Asia Art Archive in India (2026)

11/03/2026

[Delhi by DESIGN: Part I – Cultural Infrastructure and the City | AAA in India, New Delhi | On view till 30 May. 2026]

We are excited to share some close-up installation views from our latest exhibition 'Delhi by DESIGN: Part I – Cultural Infrastructure and the City.' Drop by our office space to explore the evolving landscape of art and cultural institutions in the capital, as restaged through materials drawn from Design magazine (1957–88), including editorials, interdisciplinary writings, advertisements, cover designs, blueprints, and architectural layouts.

The exhibition will be on view until 30 May 2026 (Monday - Friday, 11 am to 5 pm at Asia Art Archive in India, New Delhi).

Walk-ins not allowed. To visit, book an appointment through the link in bio.

24/02/2026

[New Arrivals in the Reading Room | Publications from Kiran Nadar Museum of Art]

We are pleased to receive a donation of publications and exhibition catalogues from Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi for AAA in India’s Reading Room.

Highlights include:

📚 Cynical Love: Life in the Everyday (2012) was a group exhibition that explored meditations on technology, and its position within a globalised world.

📚 Zones of Contact: Propositions on the Museum (2013) draws on curatorial, artistic, and archival methodologies to articulate the museum as a social space that fosters engagement across cultures and communities.

📚 Seven Contemporaries (2013) brings together artists’ notes and interviews to reimagine the received category of “women artists” through the practices of Anita Dube, Bharti Kher, Dayanita Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Sheba Chhachhi, Sheela Gowda, and Sonia Khurana.

📚 You Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag (2015) was conceived in three parts as a retrospective exhibition of artist Nalini Malani, spanning her practice from 1969 to 2014.

📚 Collection Highlights (2010–2017) comprises three volumes documenting exhibitions held at KNMA during its initial years.

📚 Our Time for a Future Caring (2019) covers the India Pavilion exhibition commemorating the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi at the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2019, with notes on the curatorial premise and exhibition-making as a commemorative gesture.

📚 KNMA Exhibitions 2010–2020, part of the Institutional Memory Series, is a log of exhibition-making at the museum in its first decade.

📚 The Archival Gaze: A Timeline of Photography in India (2022) is an edited volume of essays reflecting on technological and aesthetic developments in photography in India since the 1840s.

📚 Very Small Feelings (2023) reimagines the figure of the child and makes new propositions about childhood.

To browse our catalogue on Librarika or to book an appointment to visit our Reading Room in New Delhi, please use the links in bio.

04/02/2026

[Announcing AAA in India’s new exhibition]

We are thrilled to present “Delhi by DESIGN,” a new exhibition series that re-stages conversations on and around the city of Delhi from the legendary Design magazine and locates them in our contemporary contexts and conditions.

Set to unfold in three parts at AAA in India’s office space in New Delhi over the course of 2026, Part I of the exhibition “Cultural Infrastructure and the City,” on view now, explores the numerous spaces and infrastructures for art and cultural institutions in Delhi that featured in Design magazine. These spaces were designed, planned, and built from the 1950s onwards, producing a robust ecosystem and vision for art and culture in a newly independent nation. We ask, what has shifted since then, and what remains the same? What is the place of these infrastructures and institutions in contemporary discourse? At a time when critical voices—be it about culture or politics—are stifled, how do we read Design’s resounding commitment to public culture?

Design (1957–88) was an English-language monthly magazine from India edited by Patwant Singh. It carried writing and commentary on architecture, visual art, industrial and graphic design, and urban planning in India.

The exhibition will be on view until 30 May 2026. Visit by appointment only. Walk-ins not allowed. Book an appointment through the link in bio.

Our gratitude to Meher Wilshaw and the family of Patwant Singh. Over 150 issues of Design are now accessible online via AAA's website.

Image: Cover design by Pieter Brattinga in Design: Incorporating Indian Builder, vol. 22, no. 11 (November 1978)

28/01/2026

Inlaks Foundation () and Asia Art Archive in India are pleased to announce Afreen Akhtar () as the grantee for the Inlaks-AAA Art Grant 2026.

Afreen's project for the grant is titled “Ye wairana qafas bhi, ashiyana bhi, chaman bhi hai: an audio-visual enquiry into the historicity and (un)broken lineage of The Anjuman Yateem Khana Islamia in Kanpur.” About the site of her inquiry, Afreen writes, “The 131-year-old building of the Anjuman Yateem Khana Islamia stands red and opaque at the heart of Chamanganj, a Muslim ghetto in Kanpur. The arched sign over its facade still reads ‘Mohamaddan Orphanage, Cawnpore.’”

