India Art Fair returns to Delhi for its monumental 15th edition

As the winter chill begins to subside in New Delhi, the India Art Fair (IAF) will be returning to its usual destination at NSIC Exhibition Grounds, Okhla from February 1st – 4th. The fair is once again poised to present a blend of contemporary and vernacular practices with a South Asia-first approach, to a local and global audience that remains ever-eager for a taste of the region’s art scene. IAF has been led in partnership with BMW India for the past 8 years, and its 2024 edition is also its 15th outing, which has shaped its most ambitious presentation to date: there will be over 100 exhibitors present at the venue; the largest roster mustered thus far by the IAF team, and the fair’s largest number of international participants as of yet. Additionally, IAF 2024 will feature the fair’s inaugural Design section, offering collectors a wide range of furniture, jewellery and fabrics. Fair Director Jaya Asokan joins STIR to discuss IAF 2024.

A Look Back: 15 Years of India Art Fair

Compared to its current avatar, the India Art Fair’s beginnings were penny-plain. For its first edition in 2008, IAF was titled the India Art Summit and attracted a modest 6000 visitors across its 34 exhibiting galleries, displaying Indian art. The fair is owned by Angus Montgomery Arts, a division of Angus Montgomery Ltd. and was set up with Sunil Gautam as Founder and Managing Director. Gautam would divest his entire stake in IAF to three partners by its third edition in 2011. These parties included Neha Kripal, Associate Summit Director, India Art Summit, Sandy Angus, Chairman, Montgomery Worldwide and Will Ramsay, Founder, PULSE Art Fairs and Affordable Art Fairs. Kripal would also take over as Director of the fair.

The art fair’s third edition saw a massive spike in audience numbers, with 128,000 visitors that year. However, it was IAF’s fourth outing in 2012 that brought major international interest, with 26 museum groups sending representatives over to New Delhi. These included Tate, Guggenheim, MOMA, and the Singapore Art Museum, among others.

As IAF grew, it attracted a growing list of partners. In 2016, the fair’s eighth edition introduced BMW India as a Presenting Partner. The fair was also restructured with five sections – Galleries, which includes South Asian and international galleries showing art exhibitions, Focus, which presents curated bodies of work by individual practices, Institutions, in which domestic and international arts institutions give audiences a glimpse of their programmes, Platform, which caters to emerging artists and collectives across South Asia, and Projects (currently called Outdoor Art Projects), where the fair places large, site-specific interactive installation and immersive installation works. Since then, the fair has expanded to include a Studio section, catering to tech-art, as well as the new Design section.

In 2017, Jagdip Jagpal, founder of Silvia’s Mother, a gallery, in London succeeded Neha Kripal as Director, and in 2021, the current Director Jaya Asokan took over for the fair’s thirteenth edition, which was postponed to 2022 due to the COVID pandemic. Despite such a major setback, IAF lost no momentum, instead gaining a year-round online presence through digital programmes and artist coverage. This was also the year the fair introduced its Young Collectors’ Programme to empower art collectors who are just beginning their journeys.

India Art Fair 2024: Perusing the Festival’s Programme

India Art Fair 2024 will feature some of India’s foremost contemporary art galleries, such as Experimenter, Nature Morte, Chemould Prescott Road and Vadhera Art Gallery among others. The art festival’s international gallery participation includes 1x1 Art Gallery, Dubai, Indigo+Madder, London, Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. The fair’s artist lineup is no less exciting: names such as Manu Parekh, Ayesha Sultana, Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapoor pop out, along with performance practitioners Jyothidas K V and Sajan Mani, who will activate IAF’s performance art programme ‘BODi-Verse’, which invites audiences to reassess how they interact with their environment.

2024 marks eight years of partnership between IAF and BMW India, and sees an expansion in scale and scope for the ‘Future is Born of Art’ Commission, which was launched to present Indian artists to the wider art world. The 2024 Commission’s winning artist Sashikanth Thavudoz will create an immersive art installation titled Symphony of Nature: The Harmonic Forest at the exhibition grounds, which will be themed around the concept of ‘Forwardism’, and shall feature the BMW i7 electric vehicle at its centre.

Beyond Thavudoz’s intervention, the 2024 edition of IAF will also feature several largescale installation works in its Outdoor Art Section, by artists such as Sajid Wajid Shaikh, John Gerrard and Gigi Scaria. There is also the aforementioned Young Collectors’Programme, now in its third year, as well as an extended, month-long Parallel Programme across Delhi’s art galleries such as the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) and LATITUDE 28, among others. IAF 2024 will also \ feature a series of workshops, guided art and design tours, and its highly-regarded panel discussions featuring leading voices in the art world, such as Sonal Singh, Managing Director, Christie’s India and Pooja Sood, Director, KHOJ International Artists’ Association.

Asokan places celebration at the very core of IAF 2024, and tells STIR that this year’s edition is all about “coming together as a community of artists, creatives and cultural changemakers who have shaped the identity of contemporary South Asian culture.” As we move towards the 15th edition’s opening, Delhi is buzzing with an expected influx of new and returning art lovers, each of whom can look forward to leaving with fond memories of the city’s largest art event.