‘We will rethink what Mumbai needs’: Jaya Asokan

India Art Fair’s director on the IAF Contemporary fair that has been cancelled. Collabs with local stakeholders will be the focus for now

Ten months after Art Mumbai debuted at the Mahalaxmi Race Course — with a unique curation that blended art and the city’s brand of glamour and entertainment — the long-standing India Art Fair (IAF) in New Delhi announced it would be heading to the Maximum City, too, but in 2025. To be hosted at the Jio World Garden from November 13-15, IAF Contemporary, organisers said, would focus on “contemporary art and collectible design”.

Expectedly, the buzz leading up to the second edition of Art Mumbai, which concluded on November 17, was laced with discussions about the new addition to the art calendar, and if it is fair to have two art fairs at the same time. This has been reported in The Hindu Magazine.

But there has been a recent development. IAF’s director Jaya Asokan has confirmed that they are cancelling the Mumbai fair and will be pivoting in a new direction. Edited excerpts from an interview:

What we had announced to do in Mumbai [at the Jio World Garden in November 2025] is a standard global practice: to have multiple fairs at the same time. It happens at Frieze in London, in Hong Kong in March — there are about five fairs that happen at the same time. We were going for a similar format in India. The idea was that collectors coming into the country could access different fairs at the same time.

However, we have now decided to pivot and really rethink what Mumbai needs and what we want to do there. Hence, this decision.

India Art Fair’s commitment remains to prioritise the needs of galleries and artists from the region, and continue to lead the way in supporting the growth of the South Asian arts ecosystem. We believe the best way to do this is to work on developing meaningful initiatives in collaboration with local cultural institutions to complement existing programming, and strengthen the market in Delhi, Mumbai and across India.

There are no boundaries between creative fields, and artists of all kinds have always been in conversation to broaden their practices and generate new ideas. The inaugural collectible design section at India Art Fair is built upon this concept, and seeks to open our definitions of culture and creativity to promote even greater cross-pollination among creative disciplines and increase our offering to collectors.