As the place where her mother and now deceased uncle spent their childhood, Afreen aims to “visualise and (un)archive the historicity of the building and its residents” as a way of retracing her own inheritance of loss and abandonment.

The project will situate the building in the broader historical stream as a site of protest and of bearing witness to evolving forms of marginality. Afreen’s project plans “not just to engage with the archives but also to question and challenge the way archival creation takes place. It not only explores the historicity of subaltern spaces like the orphanage but also takes a historiographical approach to question how these spaces are remembered and forgotten.”

The line in the title of Afreen's project is from Iqbal’s Urdu poem “Tasveer-e-Dard (The Portrait Of Anguish)” and translates to “this wilderness is the cage, the nest, as well as the garden.”

Afreen Akhtar (she/they) is a q***r Muslim writer and multidisciplinary artist based between Delhi and Bir, Himachal Pradesh. The seeds of their practice lie in marginality, gender identity, intergenerational trauma, the erasure/rewriting of history, and othering.

Read more about the project on our website. Link in bio.

Image: Little Afreen with her mother in a photo studio to commemorate their first Eid, 1998. Courtesy of Afreen Akhtar.

06/01/2026

[New Arrivals in the Reading Room | Donations by Dr. Raj Kumar Mazinder⁣]

As the AAAI Reading Room reopens in the new year, we are delighted to share a selection of publications, exhibition catalogues, and brochures generously donated by eminent artist and scholar Dr. Raj Kumar Mazinder. These materials on recent histories of art, particularly from Assam and other regions, are now accessible to the public by appointment in our office in New Delhi.

Highlights from the donation include:

📚 An Exhibition of Paintings by Hemanta Misra (12-18 March 1969), published by All India Fine Arts & Crafts Society, New Delhi

📚 Exhibition of Paintings & Drawings by Raj Kumar Mazinder (18–20 June 1990) at State Art Gallery, Guwahati

📚 1st Eastern Print Biennale 1995, organised by Eastern Zonal Cultural Centre, Calcutta, Rashtriya Lalit Kala Kendra, Calcutta, and Rashtriya Lalit Kala Kendra, Bhubaneshwar

📚 Undo Objects: An Exhibition of Creative Works (23-29 April 2006) at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath (Participating artists: Swarupa Shah, Raghavendra Rao KV, Raj Kumar Mazinder, Nikhileshwar Baruah, Manoj Roy, Maneswar Brahma, Laishram Surjit Khuman, Kishor Kumar Das, Debananda Ulup)

📚 Shilpkala: A Journal of Fine Arts (Jan-April 2015), published by Jiban Krishana Shil in Bengali and English

📚 3 Artist: A Group Show of Paintings by Kishor Kumar Das, Laishram Surjit Khuman, and Raj Kumar Mazinder at Kaleidoscope Gallery of Contemporary Art, Vadodara

To visit our Reading Room in New Delhi, please make an appointment through the link in bio.

24/11/2025

{Assembling Art Archives: Case Studies from South Asia}

Public Symposium Day 3
27 November 2025 | 10:30am-1pm
Majlis, 1st Floor, Yalamaya Kendra, Lalitpur

The last day of the symposium presents varied processes of building the archives of diverse arts organisations from their specific contexts.

We hope this symposium brings forth fresh perspectives and acts as a platform and sharing and learning together.

To see the full programme and register for the symposium, please check the links in our bio.

24/11/2025

{Assembling Art Archives: Case Studies from South Asia}

Public Symposium Day 2
26 November 2025 | 10:30am-4pm
Majlis, 1st Floor, Yalamaya Kendra, Lalitpur

The second day of the symposium features two panels by the Assembling Art Archives: Workshops from South Asia cohort on "Personal Archives and Narrative Possibilities" and "Archiving People, Places, and Things".

Join us in exploring the possibilities of retelling art historical narratives and cultural histories in the region through the lens of archival practices.

To see the full programme and register , please check the links in our bio.

23/11/2025

{Symposium | Assembling Art Archives: Case Studies from South Asia}

Special Lecture

Invisible labour and patience: A process of unleashing the AIF's collections' agency

Speaker: yasmine eid-sabbagh, Arab Image Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon
25 November 2025
4:30-6pm

The first day of the symposium concludes with a special lecture by yasmine eid-sabbagh.

In this presentation, yasmine eid-sabbagh will speak about the archiving practice at the Arab Image Foundation () that was established in 1997 in Beirut. Over the past 27 years the archive has developed and enriched its archiving, preservation and research practices to endure the harsh economic and political conditions in Lebanon. Since 2019 the country has faced an unprecedented devaluation of its currency, as well as inflation. Consequently the well trained youth are leaving the country to find better living conditions abroad. Since October 2023 Lebanon is at war with its southern neighbour and experienced the most violent bombings of its history during the autumn of 2024. It is in this context that the AIF which receives no state funding, cares for the collections in its custody, as well as for its team. The awareness of the necessity of care and its limits, is what allows the AIF to generate knowledge from its collections that challenge not only imperial narratives, but also western methodologies, and the very language that upholds their dominance.

