INDIA ART FAIR 2026

Sohrab Hura (b.1981; lives and works in New Delhi, India) will show a selection of oil paintings from his new body of work The Forest. The title encompasses the act of waiting within itself, evoking the forest as a space of myriad possibilities—it can harbour secrets, offer refuge, or provide a sense of solace and comfort. For Hura, the forest becomes both a physical and psychological manifestation. These works emerge from a place of remembrance, anticipation and imagination. In the recent months, Hura has been accompanying his father to medical appointments that made him acutely aware of how time can feel interminable in the hospital waiting rooms. When he began working with oil paint, he felt a similar sense of waiting—the slow process of allowing one layer to dry before applying the next. His exploration of this new medium also stems from a desire to take a break from the heaviness of photography and his quest for tactility, softness, and meandering. While attuning himself to the physical act of making these paintings, Hura also experienced a reassuring affirmation of his presence in the real world.

For much of the past decade, Christopher Kulendran Thomas (lives and works in Berlin, Germany) has been using advanced technologies across multiple disciplines to question the myths of Western individualism. His paintings metabolize the colonial art history that came to dominate in Sri Lanka after his family, who are Tamil, left escalating ethnic violence there. Kulendran Thomas often exhibits these paintings with video installations that fuse propaganda andcounterpropaganda into a speculative vortex of alternate histories.

Through deep engagement with diverse indigenous textile techniques, material investigation, and inherited knowledge systems, Chanakya School’s practice, led by Karishma Swali, forms a conduit between contemporary thought and ancient processes. The works serve in equal parts an exploration of their interconnected textile histories, as it serves a repository of understanding the residues of the human hand imprinted in thread over time. Few human inventions carry our imprint across time as intimately as cloth—through cultures and centuries, textile has absorbed the personal alongside the collective, becoming a palimpsest of human experience where stories are deposited, layered, and preserved. For Chanakya School, these stories are not abstract—they carry the customs of a place, the rituals of daily life, and the social codes that shape communal identity. To trace a line of thread therefore, for the collective, is to follow an unbroken lineage of knowledge, even a physiological map or a chronological archive of our history that binds people to land, to one another, and to their communities.

Kaveri Raina’s (b.1990; lives and works in New York, USA) acrylic, graphite, and oil pastel paintings on burlap evoke the corporeality of memory—both witnessed and imagined. Raina transforms the agrarian material into a diaphanous screen, layering acrylic with loose graphite, oil paint, and pastel. Abstracted forms drawn from personal experience and inherited histories reveal generations of dislocation, as her somatic memories intertwine with legends of creation and destruction. In the new paintings, Raina reflects her own journey of displacement—born in Delhi into a Kashmiri family and moving to the United States at the age of ten. The body of work draws inspiration from the mystic Kashmiri poet Lalleshwari (1320–1392), known as Lal Ded, who created the poetic style vatsun or Vakhs, meaning “speech.” Through Lal Ded’s Vakhs, Rainaunearths a missing thread in a fragmented lineage, reconnecting with an obscured past. Feeling a deep affinity with Lal Ded, Raina pays homage to the Sufi poet whose message transcended cultural and religious boundaries while invoking her own complex ancestry. Her layered compositions become shifting landscapes where fragmented histories resurface, framing memory in motion.

Employing a range of processes that are central to her works, including photographic transfers from personal archives, collage, painting, stitching and drawing, Radhika Khimji (b. 1979; lives and works between Muscat, Oman and London, United Kingdom) pushes the edges of her practice. Khimji’s ongoing interests in expanding the possibilities of thinking through shapes, geometry, and the body in relation to landscapes are often the point of departure in the works on view. Abstracted landscape forms and images from construction sites seem ensconced within innumerable repeated dots and oblong shapes, an act that makes the surface of her works tactile and acutely textured.

