The India Art Fair is part of a larger cultural moment built from long-standing relationships—and a productive friction—between institutions, practitioners, communities and galleries.
When putting together a fair, scale is often emphasised. How many galleries will it have? How many artists will be represented? How many visitors are expected? How many square metres of land will it cover? And finally, how many sales will take place? These metrics matter, of course, but they don’t tell you what it actually means to set up a fair, especially one rooted in a place as layered, contradictory and alive as India. They don’t speak to the quieter negotiations, the moments of doubt or the small acts of care that shape what finally comes into view.
For me, India Art Fair has always been less about spectacle and more about bringing people, practices and histories that don’t naturally sit side by side together. Contemporary art, traditional craft, design, institutional voices, collectors, students, artisans and first-time visitors all occupy the same ground at a fair, however temporarily. That is both its promise and its responsibility.
What is rarely stated out loud is that a fair is also a site of constant listening. Long before walls are built or works are installed, we are listening—to artists articulating new ways of working, to craft communities negotiating visibility, to galleries balancing commercially successful presentations with experimentation, and to institutions wanting to make the most of this public platform. These conversations are not always neat. They demand time, trust and an acceptance that not everything can—or should—be resolved.
In the context of craft-based practices in India, this listening becomes even more critical because these practices carry histories of caste, gender, ecology, colonial disruption and resilience. To bring craft into a fair format—without flattening it into décor or nostalgia—is a challenge we take seriously. Much of what you see at the fair emerges from long-term partnerships and relationships—between artists and artisans, designers and material specialists, institutions and communities. These collaborations are often slow, uneven and deeply human. They involve disagreements, pauses and returns. They remind us that making, whether art or craft, is rarely a solitary act.
A fair also involves making choices—what to foreground, what to step back from and what to say no to. These decisions are not neutral. Over the years, this has meant rethinking how we frame sections, how we support research-driven projects and how we make space for regional practices that don’t necessarily fit dominant market logistics.
Then there is the emotional labour of the fair. Despite months of preparation and the pressure of deadlines, there are moments—dependent on logistics, weather and economics—when the fair feels impossibly fragile. Yet, every year, something remarkable happens. Conversations begin, and there is, what I like to call, the churning.
It happens at multiple levels. Senior institutional leaders—museum directors, curators and patrons—often encounter practices that resist established categories and often, these individuals find themselves reconsidering how value is assigned and how histories are narrated. For young collectors and first-time buyers, this is the moment when an object reveals the depth of labour behind it. For emerging artists and young practitioners, the fair can offer something quieter but equally vital: affirmation. To see their work situated alongside practices they admire, to be in dialogue with senior peers, institutions and audiences they may not otherwise access, can be a powerful recalibration.
There is also a deliberate openness built into the fair, an acknowledgement that meaningful engagement with art and craft does not begin or end with expertise—particularly across the Talks and Performance programme, the Learning and Inclusion initiatives, and hands-on workshops designed to be interactive and accessible to children of different ages and at various stages of learning.
For many visitors, the fair offers proximity to works they may only have encountered through images or reproductions. To stand in front of a work by Olafur Eliasson or an Andy Warhol painting is not simply to recognise a name, but to experience scale, surface and texture—to understand how ideas take physical form. These moments matter. They remind us that art history is not abstract or distant, but something that is affective, tactile, to be questioned, seen and perceived in our own personal contexts and from our vantage points.
Ultimately, putting together a fair is an act of faith—faith that people will look closely, ask better questions and recognise the intelligence embedded in material and making. Each February, as the city begins to respond—through parallel exhibitions, studio visits, conversations and chance meetings across Delhi—it becomes clear that the fair does not exist in isolation. It is part of a larger cultural moment, one in which the city itself comes alive as a space for exchange, reflection and renewed attention.
