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Kumbh Mela, But Make It Art: An India Art Fair Diary 2025 (Part 1)

In honour of the writer’s tenth year going to IAF, he was compelled to write a rambling, self-indulgent, and embarrassingly authentic depiction of his experience of the weekend in two parts.

  • 19 Feb '25
  • 6:37 pm by Dilsher Dhillon

A confession at the very outset. I’m not a collector, artist, critic or anything of the sort. I love art (who doesn’t?) but am I equipped to write about it? 

I consider myself a dilettante, an interloper, a schmoozer – someone who caught on very early in my 20s about the potential of art as a means to meet right-brained people doing left-of-field things but most importantly, to party. 

 

Thursday, 6th February 2025, Day 1

And as my flight from Mumbai landed in Delhi on Thursday morning, I had every intention of doing just that over the impending four days. Partying the blues of January away. Indulging in an orgiastic, consumptive free-for-all to (temporarily) fill the abyss inside. Connecting with people I’d never meet again. Reconnecting with ones I hadn’t seen in years. 

And looking at some art along the way.

As I enter the fair, the first person I run into is Nikhil Mehta, a theatre director and close friend, who is walking alongside none other than Mira Nair. While I gush effusively at her, speaking at a mile a minute, Shaunak Sen (director of the Oscar-nominated documentary ‘All That Breathes’) joins us. On the verge of exploding, I excuse myself from the group. As I leave, Mira Nair asks me my name again. I tell her, refusing to delude myself that she’ll remember it. Thereafter, I make a beeline for the first hall and walk past a grumpy-looking Shekhar Kapur on his way out. Reader, I’ve only been at the fair for five minutes. 

The reason for Mr Kapur’s grim pallor becomes clear immediately. The hall is packed to the gills. Given that this is day one, everyone here is (ostensibly) an important person – a fact that checks out given that the capital city is the torchbearer of VIP culture.

Overwhelmed by the crowd, I moderate my ambitions and decide to limit today’s gazing to works being presented by artist friends. First up is Sagarika Sundaram’s ‘Bitch in Heat,’ a felt sculpture featuring multiple folds of hand-dyed wool and a dizzying array of colours. I am overwhelmed again, but the good kind. I then hop over to Geek Art’s booth where several people are gawking open-mouthed at Tarini Sethi’s stainless steel and enamel sculpture ‘Undercurrents and the Golden Womb.’ True to her style, the grey and gold piece (the experience of which is elevated by the interplay of shadows on the wall behind) features animal-human hybrids consorting with each other. I feel a lot of things, but mostly pride for my dear friends and their growing, well-deserved recognition.

Before migrating to the BMW Collector’s Lounge where Sagarika and another friend, Kaveri Acharya, an art-focused PR and communications strategist, are waiting for me, I stop by Chemould Colab’s salmon pink booth (smart move, Atyaan, smart move). Amid the frenzy, I’m able to steal Jayeeta Chatterjee aside and get her to talk to me about her lovely, soothing ‘Life in Fragments’ woodcuts (printed on old saris) – depicting women in domestic and pastoral settings going about their daily chores.

 

Vikram Goyal, 2025, at India Art Fair (Image Credits: Longform and the Artist)

 

True to the art world’s devotion to hierarchy and exclusivity, the BMW lounge is only for the most VI of VIPs. There’s oodles of space to move about, as blowhard Indians and clueless expats congregate around a painted supercar. While Sagarika, Kaveri and I wait in line to avail of the open bar, I notice a middle-aged Indian man in a bright orange suit with black stripes. In the mood for some mischief, I approach him pretending to be a writer for Vogue doing a fashion diary. His eyes light up as he talks me through all the outfits he has planned for the weekend (which warrant an entire stand-alone piece). I feign awe as I record our interview, tacitly aware that I’m punching down. Later, I am informed that he’s one of India’s biggest arms dealers. I cast my eyes across the room and see him smiling at me. I wave back nervously, hoping to high heaven that I never told him my real name.

As the opening preview winds down, we exit the hall into the grounds. Everyone has moved outside, and there is a Gadarene rush for what’s left of the free wine. As Sagarika is beckoned by her gallery to do more VIP things around town, Kaveri and I are left to our own devices. We rendezvous with Tarini and another friend Alina and decide to decamp to Aurobindo Market for a quick dinner. The entirety of Okhla is choked with traffic, and it takes us over an hour to emerge onto Outer Ring Road, which is less than a kilometre away. 

Our frustrations are alleviated as we dig into pizza and Coronas on the terrace at Summerhouse Café, an old haunt made famous for hosting an unannounced acoustic session by Chris Martin in 2015. Before heading out, we do a round of tequila shots and launch into an impromptu dance to ‘Plain Jane’ by ASAP Ferg on the empty floor. At that moment, part of me wonders whether this will be as good as the weekend will get.

Our next stop is a 7-minute stroll away in Safdarjung Enclave. The party is hosted by ‘The Bridge,’ an initiative of art curator Phalguni Guliani to promote experimental and riskier works and, she adds, “to have a little bit of fun”. The terrace is an advertisement for cool-kid culture – impeccably, edgily dressed 20-somethings swill beers and smoke cigarettes, illuminated by neon signs, while a moustachioed man in a beanie spins through a playlist of Habibi Funk songs. I feel decidedly un-hip (a strange and new sensation for me). In the line to the bathroom (isn’t that always where the best conversations happen?), I have an animated chat with Gurdev Singh, a Sikh pop artist and collagist whose whimsical recreations of old family photographs make up the bulk of my Screenshots folder. He speaks to me in Punjabi while I respond in English. A bridge indeed. A little after midnight, I make an Irish exit – surmising it’s best not to party myself out on day one.