Biraaj Dodiya (b. 1993; lives and works in Mumbai, India) will be showing Howl, a set of paintings in eight parts, unfolding as a single horizontal register, recalling the logic of a film strip—frames advancing, slipping, and bleeding into one another. These oil-on-panel paintings were conceived during her time at the Pioneer Works residency, New York, while learning darkroom processes and experimenting with Super8 filmmaking. Interested in the meeting point between the sublime image and the inherent ruin in it, the works allude to landscape without ever settling into it. Shadow and light pulse across the sequence, images collapsing and re-forming as they shoot laterally with a quiet persistence. Ultimately, the movement feels orbital rather than linear: a passage through shifting terrain that curves back towards its beginning, like an animal’s long cry in the dark. In addition to this, Dodiya’s Growing Orbits will also be on view, which is a series of digital collages that combine photographic images with details from drawings and paintings. Composed and manipulated digitally, these works trace back to the beginnings of her interest in abstraction—constructing acryptic geography, connecting body and landscape, imagined and urban. The photographs in this particular series—from the street or from the studio—imagine scenes from a nocturnal life through forms, caverns and surfaces emerging from the dark. Images collapse and appear and visual orbits expand into possibilities of vast perimeters. Through the transparency and overlaps, the final image develops a scan or x-ray-like quality, almost as if it were exposing the organs and bones of her processes. They contain diagrams, suggestions, clues, questions, spontaneous conjurings, and ways of looking. Decay and formation become verbs of a poetic interchangeability; the image arrived at, is a tentative map of the world charting a choreography for searching.

Bhasha Chakrabarti’s (b. 1991) pair of oil-painted tondos, along with the studies that accompany them, depict the hands of a past lover in moments of conversation, holding, and embrace. The titles of the works invoke the biblical text Song of Solomon (also known as the Song of Songs), which speaks of love through the language of touch, eroticism, and embodiment. In the Song, desire is known sensorially— through skin, gesture, and proximity— situating the body as a site of knowledge and devotion. These paintings underscore heartbreak as a bodily condition rather than a purely emotional one. Hands are rendered in isolation, becoming instruments of perception, care, labor, and survival, as well as vessels of memory that carry both tenderness and loss. The circular format suggests reciprocity, repetition, and return, mirroring how longing revisits the body over time. Touch becomes not only a private register of intimacy but a way of knowing the world, foregrounding the body’s capacity to remember even when contact has ceased. Echoing Audre Lorde’s call to “not let your head deny / your hands / any memory ofwhat passes through them,” the paintings insist that the extremities of the body function as both instruments of knowledge and archives of feeling. Here, touch— historical, emotional, and embodied—remains a vital, sustaining force rather than something flighty or superficial.

Praneet Soi (b. 1971; lives and works between Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Kolkata, India) will be showing a new body of work that brings together his sustained engagement with the Kashmiri craftsman Fayaz Jan and, through this, his growing familiarity with the landscape of the Hasanabad area where Jan’s Karkhana is based. The Hasanabad Discs reflect this. The surfaces—built from papier-mâché, clay from the River Jhelum, chalk dust, and tissue paper sealed with saresh—create richly absorptive grounds for painting. The backgrounds are painted on by craftsmen, using floral motifs ubiquitous to the region. Soi asked them to reduce certain of the patterns to their basic elements, allowing them to become grounds over which he painted, en plein air, imagery from the Hasanabad region that had gradually become familiar to him over a decade of working there. In Hasan Abad: View of the Zabarwan Range, a radiating pattern inspired by the Mosaic of the House of Citharist of Pompeii, which Soi had come across in the Archaeological Museum in Naples, frames a silverpoint drawing of the Zabarwan mountain range visible from the craftsmen’s karkhana. The ongoing series Landscape(s) underscores Soi’s elucidation of landscape as a construction of multiple viewpoints, stitching together his references drawn from personal experience and research, such as local Kashmiri architecture, Buddhist histories (Buddhism was a major religion in and around Srinagar, of which little trace remains), and Amsterdam’s Oosterpark, situated adjacent to Soi’s studio. Sculptural works like the Bird series and Two-headed Bird are studies in colour, pattern, and figuration simultaneously. They also mark the beginning of Soi’s work with Khatambandhi—a craft in which ceilings are panelled with wooden patterns. These sculptural works are inspired by the Modernists,such as K. G. Subramanyan, and the Arts and Crafts movement of 19th-century England in bridging myth with motif-making with pattern. In Indian mythology, the two-headed bird alludes to the Gandabherunda. In Spring (Avian Window), isolating the blocks that make patterns, Soi began to see how adding them together formed windows that were interesting. Bird-like forms appeared, similar to this work, tying patterns to figuration. Soi decided to use them as windows in which he could experiment with the artisans in making experimental compositions. These works extend his inquiry into pattern, figuration, and drawing from Khatambandhi ceilings and papier-mâché tiles to stitch disparate geographies into a shared visual language.

