A season for textiles, from Union Budget to biggest India Art Fair so far

As textiles return to the policy spotlight, India Art Fair reflects this moment, exploring fabric and fibre as living archives of labour, identity, and cultural memory

February has begun with a good amount of conversation around textiles. First, the Union Budget put the sector, which is one of India’s oldest and most diverse, at the heart of the country’s growth story, with the finance minister turning the spotlight on handlooms and announcing mega textile parks and policy support. The next day, the long-delayed India-US trade deal signalled tariff relief for several industries, including textiles. This renewed attention now finds a cultural echo at the India Art Fair, where, besides other forms of creative expression, fabric and fibre are being explored not just as materials, but as repositories of identity, belonging, labour, and living knowledge. 

The fair, now in its 17th edition, begins today and will run till February 8 in New Delhi. With a record 135 exhibitors, 27 of them new, it is the largest to date. 

Among those drawing from threads and weaves is Australian First Nations artist-designer Grace Lillian Lee, who is presenting at India Art Fair for the first time. She brings a vibrant new body of work, titled ‘The Winds of Guardians’, which celebrates the grasshopper-weaving traditions of the Indigenous Torres Strait Islanders, of whom she is a descendant. And while her art is grounded in traditions, she adapts materials and scale to speak within contemporary spaces. 

“It feels meaningful to be sharing my practice in a context where textiles, adornment, and material knowledge have such deep cultural and ceremonial histories,” Lee says about exhibiting in India. Rather than a sense of arrival, she describes it as “entering into an ongoing conversation”, and points to the “shared histories of weaving, making, and cultural knowledge”. 

Lee’s practice is a convergence of art, craft and design, all of which is today central to India Art Fair. The fair’s Design section, now in its third year, particularly builds on this approach, “foregrounding craft, material intelligence, and cross-disciplinary thinking as central to contemporary cultural production,” says fair director Jaya Asokan. 

Asokan adds that in the context of artificial intelligence and machine-led production, artists and curators are returning to hand-made processes, “frequently drawing on the familial and personal archives”. 

Among the others engaging with textiles and fabric are Afrah Shafiq, whose creation, “A Giant Sampler”, inspired by the embroidery sampler, has been scaled and is to be displayed as a digital tapestry on the fair’s facade. Commissioned by BMW India, the work, with over a hundred motifs, is described as “spanning centuries and geographies — from the 1500s to the present, across regions including Japan, Mexico, Egypt, parts of Europe and Asia.” It draws attention to “textile motifs and practices that have historically shaped women’s lives — from everyday labour to rites of passage”. 

Other significant textile-, fabric-, and embroidery-based works include those by Anju Dodiya in a parallel programme at Vadehra Art Gallery and Shilpa Gupta, whose art explores themes of borders, power, and human movement. 

Past and present, material and meaning, and through it, a sense of continuity. India Art Fair’s programming is a conversation around all of this, both in the gallery presentations and the outdoor art projects such as ‘Extinction Archive’ by Kulpreet Singh, presented by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA); ‘The Charpai Project’ by Ayush Kasliwal x Goji, supported by Serendipity Arts; and Paresh Maity’s ‘Recycle of Life’, presented by Art Alive Gallery. 

Meanwhile, parallel city-wide exhibitions include the first retrospective of Tyeb Mehta at KNMA, besides exhibitions at National Gallery of Modern Art, and the first solo exhibition in India by Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei at Nature Morte. 

Looking ahead, Lee says she would like to see international art fairs create more meaningful spaces for First Nations creatives, “involving Indigenous artists in curatorial conversations, decision-making, and long-term partnerships, rather than positioning them only as participants”.