 

Friday, 7th February 2025, Day 2

I reach the fair at 11:45 AM, a time I deem to be reasonably early. However, there is no escaping the crowds. Before putting in my Airpods (signalling my aversion to socialising), I overhear a girl with a septum piercing calling IAF “South Delhi’s Kumbh mela.

Over the next three hours, I luxuriate in an unmitigated stretch of art viewing. Veritable highlights include Mithu Sen’s ‘Howling Apologist’ watercolour and ink series, starkly depicting men in crisis;  Hemant Chaturvedi’s haunting photographs of shuttered single-screen cinemas across India; Alexander Gorlitzki’s Indian Miniature-inspired pigment and gold works (made in collaboration with painter Riyaz Uddin) juxtaposing the modern with the mythical; Atul Dodiya’s ‘Weeping Ancestors’featuring the portraits of several 19th and 20th-century Indian statesmen painted over a metallic shop shutter; Lancelot Ribeiro’s weird and wonderful ‘Frolic on a Nuclear Playground’ painted in 1965 at a time when apprehensions over global nuclear war reached a fever pitch.

There was also Reyaz Badaruddin’s ‘Private and Public Spaces, a chaotic collage of ceramic pieces meant to evoke the anxiety of house hunting in an Indian metropolis; Ian Malhotra’s painstakingly intricate landscapes, rendered digitally in a series of dots and dashes; Ketaki Sarpotdar’s vibrant and bustling oil painting of a city street, ‘When Forests are On Fire, Wind Willingly or Contingency Becomes its Ally’ (still trying to make sense of that title), full of vibrant, funny details; ‘American Dancer” by Rose Wylie, a 90-year old artist whose bold, punk-inflected style channels the vitality of someone a quarter of her age and finally, Nityan Unnikrishnan’s ‘All I Think of is Growing Old with You,’ a simultaneously eerie and comforting painting depicting an old married couple in their kitchen, with literal skeletons from an open closet between them.

 I even managed to make it to the design section of the fair, where Vikram Goyal’s maximalist wall mural ‘the Garden of Life,’ moulded using a metalworking technique called repoussage, and Tahir Sultan’s bewitching metal and rope Ganesha sculptures are the standouts.

 

‘Weeping Ancestors,’ by Atul Dodiya, 2016-2025, at Vadehra Art Gallery. (Image Credits: India Art Fair)

 

Later, amid the evening exodus, I am kidnapped by Tahir Sultan. We make a quick pit stop at his house, where he switches from an all-beige outfit to an all-black one, while I raid his fridge (and bar). Time is running short and we have to triage. We forgo the Soho House party on the other side of town and stay within Central Delhi. At Bikaner House (which is thankfully empty), I finally get to see Shilpa Gupta’s solo exhibition, which knocks the wind out of me, particularly an installation featuring a rock and a lightbulb going up and down via a pulley – each time coming within striking distance of each other. Words fail me as I write this, and I have no pictures because I left my phone to charge at the front desk. Reader, if you’re in Delhi, you’re committing a crime by not seeing this show.

We then head to a private viewing at Delhi Art Gallery, where two modern collections are being showcased – one centred on Benarasi landscapes and the other on Cubism-inflected works. I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of most modern Indian art (it does very less for me on a purely emotional level), but I am hypnotised, quite literally, by a piece in the latter collection, Devayani Krishna’s ‘Untitled (The Effect of the Moon)’.

 

‘Supper at Emmaus,’ by F N Souza, 1987, at Saffron Art. (Image Credits: Dilsher Dhillon)

 

There is more modern art in store for us at Saffronart and Christie’s Auction Preview at the Oberoi. As soon as we enter, a giant Souza painting ‘Supper at Emmaus’ greets us. The work sets the tone for the rest of the evening, as I gorge myself on mini-burger sliders and Negronis while serious-minded buyers discuss bidding strategies. Rajiv Menon enters, and in less than five minutes, manages to speak to every single person in the room. And I thought I was good at parties.

Later, as Tahir and his crew of Jaipur bon vivants make for Shalini Passi’s house, I look at the time and realise I have a wedding Sangeet to go to in the middle of Chhatarpur. I’m extremely unenthused at the prospect of going back home to Gurgaon, changing into a suit and then returning to Delhi (easily a three-hour ordeal) so I decide to be my most tipsily-uninhibited, entitled self. 

I coax my friend Rhea Sidhu, a client advisor at Christie’s, to introduce me to her older colleague, Nishad – a man who is around my height and build, and happens to be staying at the hotel. It’s a shot in the dark, but it’s worth a try. And boy oh boy, does Nishad prove to be my Good Samaritan. We go up to his room, and he lets me borrow his dark blue suit – and a shirt to boot. After squeezing the life out of him with my arms, I shuffle into a car in the Oberoi portico and head to the wedding.  Traffic in Chhatarpur is a nightmare and in true Delhi style, I arrive a little before 11 PM – only to be the first amongst the young(ish) people to enter. But I look and feel like a million bucks. Five hours later, I am on my way home – drunk, delirious, still reeling from all the art I’ve seen today, and the unexpected act of kindness by a total stranger. 

Read about Saturday and Sunday here

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