India Art Fair: Taking South Asian Art Global?

New Delhi’s international art fair returns with a new investor, Middle Eastern galleries and designs on nurturing India’s art market

The 2017 India Art Fair, which takes place from 2-5 February in New Delhi, is a fair on the rise. With a new investor in the form of the Swiss-based MCH Group, this year marks a new chapter for the Modern and Contemporary art fair.

MCH Group is the owner of the powerful Art Basel franchise, whose trio of events in Basel, Miami Beach and Hong Kong dominate the realm of high-end Modern and Contemporary art fairs. In September, MCH announced it had taken a majority stake in the India Art Fair, the first move in its plan to expand by buying stakes in smaller, existing regional art fairs.

It’s important to note that this does not mean the India Art Fair will come under the Art Basel umbrella and organisation will be entirely separate. However, MCH’s move on the India Art Fair both recognises the importance of India as an important and growing market and, potentially, elevates it to another level, with the injection of capital and expertise afforded by such a large exhibition organiser.

In a statement, MCH said that, after this edition, its “involvement will help develop India Art Fair to its fullest potential in the coming years.” The fair’s two existing owners, Angus Montgomery and founding director Neha Kirpal, still own stakes in the fair, however, and Kirpal particularly will continue to play a key role.

Despite India’s rich artistic history, size and wealth, the red tape that complicates importing and exporting artworks has long strangled its art market and the India Art Fair occupies a rare space as the only international art fair in the country.

Though it is international, the vast majority of exhibitors are from India and the concentration across the board is South Asian art. Indeed, promoting the reputation of established and emerging South Asian galleries, artists and artist collectives is the sole aim of the fair’s Platform section, which this year consists of Britto Arts Trust (Dhaka), Nepal Art Council (Kathmandu), Theertha International Artists’ Collective (Colombo) and Blueprint 12 (New Delhi).

Within the main section of the fair, featuring just over 50 galleries, the longstanding exhibitors, such as Grosvenor Gallery, London specialist in Indian art, take part alongside debutants from India, Europe and the Middle East, keen to establish a presence and a clientele in India. They include Kalfayan Galleries, a gallery based in Athens that, through its concentration on contemporary art from Greece, the Balkans and the MENASA region, sees itself as a “bridge between Eastern and Western visual culture”. Also new is Sabrina Amrani from Madrid and Lukas Feichtner Galerie of Vienna, alongside two homegrown galleries. They are PhotoInk, which started life as a photo agency and design studio but is now a gallery in New Delhi showing the work of both Indian and international photographers, and TARQ, Sanskrit for “discussion, abstract reasoning, logic and cause”, a contemporary art gallery founded by Hena Kapadia in one of Mumbai’s 1930s Art Deco buildings.

The Middle East is also represented this year with the first participation of two well-known Dubai galleries, Grey Noise and 1X1 Gallery. They will both show artists from South Asia. 1X1 Gallery presents the work of Chittrovanu Mazumdar (born 1956), now based in Calcutta whose expressionistic, mixed media works incorporate both abstract and figurative elements. His large-scale installation is currently a highlight of the Kochi Biennale, until 29 March. 1X1 will also be exhibiting the young, emerging artists, Poonam Jain and Sachin Bonde.

Grey Noise will also show an artist who is participating in the Kochi Biennale, the young Dubai-born Lantian Xie, alongside the Pakistani artist Fahd Burki and Bangalore-based Mariam Suhail.

Alongside the commercial side of the fair will be 16 curated art projects, both indoor and outdoor, each by a different artist. Vernacular in Flux is a new curated space by Dr Annapurna Garimella, putting a refreshing focus on vernacular art, particularly the traditional Gond, Madhubani and Mysore painting.

The Film Programme, introduced in 2016, returns along with the Speakers’ Forum, an effort to increase the level of artistic discourse in the country with a talks programme featuring artists, curators, critics, academics, gallerists and collectors. Notable participants this year include Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museums and Foundation and Sheena Wagstaff, the Leonard A Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art who weigh in on the panel discussion about The Future of Museums. Another highlight of the programme is the BMW Art Talk: The Art of Collecting which features HE Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, in conversation with Dr Thomas Girst, Head of Cultural Engagement BMW Group.

In all, a rich academic and commercial offering intent on extolling the virtues of South Asian art, nurturing its galleries and perhaps inspiring a future generation of collectors.

India Art Fair runs from 2-5 February in New Delhi, India. For more information see Indiaartfair.in