Asia NOW’s ‘New Voices’ Iniative Highlights the Curators Connecting Asia and Its Diasporas

For the past 12 years, Asia NOW has brought a boutique-scale focus on contemporary art from Asia and its diasporas to the Monnaie de Paris, focusing on creating a space where, per the fair’s website, “Asia is more than a geography, but a methodology—a movement.” This year’s edition, which runs until 24 October against the backdrop of Art Basel Paris, welcomes a fresh initiative: New Voices. 

The programme gives emerging curators a larger role by highlighting five independent curatorial platforms, with South Asian practices playing a particularly prominent role. All the projects are presented for the first time, while several are newly commissioned for the fair, including a site-specific passageway and a participatory food installation.

The initiative follows the fair’s introduction of The Third Space in 2025, which placed installations and moving-image works throughout the building. “These formats make the fair a place for discovery and exchange,” Asia NOW’s founding director Alexandra Fain told Ocula.

“New Voices extends that logic to the people who curate. It is a programme for emerging curators and collectives defining the ‘next generation’; it brings together a range of voices, perspectives and approaches, reflecting a curatorial scene that is evolving, connecting and redefining itself.”

Fain chose the programme’s first five participating spaces and collectives with team members Salomé Fau and Krishna Kapadia, drawing on their research and networks alongside existing collaborations. Together they sought fresh perspectives from Asia and its diasporas, asking curators where the fair—and contemporary art—should be placing its focus.

“New Voices is designed as a connecting thread,” Fain explained. “The aim was a balance between discovery and familiarity, and a mix of formats: performance, installation, sculpture and curatorial practice.”

For TAK Contemporary, the invitation to join New Voices continues a relationship with Asia NOW that began last year with a joint presentation of thread sculptures by Sumakshi Singh, who is currently representing India at the Venice Biennale. Founded in 2023 by three curators of Indian heritage—Shubhankar Pr Bharti, Elizabeth Pranitha Joseph and Damini Kulkarni—TAK has organised exhibitions across India and France, and opened its first permanent space in Paris on 10 October.

The space’s presentation at this year’s Asia NOW, Baagh Bageecha, brings together nine artists, each exploring gardens as places shaped by memory, labour and everyday rituals. The familiar space of refuge becomes vulnerable to environmental damage, changing land use and displacement, emerging, a curatorial statement explains “not as an inherently secure or autonomous space, but as a site that remains vulnerable to the environmental, social and political forces that surround it”.

Another garden provides the framework for a second New Voices participant: Brief Shalimar x Zara Sajid. The collaboration between non-profit association Brief Shalimar and curator Sajid presents Halfway Garden, which draws on the gardens of longing and deferred promise in Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry, alongside the transitional space of a halfway house.

In a project statement, Brief Shalimar said the partnership aims to address themes of emotional value, ecology, and the modern socio-political landscape between Asia and Europe, building a “symphony” with the curatorial vision of Asia NOW. “The joint project recognises the urgency of creating space for voices from South Asia at a time of profound geopolitical transformation and cultural realignment,” the statement added.

Other New Voices projects include Still Other Collective’s Fivefold: The Anatomy of Chaos, which pairs Paris and Delhi-based Sehaj Malik’s five-hour performance with a participatory installation, and the fourth instalment of 2 Curators 1 Collapse’s RING/CAM series.

Meanwhile, Plasma Contemporary presents Poojan Gupta’s A Walk Through Beliefs, a site-specific passageway conceived for the architecture of the Monnaie de Paris. The work is composed of approximately 105,000 empty blister pockets meticulously joined together by hand, offering a reflection on healing, devotion, and collective memory.

Alongside New Voices, Asia NOW hosts more than 70 galleries, including Esther Schipper, where Prabhavathi Meppayil’s meticulous abstractions are paired with Tseng Chien-Ying’s otherworldly, androgynous deities in ink and colour. Meanwhile, first-time exhibitor Whitestone hands its booth to Singaporean duo Chow and Lin, whose photographic surveys document how much food a poverty-line budget can buy—giving fair-goers a very different view of purchasing power.