Jaya Asokan's plans for India Art Fair 2025

An interview with the director of the India Art Fair ahead of this year’s fair in New Delhi from February 6 to 9

Jaya Asokan, director of the India Art Fair for the past four editions, has steered the country’s largest commercial art event through rough times. When she took over as the director in the middle of the pandemic in 2021, her first edition saw muted participation from international galleries, institutions and collectors. However, since then, the fair has focused on not only expanding its exhibitor base — the current edition has 120 exhibitors, compared to the 75 when she first took charge — but has focused on growing its influence by supporting local art events, expanding its young collectors’ programme, and creating a website that puts out information on grants and fellowships for young artists. “We are more than a four-day fair,” Asokan told HT.

Jaya Asokan (India Art Fair)

Last year, the India Art Fair had announced its Mumbai foray (focused solely on contemporary art) in November 2025. However, within weeks, the plans were rolled back. Asokan revealed that the India Art Fair will hold a commercial event in Hyderabad later this year. She also announced that a new Swali Craft Prize will be presented this year in partnership with the India Art Fair. Read edited excerpts.

When you took over as the India Art Fair director in 2021, the edition had around 75 exhibitors. This time around, it’s increased to 120, with a new design section, and a new craft prize being introduced. In terms of the scope and scale, how is the India Art Fair 2025 growing?

From a macro level perspective, there has been a tremendous increase in the scale of the Art Fair, both physically and digitally, in the last few years. We have incrementally achieved this by adding parallel events that run concurrently with the main event. Now, it’s not just about the Fair, but also its relationship to New Delhi. Two, we have brought within the fold of the Fair a wider programming of talks and panels. We’ve brought in a lot more inclusivity, particularly in terms of activities for differently-abled people.

Alongside all of this, we’ve paid attention to our website, so that it is as much a resource for the art scene as it is a site of information. The design section that we introduced last year has been expanded to showcase emerging designers in a curated exhibition. And, we will also have installations of new commissions and large-scale outdoor projects in different parts of the city . Our Artist-in-Residence programme will showcase works by three contemporary artists working in different mediums.

The pandemic taught us the biggest lesson in working collaboratively and not in isolation and pushed us to create an ecosystem for young and emerging artists.

The Fair is more than a commercial, trade event, and has gone into the space of collaborations with other galleries, museums, institutions both within India and internationally. What is the reason for doing this?

I wouldn’t call this a trade fair, because we have end clients buying art. It’s not necessarily for people just in the trade of art. The Indian art market’s growth has really been due to a spirit of collaboration. There was no prior model of a contemporary art fair in India when we started 16 years ago. In fact, there were no private museums at that time either.

From the very inception, we’ve been very different from other fairs globally because we acted almost as an institution in the market by bringing together an ecosystem. Since then, we have also succeeded in building creative partnerships with other cultural leaders in the region and in allied fields like fashion, design, architecture. We want to forefront Indian and South Asian art, and that’s always been a mandate. We don’t want to be a cookie-cutter fair.

People come because we’ve also managed to bring people from some amazing institutions globally, including the ones coming this year, which itself indicates an interest in artists from this region. We have worked really tirelessly to do this, and this has now borne fruit. We have helped in placing artists in galleries overseas. For example, [the representatives of] David Zwirner, a reputed international contemporary art gallery, met Mahesh Baliga at the fair and went on to exhibit him in London in 2022. We took representatives from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to artist studios and they acquired a piece by Manjunath Kamath.

The biggest differentiator over the last few years is that now we no longer exist only as a four-day Fair. We are also thinking of creating a commercial event in Hyderabad, so galleries have an opportunity to be exposed to new markets. You can expect to hear something about this in March.

What impact has the Art Fair had in other cities?

The Fair has quite organically become an essential partner to other arts and culture initiatives around the country. We organise collectors’ weekends in cities like Chennai and Kolkata, we supported the Mumbai Gallery Weekend that took place in January.

We also support sizable art prizes and fellowship opportunities [in 2024, the Motwani Jadeja Prize; this year, the BMW Future is Born of Art commission, by IAF partner BMW India, instituted in 2021; India Art Fair X Raw Mango designer-in-residence, instituted last year]. For the past five years, we have had our very own artists in residence. And the winners of these awards and residences have gone on to great successes showing in major galleries in India and internationally.

This year we will announce a new prize — the Swali Craft Prize in partnership with India Art Fair — in collaboration with Chanakya Foundation, run by Karishma Swali, who is the creative director of Chanakya International and the founder of the Chanakya School of Craft. It’ll involve a residency as well as cash component and will be given to persons working the space of [textile] craft.

For our readers, who might well be potential buyers, could you tell us a bit about how the Art Fair has performed in terms of sales, particularly after the pandemic?

We have had sales that have ranged from ₹50,000 to ₹32 crores. And in a Fair, you find works across all price-points. What has been encouraging for us was the realization that during that first fair after Covid, which we held in the summer, we didn’t have any international visitors, which we normally do. We couldn’t rely on international museums, et cetera, to make sales. But that year, we saw a domestic demand for art that was so strong and it made us realise that we could be self-reliant. For instance, this year, we have a few collectors coming from places like Surat and Indore. So it’s not just the big, glitzy cities where we’re seeing art collectors come from.

Anecdotally a lot of the bigger sales and large-value sales have been from people in small cities.