The 2026 ART MUMBAI Speaker Series, presented by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, explores developments from across the art world, from institutional legacies and public art to women artists and emerging technologies.

Hosted in the Aditya Birla Auditorium, the Speaker Series aims to stimulate both questions and answers, while providing an opportunity to hear directly from the people shaping the art world today.

Art, Nation, and the Politics of Display
Thursday, November 12th, 3:30pm-4:30pm
Speakers: Kulapat Yantrasast, Jitish Kallat, Roobina Karode, Dr. Deepanjana Klein

Biennales have become one of the most dynamic events on the global art calendar, platforms where artistic exchange, national identity, and cultural ambition meet. This panel explores the possibilities of the biennale—what could happen when diplomacy, capital and art intersect, and how the biennale can channel this confluence into long-lasting connection, care and productive exchange

Scaling Up: The Future of Art Institutions in Asia
Friday, November 13th, 12:00pm-1:00pm
Speakers: Lydia Yee, Manuel Rabaté, Zeina Arida, Dr. Deepanjana Klein

Across West Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, new museums, foundations, and cultural infrastructure are emerging at a pace few could have predicted a decade ago. This panel asks whether an art institution is truly scalable, and what scale can mean: physical expansion, programmatic reach, digital presence, or influence, for public and private institutions alike.

Why We Collect: From Private Passion to Public Legacy
Friday, November 13th, 2:00pm-3:00pm
Speakers: Kiran Nadar, Sunil Hirani, Dipti Mathur, Kito de Boer, Minal Vazirani

The strongest collections build a bridge between what came before and what comes next. South Asian art spans millennia, and no single collector holds all of it. In this conversation, Kiran Nadar is joined by members of the KNMA Board, collectors who have each spent decades building their own chapter of that story. Together they reflect on their collecting journeys and how that experience is now shaping KNMA 2.0.

The Fine Print of Fine Art
Friday, November 13th, 3:30pm-4:30pm
Speakers: Kirti Balasubramanian, Punya Nagpal

In this panel, experts in law and the auction market will explore what collectors can resell, reproduce and exhibit, copyright laws, and how heritage rules affect antiquities and export. The panel also explored the ownership of performance art that leaves no object to hold, digital works, NFTs, AI-generated art, and murals and sculptures in public spaces that belong to everyone and no one at once.

Book Launch: My Tyebi - A Memoir
Friday, 13th November, 5:00pm-6:00pm
Speakers: Sakina Tyeb Mehta, Shabana Azmi, Himani Mehta Dehlvi, Nusrat F Jafri, Vaseem Ahmed Dehlvi, Yusuf Mehta, Minal Vazirani, Dinesh Vazirani

This book launch presents My Tyebi, a memoir of a life lived beside one of India's most celebrated modern artists, Tyeb Mehta. Narrated by his wife, Sakina Mehta, the book takes us beyond the galleries, exhibitions and public acclaim, and into the personal world of Tyeb Mehta. The conversation will feature the book’s authors and members of the Tyeb Mehta Foundation—offering diverse perspectives on the life and legacy of Tyeb Mehta. The event will include readings by Shabana Azmi.

This event is supported by the Tyeb Mehta Foundation and the Saffronart Foundation.

A Poet and a Painter
Friday, November 13th, 6:00pm-7:00pm
Speakers: Javed Akhtar, Baaraan Ijlal, Ranjit Hoskote

How do different forms of art interact? Poet Javed Akhtar and painter Baaraan Ijlal, who have collaborated on projects together, will explore how different artistic media can become translations for one another. The panel will look at what may be kept, discarded or built upon through the act of translating, how different media collaborate across craft, and the impact that translation has upon meaning.

Living Legacies
Saturday, November 14th, 11:30am-12:30pm
Speakers: Krupa Amin, Geetha Mehra, Amita Malkani, Dr Naman P Ahuja, Siddharth Somaiya

2026 marks a milestone anniversary for several organisations in India’s art ecosystem—organisations across facets of the art world, that have played important roles in cultivating the Indian art scene as we know it today. They create space for dialogue and discourse, support artists and fuel the art ecosystem and economy. This panel will explore how these organisations have sustained their vision, adapted to an evolving art landscape and even collaborated with one another, all of which have ensured their relevance even today.

Satish Gujral: The Modernist and His Many Worlds
Saturday, November 14th, 1:30pm-2:30pm
Speakers: Feroze Gujral, Kishore Singh

Celebrating Satish Gujral's centenary retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, this panel will take a look back at Gujral— his oeuvre, defined by the diversity of his mediums, his role in shaping Indian modernism, and The Gujral Foundation, which nurtures emerging talent. The panel will also explore the role of the Indian modernists in today’s contemporary art landscape.

Women to Watch 2027: A Book Arts Revolution
Saturday, November 14th, 3:00pm-4:00pm
Speakers: Indu Antony, Vidya Shivdas, Veeranganakumari Solanki, Minal Vazirani

ART MUMBAI returns with Women to Watch, an initiative of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA). Artist Indu Antony and consulting curator Vidya Shivdas will talk about Antony’s practice, which explores the experiences of gendered bodies, her community work and her creation of spaces for artistic expression, photography and book art. Indu's practice aligns with NMWA's conviction that women's voices, bodies, and labour have a right to be centred.

This panel is supported by the Saffronart Foundation.

Enter the Art: How Immersive Tech Is Redrawing the Gallery Walls
Saturday, November 14th, 5:00pm-6:00pm
Speakers: Alap Parikh, Sonia Parekh, Asad Lalljee, Alessandro Simonetti Lustig

The gallery space itself is being redefined with the prevalence of immersive technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), virtual and augmented reality (AR/VR), that have created new ways to engage with art, and draw in new sets of people into galleries. This panel will see artists, technologists, curators and critics discuss the shift in gallery systems and modes of interaction, looking at how technology reshapes artistic authorship, institutional accessibility and art experience.

Reframing the City: Public Art in India
Saturday, November 14th, 06:00pm-07:00pm
Speakers: Vishal K. Dar, Ranjit Hoskote, Veeranganakumari Solanki, Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi

Public art has become one of the most visible, and most contested, forms of contemporary practice in Indian cities. Murals transform neglected walls into landmarks, foundations fund large-scale interventions in stepwells and heritage sites, and artists work at civic and even high-altitude scale rather than within gallery walls. But beneath the celebratory framing lie harder questions: who commissions this work, who it is really for, and who sustains it once the launch is over.

What Is Art Made Of?
Sunday, November 15th, 2:00pm- 3:00pm
Speakers: Jayari Burman, Karishma Swali, Sandeep Khosla, Kishore Singh

Materials carry both meaning and collective memory, shaping the significance and relevance of an artwork. From watercolour, ink, shells and gold leaf that retell myth and folk memory, to textile crafts, used to create new meaning and collaboration between artists, material has been a medium that carries meaning and memory across generations. This panel will explore art authorship when art is made by a collective, the overlap between art and craft, and how craftsmanship and delicacy shape value.