s lives. What’s interesting is that it has been conceived as an interactive AR-enabled installation to blend traditional embroidery, textile, and mathematical logic, allowing visitors to digitally engage with motifs.
Another parallel dialogue between tradition and contemporary design unfolds through The Charpai Project by Ayush Kasliwal x Goji, supported by Serendipity Arts. Reimagining the humble charpai as an object of social and cultural memory, the project takes on a new dimension with digital intervention by Goji, an AI artist, who reinterprets the work through stories. The installation navigates through a lattice of stacked charpais, echoing the movement of a Snakes and Ladders board, inviting visitors to climb, recline, and connect in spontaneous ways.
Conversations around materiality, technology and cultural memory, too, find prominence at this year’s edition. Nacho Carbonell, presented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery (London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles), brings a large table and light-based works in texture and natural materials. Artist Grace Lillian Lee, presented by the Australian High Commission, explores identity and cultural memory through material experimentation, while Chinese artist Ai Weiwei comes with his iconic large-scale toy-brick compositions Surfing (After Hokusai) and Water Lilies, in collaboration with Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy.
Many such ambitious projects set the tone for IAF 2026, now in its most expansive edition to date, bringing together a record 135 exhibitors, including 83 galleries, 16 institutional participants and 16 design studios, with 27 new participants joining this year.
Market Maturity
The fair is broadening its audiences while deepening its curatorial ambition, says Jaya Asokan, fair director of India Art Fair, explaining how the expansion is reflecting a steady market growth. “While the global art market declined by 12% in 2024, according to the UBS Global Art Market Report 2025, India’s market has continued to grow steadily from the mid-segment market. We saw that sales for the top 50 living Indian artists reached approximately Rs 310 crore in 2025, as per the Hurun India Art List, signalling a market that is maturing rather than overheating, one that is building resilience through diversity of price points, practices, and collectors.,” she says.
Asokan points to a clear shift in collector behaviour, with buyers largely in their mid-30s and 40s—entrepreneurs, professionals and second-generation business leaders— acquiring works in the Rs 5 lakh- Rs 50 lakh range. “These collectors are increasingly research-driven, conscious of price histories, and drawn to practices rooted in craft, materiality and process,” she adds.
This year, the fair’s engagement with ecology, memory and material reuse is also stated in artworks like Extinction Archive by artist Kulpreet Singh, commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and Recycle of Life by Paresh Maity, presented by Art Alive Gallery. In the Focus section, Shailesh BR presents a solo project titled New Moon, engaging with the cosmos, dreams, and philosophy.
Italian painter Michelangelo Pistoletto, presented by DMINTI, brings mirror-based installation using AI, generating composite portraits that merge individual faces into a collective archive.
Indian artists remain central to the curatorial framework. Recognised for her signature use of the bindi, Bharti Kher, presented by Nature Morte, showcases a large painting, a salon-style display of drawings, and a monumental sculpture. The Sabyasachi Art Foundation brings works by Atish Mukherjee, whose detailed paintings draw from myth, history and allegory. Natasha Preenja (aka Princess Pea) presents a collaborative project combining her sculptural forms with embroidery by the Chanakya School of Craft.
Sustainability is also at the core of the fair. From works using reclaimed brick, cigarette butts and dried leaves to expanded accessibility initiatives— including braille guides, tactile artworks, multilingual talks and Indian Sign Language interpretation with select sessions in Hindi, Punjabi, Odia, and Saura, support live translation—the fair positions art not as an object of exchange, but as a space for dialogue and possibility.
