Art, Amplified

Director of External Relations & Outreach at India Art Fair, UMAH JACOB presents an insider's guide to IAF 2026.

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It’s already that time of the year again! Delhi’s cultural calendar reaches its zenith in February as India Art Fair (IAF) transforms the city into the mecca of art.

With incredibly exciting exhibitions by some of the region’s most important artists, seminal museum shows, international artist presentations, special gallery nights, and dynamic programmes featuring emerging artists, this is when the art world pulls out all the stops, staging their most ambitious programme of the year.

And to top it all, at IAF 2026, we have the most stellar lineup, a real testament to the strength and veracity of the art scene in South Asia today.

Here are the highlights to catch at this year’s edition:

FAIR FAÇADE

This year marks 10 years of collaboration for IAF and BMW, and to celebrate, we reframe the iconic The Future Is Born of Art Commission into a mammoth artwork, relocating it to the fair’s façade where it transcends the tents themselves. The 2026 commission is awarded to the intensely talented Afrah Shafiq, an artist whose work excavates the quiet intelligence of embroidery—its patterns, pauses, and marginal notes—long overlooked in histories of making.

Titled Giant Sampler, Shafiq’s work transforms intimate stitching motifs into a monumental surface, drawing attention to the labour, memory, and rituals that shape women’s lives. By translating embodied, craft-based knowledge into algorithmic and screen-based forms, Shafiq collapses the distinctions between hand and code, tradition and technology. Rooted in tactile knowledge yet mediated through contemporary technology, the work unfolds further through an interactive AR layer, inviting viewers to trace the stories embedded in each thread. Here, craft becomes both archive and proposition, stitching past and future into the public realm.

ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE