India Art Fair 2026 has firmly staked its claim as a node in the global art circuit, and nowhere is that more evident than in the presence of five towering figures: Judy Chicago, Anish Kapoor, Yayoi Kusama, Ai Weiwei, and Marina Abramović. Each arrives with a distinct artistic language and political charge.
Stretching across the fair from outdoor installations to blue-chip booths and the FOCUS section, these artists’ presence make India global.
Judy Chicago: What If Women Ruled the World? — Presented by DMINTI, Outdoor Installation
Judy Chicago’s landmark project What If Women Ruled the World? arrives in India as both a question and a methodology. Reimagined in 2022 as a participatory project with DMINTI, the work now appears at India Art Fair 2026 as an evolving physical and digital quilt, installed in an open-air setting that invites lingering, reflection, and response.
Chicago, a pioneering feminist artist whose practice has consistently foregrounded women’s histories and experiences, turns to the quilt—a form associated with domestic labour, care, and community—as both metaphor and medium. Rooted in the revival of quilt-making traditions through the reuse of fabrics, the work transforms craft into a potent vehicle for social commentary. Visitors are invited to respond to a series of urgent prompts: How might politics, economies, ecologies, and intimate relationships shift if women held structural power?
This participatory structure is crucial. The quilt grows with every contribution, creating a living archive of speculative futures.
Anish Kapoor: Galleria Continua, Booth D106
Anish Kapoor’s presence at India Art Fair 2026 via Galleria Continua signals an encounter with an artist whose work has long negotiated the tension between spectacle and stillness.
At Booth D106, His pieces act as portals: mirrors that fold the public back into the work, concavities that absorb light, forms that refuse to sit comfortably in a single dimension.
Yayoi Kusama: David Zwirner, Booth B04
At David Zwirner’s Booth B04, Yayoi Kusama’s visual universe brings its unmistakable grammar of repetition, colour, and pattern to New Delhi. Kusama’s polka dots, mirrored spaces, and obsessively repeated forms have become globally recognisable, but beneath the Instagrammable surfaces lies a deeply personal psychoscape. Her work has long drawn from experiences of hallucination, anxiety, and self-imposed institutionalisation, translating inner turmoil into vivid, structured environments.
Ai Weiwei and the Politics of Everyday Objects: Nature Morte, Booth A1
At Booth A1, Nature Morte presents Ai Weiwei, one of the most politically outspoken and widely recognised artists of the contemporary era. Ai’s practice braids together conceptual rigour, documentary testimony, and poetic use of materials—from ancient ceramics to life jackets, from wooden structures to digital images.
Marina Abramović: Saatchi Yates, FOCUS Section — Marina Abramović, Video Portrait Gallery
In the FOCUS Section—dedicated to strong solo presentations and prolific contemporary practices—Saatchi Yates brings a rare and tightly curated selection of works by Marina Abramović. Long acknowledged as a pioneer of performance art, Abramović has pushed the human body to extremes of pain, stillness, endurance, and vulnerability. At India Art Fair 2026, the booth draws from her Video Portrait Gallery series (1975–2002), particularly the works Red Period and Blue Period (1998), reconfigured as 1,200 unique photographic stills.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