T. Vinoja’s (b. 1991; lives and works in Kilinochchi, Sri Lanka) practice is influenced by contemporary art and Tamil literature, particularly the lived experiences of the Sri Lankan War (1983-2009). Her work explores the war-torn landscapes, social conflict, and collective memory. Rooted in textile-based practices, her weaving embodies the concept of skin—both as a physical boundary and a metaphor for land, identity, and loss. The act of weaving itself is a process of connecting lines, much like the threads of history and personal experience. These lines symbolise both the fragility and resilience of human existence. Fabric, like skin, accompanies us through life and death, serving as a second layer that records our presence and absence. Through her practice, Vinoja seeks to evoke this enduring relationship between body, land, and memory, reflecting on the marks left by war and the stories woven into our collective past.

Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah’s (b. 1989; lives and works in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka) work focuses on the destructive impact of Sri Lanka’s prolonged civil war, its effects on the ecological world and the lives of people existing amidst the ceaseless violence and trauma. Using motifs such as mycelium, reminiscent of the damaging wounds inflicted on nature, while reflecting on how land becomes the bearer of the vestiges of war, Pakkiyarajah’s work explores how natureis rendered vulnerable due to human actions and offers a lens into how they are inextricably linked to each other.

Prabhakar Pachpute’s (b. 1986; lives and works in Pune, India) recent works comprise contemplative renditions that have evolved from his earlier conceptual explorations. He delves deeper into his recurring characters and the lively presence of the human, the wild, and the non-human that have shaped his panoramic landscapes over the years. Each piece extends the inquiry beyond material extraction, encompassing the social and psychological dimensions of hardships and systemic abuse. Moving between the local and the global, Pachpute brings an investigative, socio-cultural, ethical, and empathetic lens to his practice, raising critical questions about what it means to be human amid the unfolding crises of our time. What began as a study of altered natural and industrial landscapes has evolved into an exploration of the inner worlds of those affected—revealing how individual experiences and bodies bear the weight of broader power structures. Pachpute now examines these phenomena from the periphery, maintaining a deliberate distance to better understand the complexities, contradictions, and nuances that shape these lived realities.

Afrah Shafiq’s (b. 1989; lives and works in Goa, India) Samplers on Time: I, II, III draws on the tradition of embroidered samplers as systems of learning, transmission, and record making. The works reference motifs from a 1937 pattern book, Germanische Symbole und deutsche Volkskunstmuster neugestaltet in Kreuzstich, that reconfigures ‘folk’ symbols into the counted logic of the cross stitch. In these samplers, three symbols—day and night, the four seasons, and the persistence of time—are used as a framework to examine Shafiq’s experiences of time in the postpartum period. Annotating the original symbols are stitches that journal a personal, and often isolating but hugely universal experience of time. Sometimes the stitch functions as a literal unit of time, where each stitch represents a minute and logs the sheer volume and repetitive cycle of care thattranspires in a single day. In others, the stitches serve as a testament to her simultaneous experience of the linearity and circularity of time, the experience of time bending and expanding of giving birth and being born—a time beyond a lived experience, an almost cosmic experience of time.

Kallol Datta (lives and works in Kolkata, India) is a maker and researcher. Their practice reflects upon reconstructing, repurposing, and restructuring donated items of clothing and reclaimed textiles that hold memory, episodic events, and history, to negotiate larger questions about work and production, of labour and use, cultural sustainability, and of ideas revolving around research as production. The Dispatches series resides within the fifth chapter in Volume 4 – Misleading Truths Our Clothes Told Us. These dispatches are witnesses to episodic events in the Korean Peninsula during the early and mid-1900s and draw parallels to the social and bio-political ongoings in global societies today.

Aziz Hazara’s (lives and works in Berlin, Germany) Kite Balloons refers to the activities of gigantic tethered aerostat radar systems which came into existence in the early 2010s and floated above Kabul, Kandahar and other cities in Afghanistan to keep the people under watch. The images shot by these cameras from above exuded an extraterrestrial degree of vision. This body of work prompts introspection on the violation caused by the perpetual invasion of privacy in the name of security through an intricate network of wartime surveillance practices. Kite Balloons brings attention to how these tools serve a sinister purpose of collecting an archive of biometric data and panoptic images by military oppressors.