To see the full programme and register for the symposium, please check the links in our bio.

22/11/2025

{Assembling Art Archives: Case Studies from South Asia}

Public Symposium Day 1
25 November 2025 | 10am-4pm
Majlis, 1st Floor, Yalamaya Kendra, Lalitpur, Nepal

ASAP and AAA-I begin the three day symposium with two panels by the Assembling Art Archives: Workshops from South Asia cohort on "Art Spaces and Their Archives" and "Artist Archives and Their Institutional Contexts".

Join us in learning and engaging with methods and questions around archiving practices related to artist-run and independent art initiatives, as well as personal archives of artists situated within institutional settings across the region.

To see the full programme and register for the symposium, please check the links in our bio.

19/11/2025

[SSAF–AAA Research Grant for Archiving Histories of Ideas, Art, and Visual Culture 2025 Grantee | Thangkhankhup Hanghal ]

The Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation ( ) and Asia Art Archive in India are pleased to announce the grantee for the SSAF–AAA Research Grant for Archiving Histories of Ideas, Art, and Visual Culture 2025: Thangkhankhup Hanghal (aka Khup/Kooper ) for his project “Zokhankhual: Indigenous Storywork in Nengzalam Guite’s Comics.”

Khup’s project intends to research into and build an archive of Zokhankhual, a comic series by Nengzalam Guite that originated in Lamka, Manipur, written in the Paite language, with around 300 volumes published between 1982 and 2015. Khup writes, “Zokhankhual is a complex cultural and political document. Emerging from the “Zomi consciousness” movement of the 1980s, it is deeply embedded in the region’s history, providing a unique vernacular perspective on a pivotal moment of identity formation. The series serves as a critical bridge between the Paite community’s rich oral storytelling traditions and modern illustrative forms, establishing a unique relationship between the oral, the visual, and the textual.”

Khup’s research will involve a combination of oral history and contextual research, translation and annotation, as well as community engagement and discussion. The final intended outcome will be a publicly accessible, comprehensive digital archive in the form of a dedicated website.

Thangkhankhup Hanghal (aka Khup/Kooper) is a writer, researcher, curator, and creative practitioner. A graduate from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, he teaches art history and writing at the S.N. School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad. Guided by Jo-ann Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem’s conception of “indigenous storywork,” his current research and practice focuses on indigenous storytelling and decolonial frameworks among tribal communities in Northeast India.

Khup’s grant commences on 1 December 2025.

Image courtesy of Sangmuan Hangsing

14/11/2025

Public Symposium | Assembling Art Archives: Case Studies from South Asia

Join us in Kathmandu for the three-day symposium centred on the art archives in their various contexts. The programme brings together the Assembling Art Archives: Workshops from South Asia cohort from different regions in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The symposium will be the first instance for 20 workshop participants to gather in-person, as well as for them to share their methods, questions, challenges, and excitements for the archives they have been engaging with.

The symposium opens the conversation to the public and hopes to become a moment for gathering, sharing, and learning. We invite you all to join us in thinking together about art, history, and community.

For more details on the symposium panels and speakers, please click here:
https://aaa.org.hk/en/programmes/programmes/symposium-assembling-art-archives-case-studies-from-south-asia

Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfeWyV3gmOppwc-rGNq78PLRacQQgi6zMk76VgJ-HbWNmvNMw/viewform

15/10/2025

[Open Call for Inlaks–AAA Art Grant 2026]

Inlaks Foundation and Asia Art Archive in India are pleased to announce the open call for the Inlaks–AAA Art Grant 2026, dedicated to supporting experimental approaches to practicing art today.

The grant will encourage artists to propose methods of art-making that incorporate research, collaboration, workshops, and formal experiments to explore the imaginations, architectures, sensoria, and interfaces of the archive.

This open call seeks proposals that demonstrate a critical and imaginative approach around the archive as concept, as systems, and as medium. The provocation to artists applying for the grant is: "What shall we do with the archive?"

The deadline for applications is Sunday, 30 November 2025.

For details on the application process and eligibility, please visit the link given below:

https://aaa.org.hk/en/programmes/programmes/open-call-for-inlaksaaa-art-grant-2026/

Asia Art Archive in India

11/03/2026

24/02/2026

04/02/2026

28/01/2026

06/01/2026

24/11/2025

24/11/2025

23/11/2025

22/11/2025

19/11/2025

14/11/2025

15/10/2025

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