Fairs and events

The Faculty of Fine Arts at Baroda was founded in 1949 or 1950, depending on the source, and was the first institution in India to offer a degree in the fine arts. N S Bendre, Sankho Chaudhuri and later K G Subramanyan taught there.

At the end of each year, graduating students show their work across the faculty’s studios, classrooms and corridors as their degree show. It is a school show, not a curated one, and that is its value: everything is there, finished or not. The faculty’s Fine Arts Fair, started at Subramanyan’s urging, dates to 1961.

In 2020 and 2021 the physical show was cancelled and moved online. Dates are set by the university; check with the faculty before travelling.

For fifteen years India had one major art fair, and it was in Delhi. Art Mumbai changed that in November 2023, with about 50 exhibitors, most of them Indian, at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse in the middle of the city. It is run by Minal and Dinesh Vazirani with the dealers Conor Macklin and Nakul Dev Chawla, who called the first edition a test run.

It has come back each November since. The third edition, from 13 to 16 November 2025, had more than 80 exhibitors, foreign galleries among them.

Bengal has two art capitals, a university town and a city, and the biennale uses both. The first edition ran in Santiniketan from 29 November to 22 December 2024 and in Kolkata from 6 December to 5 January 2025, across 27 venues and more than 100 artists.

Malavika and Jeet Banerjee of the Gameplan Foundation organised it, with Siddharth Sivakumar as curatorial director, under the theme Anka Banka (Through Cross-Currents). It favoured large solo shows: R Siva Kumar’s retrospective of Rabindranath Tagore, with 85 works, and Gayatri Sinha’s Kali: Reverence and Rebellion for DAG at the Alipore Museum.

The second edition runs from 25 November 2026 to 2 January 2027, in about twenty venues.

The photographer Varun Gupta and the then new director of the Goethe-Institut in Chennai began talking about it in 2015. The first edition ran from 26 February to 13 March 2016, in train stations, parks and galleries, and drew more than 100,000 visitors. Gupta is now managing trustee of the CPB Foundation, which runs it.

The editions since have not kept strict time. The second ran from February to 24 March 2019, with more than 50 photographers from 13 countries. The third, Maps of Disquiet, ran into February 2022, partly online. The fourth, Why Photograph?, took its question from the photographer Dayanita Singh and ran from 20 December 2024 to 16 March 2025.

Delhi Contemporary Art Week is run by galleries, not by a fair company. A handful of the city’s galleries take over Bikaner House, the former Delhi residence of the Maharaja of Bikaner near India Gate, and fill its rooms with their own shows for about a week.

The group has changed over the years. The fifth edition, in April 2021, was organised by seven galleries. The ninth brought together six, all led by women: Blueprint12, Exhibit 320, Gallery Espace, Latitude 28, Shrine Empire and Vadehra Art Gallery, with two curated exhibitions alongside the gallery rooms.

Timing moves. The 2021 edition ran from 8 to 15 April; the ninth ran from 31 August to 5 September 2026. Check before you go.

It started in 2008 as the India Art Summit, founded by Sunil Gautam, at Pragati Maidan, with 34 galleries. In early 2011 he sold it to Neha Kirpal, who had been associate director of the summit, and the organisers Sandy Angus and Will Ramsay; they renamed it India Art Fair for the 2012 edition. The Swiss MCH Group, owner of Art Basel, took a majority stake in 2016 and sold it in 2019 to Angus Montgomery Arts.

After three editions at Pragati Maidan it moved to the NSIC Exhibition Grounds in Okhla, where it has stayed. The 17th edition ran from 5 to 8 February 2026, and the fair lists 4 to 7 February 2027 for the next.

Tickets for the 2026 edition were sold online only, with none at the gate.

The galleries, patrons and institutions around Kala Ghoda formed an association on 30 October 1998 to look after the precinct’s heritage, and the first festival followed in 1999. Money raised by the festival goes into the association’s restoration work in the area.

It now runs for nine days, with twelve sections each curated by its own team: visual arts, dance, music, theatre, cinema, literature, children’s events, workshops, heritage walks, urban design and architecture, food and a street of handmade crafts. In recent years it has spread to Cross Maidan and Horniman Circle.

Entry to every event is free, paid for by corporate sponsors. The 2026 edition ran from 31 January to 8 February.

In May 2010 Kerala’s culture minister, M A Baby, asked two Mumbai-based artists of Kerala origin, Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, for an international art project. They proposed a biennale and curated the first edition themselves. It opened on 12 December 2012 with 80 artists, and Aspinwall House as one of its main venues.

Each edition since has had an artist as curator: Jitish Kallat in 2014, Sudarshan Shetty in 2016, Anita Dube in 2018, Shubigi Rao in 2022 after pandemic delays, and Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces for For the Time Being, which ran from December 2025 to March 2026. Kader Attia is named for the seventh, planned for 2027.

The sixth edition used 22 venues across Fort Kochi, Mattancherry, Ernakulam and Willingdon Island: old warehouses, halls and heritage buildings. Allow more than a day.

In the pandemic year of 2021 the Kochi Biennale Foundation, with the Kerala government, put on something closer to home. Lokame Tharavadu gathered the work of 267 artists who trace their roots to Kerala, 56 of them women, curated by Bose Krishnamachari.

The title comes from the Malayalam poem Ente Gurunathan by Vallathol Narayana Menon, and is usually given in English as “the world is one family”. The show filled five heritage buildings in the old port town of Alappuzha, among them the Port Museum, the New Model Society building and the Kerala State Coir Corporation, with a sixth venue at the Durbar Hall Art Gallery in Ernakulam.

It opened on 18 April 2021, was due to close on 30 June, and was listed again from September to the end of the year.

Nine galleries began it in 2012, among them Chemould Prescott Road, Chatterjee & Lal, Sakshi Gallery, Gallery Maskara and Project 88. The idea was simple: open new exhibitions on the same few days in January, so people could walk from one to the next through Colaba and Fort.

It has grown steadily. The 2025 edition, from 9 to 12 January, listed 32 galleries, from Colaba and Ballard Estate to Byculla, Worli, Lower Parel and Bandra. The 14th, which ran to 12 January 2026, was co-led by Ayesha Parikh of Art & Charlie in Bandra and Sanjana Shah of Tao Art Gallery in Worli, and leaned further beyond the old south Mumbai district.

Take comfortable shoes and a list.

Sunil Kant Munjal of Hero Enterprise founded the festival in 2016, and the non-profit Serendipity Arts Foundation runs it. It takes over Panaji for about a week in December.

The range is the point. Visual art, theatre, music, dance, literature, food and craft run side by side, and each edition has a fresh team of curators for each discipline; in 2019 the visual arts were curated by Jyotindra Jain and Sudarshan Shetty. That year it used 12 venues, including heritage buildings along the Mandovi river.

It drew about 450,000 visitors in 2018. The ninth edition ran from 15 to 22 December 2024, with more than 200 events across 22 venues.

The Kochi Biennale Foundation started the Students’ Biennale in 2014 as part of its higher-education programme, with the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art. The first edition showed more than 100 works from 37 institutions, from Srinagar to Imphal, chosen by fifteen young curators who spent three months visiting art schools. The Tata Trusts have supported it since 2016.

The focus is on students from government and state-funded art colleges, many of them showing for the first time. The edition held with the sixth Kochi-Muziris Biennale opened on 13 December 2025 at the VKL Warehouse in Mattancherry, under the theme Sensing Grounds, with seven curator collectives working across seven regions and 70 works by more than 200 students from about 175 schools.