Contemporary Art Exhibitions Part of India Art Fair 2025
The 16th edition of the India Art Fair, bringing some of the country’s most significant galleries and institutions to New Delhi, has a compelling Parallel Program. These exhibitions complement the fair’s diverse offerings, introducing a vibrancy of contemporary artistic expression.
The Young Collectors’ Programme (YCP), a mentorship programme for emerging art collectors, also enters its fourth edition in 2025. YCP continues to open doors for new audiences to engage with the art world through exhibitions at various venues like STIR Gallery.
Adding to the official schedule of the India Art Fair, there are also several independent contemporary art exhibitions across Delhi, adding to the overall experience of the fair. While not directly tied, these exhibitions offer visitors immeasurable experiences that deepen an already rich interaction with ancient and contemporary artistic storytelling.
In addition to exhibitions, the IAF Parallel events provide visitors with a deeper understanding of India’s evolving art scene through talks, seminars and interactive sessions. A citywide array of events and demonstrations (which find visitors painting, collage-making and more) transforms the fair from an overpriced art bazaar into an authentic celebration of creativity and conversation. These are undoubtedly art spaces you can interact with
Here are some exhibitions to watch out for:
1. Lie Machine – Men and the Moon Are Not Concerned (Moonis Ijlal – Solo Show)
Dates: 30th Jan – 10th Feb 2025
Moonis Ijlal’s first solo, Lie Machine, explores the duality of digital technology, as a representational tool and a surveillance tool. Showcasing, digital art in India, his paintings are framed to resemble smartphone displays, and they explore how personal electronics shape our understanding of reality, confounding our perception of reality as propaganda, truth, or commodified conflict. By drawing on the theories of intellectuals like Judith Butler and Hannah Arendt, the exhibition critiques the normalisation of state control, political instability, and digital warfare in a post-truth world, exposing how technology transforms oppression and conflict into consumable content.
2. Shilpa Gupta: Beyond Borders (Vadehra Art Gallery)
Dates: 2 – 10 February 2025
Where: CCA, Bikaner House
A show of sculptures by Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta, organized by Vadehra Art Gallery The show includes around 20 works by Gupta that explore borders — both conceptual and physical — and the ways they’re resisted. Internationally, Gupta’s work came to prominence with shows at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and the Barbican Centre in London in 2021 and investigates topics including the struggle for individual liberties and the hegemonic structures controlling our planet. Her art for environmental awareness includes several works on view in India for the first time.
3. Re: Staging 1990S(Delhi) | Alkazi Theatre Archives and The Alkazi Collection of Photography
Dates: February 1 – 10, February 2025
Where: Triveni Amphitheatre, Triveni Kala Sangam
But to know the 90s in India you would have to visit Re: Staging 1990s (Delhi). Rooted in the Alkazi Theatre Archives and the Alkazi Collection of Photography, the exhibition looks at how theatre operated as a cultural space in reaction to the liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation of India after 1991. It reconstructs the dramaturgical elements—persona, gesture, image and scene—of Delhi’s theatre landscape through archival materials, the works of the practitioners who influenced it and the key moments of the time. This fusion of traditional and modern art exhibition frames theatre as a conceptual construct that interrogates the structures of how yesteryear’s presentations bear influence in today’s reality via repetition, ellipsis and recontextualization. The exhibit suggests that the model is not simply an instrument to be set aside once its primary function has been fulfilled and that we can better understand the present by investigating its past.
4. Of Worlds Within Worlds: Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, A Retrospective
Dates: 5 February – 30 June 2025
Where: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), Saket
Opening with India Art Fair 2025 is the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) with Of Worlds Within Worlds: Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, A Retrospective from February 5 – June 30, 2025, curated by Roobina Karode. Of more than 100 works culled from KNMA and private collections, it also provides the most extensive view of the modernist’s 65-year career. Sheikh’s paintings which are of humungous importance in the modern Indian art movement merge reality, imagination, history and mythology, registering India’s metamorphoses through painting, drawing, poetry and printmaking. Drawing on rich archival material, the exhibition charts the arc of his interdisciplinary practice.
5. Being Alive – Group Show
Dates: 4 December 2024 – 29 January 2025
Venue: IRAM Art Gallery, Ahmedabad
The concept of Being Alive, curated by Satyajit Dave, investigates circled intertwining vignettes of art, anthropology, culture and ecology. Calling upon our most venerable anthropological insights as well as more recent “turns” in textual, material, and performative theory, the eco-friendly art exhibits re-envision art as an active, living, breathing organism instead of as inert objects to be looked at, thought about and speculated on. By way of many forms of art, it challenges the audience to think about how identity and environment inform how we see the world.