Soumya Sankar Bose (b. 1990; lives and works in Kolkata, India) reconstructs archival material and oral histories through photography, film, alternative archives, and artist books. His hybrid practice, grounded in long-term research and close engagement with local communities, underscores subaltern experiences of the marginalised yet resilient. His new work We Need to Talk in Whispers expands on the broader themes and concerns that permeate his practice. Stories shaped by gender-based violence, workplace harassment, domestic abuse, dowry-related pressure, and rape often go undocumented by mainstream media. From a found diary, Bose develops a series of interconnected case studies, each centred on the presence and evolution of the individuals within them. We Need to Talk in Whispers delves into the emotional turbulence of such moments, exploring the fragile space between desire and dread, dream and reality. At its core lies a deep engagement with mental health, vulnerability, and the human psyche when confronted with mortality. Through this process, Bose seeks to foster empathy, deepen collective understanding, and create space for reflection—on our hidden griefs, our quiet resilience, and the strength we summon in facing life’s inevitable end.

Julien Segard (b. 1980; lives and works in Goa, India) carefully considers the urban environment, the crevices where the constructed meets the natural, and how the two become inseparable. His works feature an assemblage of found elements and architectural structures that exist because of humans, but are bereft of human presence. The intimate, symbiotic, and oftentimes destructive relationship between man, nature and architecture become points of introspection for Segard in his works. Rooted in experiences of solitude and silence, Segard’s practice immerses the viewer in the minuteness of their elements while simultaneously operating as the entry points into vast infinite spaces.

Vikrant Bhise’s (b. 1984; lives and works in Mumbai, India) Vikrant Bhise’s current practice is an inquiry into the lives of various migrant and marginalised communities who have been discarded by society, yet continue to struggle for identity and acceptance. This body of work extends his previous series, which focused on snake charmers and monkey charmers, etc—street performers who move from village to village, living without a permanent homeland. These migrant communities set up temporary tents using whatever materials they are able to accumulate; these tents become their abodes and the only spaces they can call their ‘own’. Tents, in particular, carry layered political meanings. They can function as theatres for itinerant performers who wander from place to place, speaking to the lives of such communities, and they can also serve as shelters for worn-out bodies during moments of protest. These works reflect Bhise’s own mindscape, where land, tents, cloth, people, and other objects churn together in a constant state of turmoil—much like the lives of these communities themselves. The Buddha, as the ultimate form of peace and liberation, anchors this practice. Drawing from Buddhism, Bhise derives his visual vocabulary through its iconography and architecture. The Chattra spire—the crowning element of a stupa—emerges as a symbol of peace and protection, offering a form of hope for these people. The presence of Babasaheb Ambedkar serves as a reminder of his enduring call—“Educate. Agitate. Organise.”—which remains a crucial tool in the struggle against injustice and oppression. This body of work is also inspired by Bhise’s rereading of Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki, a text that addresses caste-based discrimination and the lived realities of the Valmiki community, historically engaged in sanitation and manual labour. The area where Bhise grew up, in Vikhroli, included a neighbourhood known as Valmiki Nagar, or ‘bhangiwada’ in popular slang. While tall towers stand there today, in Bhise’s memory it persists as a caste ghetto, marked by tents.

Rathin Barman (b. 1981; lives and works in Kolkata, India) often breaks down the thoroughly engineered and fixed construct of a ‘home’ into a graphical outline of formal abstraction. In the Spatial Distortion series, Barman explores the notion of a ‘home’ as a living organism, as the configuration of spaces and other architectural features morph over time to mirror the mutability wrought in the time and lives of people. Concurrently, Barman also explores the various nuances of fragility and materiality with regard to architecture. In common parlance one does not associate the notion of fragility with a material such as concrete, but Barman through his experiences of working with materials of construction emphasises how this material also demands delicate handling and would often require multiple interventions of repair, much like the structure of a house which also needs renovation and maintenance for it to endure the ravages of time. One often notices how Barman plays around with the assumed infallibility of permanence by choosing concrete as his medium, which is both porous and rigid at the same time. The Spatial Distortion series seem to highlight the certain shifting facets, maybe an addition of rooms, walls or extension of a balcony through the use of lines, colours, and charcoal planes in multiple tonalities on pigmented concrete panels. The sculptures also evoke the past grandeur of these edifices, once based in the imposing colonial architecture, but have now succumbed to decay and ruin.