7 shows to see in and around India Art Fair 2026

Right after Kochi Biennale and a buzzy start in Jaipur, the art season officially arrives in Delhi with the four-day-long India Art Fair (February 5-8). But as always, the real action spills beyond the fairgrounds—into galleries, standalone exhibitions, performances, and gatherings across the city.

Consider this your Nod-approved guide to making the most of Delhi, India Art Fair and everything around it. From parallel exhibitions and city-wide showcases with names like Ai Weiwei, Tyeb Mehta, and Tara Lal in the mix, these are shows, spaces, and moments worth stepping out for.

The highlights at India Art Fair

The first piece of art you witness at the India Art Fair will not be inside a gallery, but along the fair’s facade. Goa-based Afrah Shafiq, one of our favourite multimedia artists, has used embroidery traditions from around the world—from cross-stitch to counted-thread embroidery—to bring together an archive of patterns: centipede from Kheng, Meghalaya, mangoes from Karnataka, and a shaman from Peru. You can even interact with the exhibit with a special AR layer.

As you dash in and out of gallery spaces, pause to explore the many outdoor art projects peppered across the NSIC Grounds, including The Charpai Project by Ayush Kasliwal x Goji, supported by Serendipity Arts and Recycle of Life by Paresh Maity, presented by Art Alive Gallery. The fair also debuts a landmark performance in collaboration with HH Art Spaces, supported by Soho House, featuring Yuko Kaseki, Uriel Barthélémi, and Suman Sridhar / Black Mamba that merges movement, sound, and voice framed around the act of “feeding,” and functions as ritualistic gestures of connection, healing, and transformation.

This year’s IAF spotlight is surely the Marina Abramović exhibit that comprises 1,200 unique photographic stills from the artist’s two video works, ‘Red Period’ and ‘Blue Period’, 1998. Much like Picasso’s Blue Period and Matisse’s Red Period, which signified distinct phases in their artistic evolution, Abramović’s works explore the extremities of human emotion, physical endurance, and the symbolism of colour.

India Art Fair is ongoing until February 8. Register here.

Gallery hopping in Def Col

On the sidelines of IAF, Defence Colony, the capital city’s chicest art gallery hub, that has grown exponentially over the last year, has a mix of new and ongoing showcases. Some of our favourites include Sudarshan Shetty’s ‘A Breath Held Long’ at Galleryske—a film that proposes an intersection between voice, body and the city and the act of breathing as a metaphor for a life within an urban landscape and ‘The Gatecrasher’ by Atul Dodiya at Vadhera Art Gallery (D-53) that offers an abstract, complicated narrative of overlaps with a collection of paintings within paintings. Neerja Kothari’s ‘A Day in Making’ on display at Shrine Empire, is a beautiful showcase of one hundred and thirty-one drawings, each made in the expanse of eleven minutes. Do not miss some of the ongoing exhibitions like ‘In Memory of a Totem’ by Jumu and ‘the Storyteller’ by Manjit Bawa, showing at Gallery XXL and Vadhera Art Gallery (D-40), respectively.

Make a trip to Bikaner House

A short distance from the NSIC exhibition ground, Bikaner House is hosting three key exhibitions, including ‘Gujral Within: An Introspection’ that brings together a body of original works by the artist, drawn entirely from the private collection of his daughter and interior designer Raseel Gujral. ‘Bitter Nectar’ by Sustaina India, curated by Thukral and Tagra, asks you to pause and reflect on climate change through fruiting cycles and fragile ecologies. The third one, 'Conjectures on a Paper Sky’ a solo exhibition by Jitish Kallat, curated by Alexandra Munroe brings together a decade of work across painting, sculpture, and photo works, engaging questions of time, space, and shifting perspectives across planetary and historical scales.

India Art Fair Parallel at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

If you’re in Delhi and can only make time for one exhibition, let it be ‘Tyeb Mehta: Bearing Weight (With the Lightness of Being)’—a retrospective marking the birth centenary of one India’s renowned modernist artist, Tyeb Mehta. In collaboration with the Tyeb Mehta Foundation and the Saffronart Foundation, the showcase will include more than 120 works, featuring paintings, drawings, sculptures, film, and archival material.

All roads lead to Ai Weiwei’s India debut

Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, known for his outspoken political stance and conceptual works examining power, freedom, and human rights, made his debut in India early this year. On view until February 22 at Nature Morte gallery in Dhan Mill, the solo exhibition will showcase Lego works based on Pichwais, intricate cloth paintings depicting devotional Hindu subjects, as well as homages to the country’s most famous Modernist painters, VS Gaitonde and SH Raza. His large-scale Lego works based on famous artworks, including versions of ‘Surfing (After Hokusai)’ and ‘Water Lilies’, a reinterpretation of Monet’s triptych of the same title, will also be on display.

Touch grass (literally) at Aranyani Pavilion, Sunder Nursery

The Aranyani Pavilion is conservationist and designer Tara Lal’s living, breathing installation that you can visit between gallery hops during India Art Fair season. Located in Sunder Nursery, the spiral structure is inspired by India’s sacred groves and designed with TM Space. Built from lantana, an invasive species that threatens native forests, and topped with a living canopy of indigenous plants, the Pavilion embodies themes of ecological imbalance and repair. It also serves as a participatory space, hosting walks, discussions, workshops, and performances.

Art night at an abandoned nightclub

Once Connaught Place’s favourite nightclub, The Radial now functions as a temporary experimental space. This year, as part of the IAF Parallel Event, it will host ‘Party Is Elsewhere’ (a title borrowed from Sudarshan Shetty’s solo show in Mumbai in 2005), an exhibition that will bring together leading voices from South Asia. Curated by Reha Sodhi and Amit Kumar Jain, the group showcase will feature works by Alwar Balasubramaniam, Anju Dodiya, Ayesha Sultana, Bharti Kher, Gauri Gill, Himmat Shah, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Idris Khan, Jeram Patel, Krishna Reddy, Mehlli Gobhai, Mithu Sen, Nalini Malani, Nasreen Mohamedi, Rana Begum, Sayan Chanda, Seher Shah, Sheba Chhachhi, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, T Venkanna, Vivan Sundaram, and Zarina Hashmi among others.