6. The Bird that Sings Within by Ajit Kumar Das by Emani Art
Dates: 10 Jan – 28 Feb 2025
Where: Kolkata Cultural Centre, Kolkata
The Bird that Sings Within – Nationally established natural dye artist Ajit Kumar Das’ exciting exhibition of fabric paintings from his latest works, created using natural dyes, most of which are on display for the first time. Das’ deep affiliation with nature is evident in the floral, plant and bird-oriented works in his nature-inspired installations and artworks. Das, who has been working for over fifty years in textile crafts, including a long association with the Weavers’ Service Centres in Ahmedabad, Guwahati, and Kolkata, has worked with natural dye as a medium and has pushed its limits with innovative techniques developed during his long career in the field.
7. Migrants in the Museum: Probir Gupta at Anant Art Gallery, Delhi
Dates: 1st to 11th February 2025
Venue: Travancore House
Probir Gupta: Migrants in the Museum, with works by the Indian artist and activist. The exhibition mixes Gupta’s social art, a sweating, grimy mix of a thing all its own, with painted, cut-out, or photographic things. Dealing with some of the most pressing issues of our time, including the risks of unbridled capitalism, communal marginalisation and societal injustice, the artist draws from a myriad of source material ranging from history, modern politics and mythology to touch on issues that matter today. In particular, Migrants at the Museum is social commentary through art, which seeks to challenge our preconceptions by confronting us with Gupta’s vision of dislocation, as laid bare by the artist’s messy layered work.
8. Curated by Peter Nagy, Jaipur Centre for Art A New Way of Seeing
Date: 23 November 2024 – 16 March 2025
When: 6.30 pm
Where: Jaipur Centre for Art, Jaipur
A New Way of Seeing is the first show at the Jaipur Centre for Art, showcasing works by eight notable artists including Anish Kapoor, Dayanita Singh, Tanya Goel and Hiroshi Sugimoto. This examines perception and materiality with paintings, sculptures and photography that ask how artists manipulate, distort and subvert visual experience. Through abstract art techniques, reflection and material transformation, the works demand viewers to reevaluate how they see and engage with art but also make perception itself a subject of investigation.
The Young Collectors’ Programme at IAF 2025
The Young Collectors’ Programme, which took place at various locations across Delhi over the past few years, is another arm of the India Art Fair 2025. This year, the YCP (Young Curators Program) at Method Gallery, New Delhi, is presenting Fresh Produce 2025, any time from January 31 to February 9, 2025. The exhibition, curated by Anica Mann, showcases works by more than 30 emerging artists, including Karan Khosla, Avinda Tishan and Ravi Morya. The exhibition creates a varied practice of art, which situates the Method as an active container for daring experiments and contemporary art. Another contemporary art exhibition in India under the YCP umbrella is the ‘Indigenous Fashion Futures: A Living Archive’, curated by Sreyansi Singh in partnership with the Fashion Design Council of India. Indigenous fashion as resistance, telling stories through the body’s clothing while preserving memories and forgotten histories and myths of the land. It presents modern Indigenous garb as a living synthesis of legacy, resilience, and novelty that is the making of new modes of revivalism and communal social work. With designers including Boito, East, 2112 Saldon and Johargram, this dynamic display underscores the continual, vital aspect of cultural archives.
It is these kinds of progressive, thought-provoking exhibitions that the YCP parallel programme is important for, introducing the work of young, emerging artists and creators at India’s dynamic contemporary art and design fair.
As the art fair approaches, Delhi swells with current and upcoming exhibitions that are bound to thrill art lovers. With all that going on in early February, the city is set to be an exciting destination for anyone keen to experience the spectrum of India’s contemporary art scene. The IAF Parallel events play a similar role to the India Art Fair itself in nurturing the development of contemporary art in India, bringing Indian art to the global stage, and facilitating a more sustainable and dynamic art community.
References
- New fair in Hyd and Delhi’s largest art fair, India Art Fair’s plans for 2025.
- https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/leisure/story/20250210-india-art-fair-artistic-epicentre-2672901-2025-01-31
- https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/02/04/shows-to-see-around-delhi-during-india-art-fair-week
- India Art Fair 2025 Is Bringing a Fresh Lens to the Subcontinental Artscape.
- https://www.instagram.com/indiaartfair/
- Indulge in a Confluence of Art & Culture: A Homegrown Guide to India Art Fair 2025https://homegrown.co.in/homegrown-explore/experience-a-confluence-of-art-culture-a-homegrown-guide-to-india-art-fair-2025
- https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/india-art-fair-2025-ai-weiwei-and-anish-kapoor-among-120-exhibitors-this-year-9811383/
Image Courtesy – Le Mill
Contributor
