Inside Icons of Art: Condé Nast Traveller and Tiffany & Co. host an elegant celebration of South Asian creativity

On Sunday evening, a few days ahead of Frieze London, one of the world’s most influential contemporary art fairs, Condé Nast Traveller’s Global Editorial Director, Divia Thani, hosted an intimate cocktail gathering at Annabel’s in Mayfair in partnership with Tiffany & Co. The art crowd spilt into the club’s gilded Elephant Room, where leading gallerists, curators, collectors, and cultural voices from across the Indian subcontinent gathered to toast the growing presence of South Asian art on the global stage. Among the guests were Nadia Samdani, Aarti Amit Lohia, Shalini Misra, Rajshree Pathy, Esha Arora, Anita Rani and Roshini Vadehra, who joined to listen to the husband-and-wife artist duo Bharti Kher and Subodh Gupta in conversation on the love of art.

Kher and Gupta, often described as the first couple of Indian contemporary art, met through their shared love for the discipline in Delhi in the ’90s – Gupta arriving from Patna, Bihar, and Kher from London. Without English as their common language, art became their shorthand. “Art is a very universal, amazing and incredible language,” shared Kher with the audience gathered.

Kher’s acclaimed practice – spanning painting, sculpture, and installation – often turns the bindi into both material and metaphor, a meditation on identity and multiplicity. Meanwhile, Gupta, who trained as a painter before turning to sculpture, is known for transforming humble stainless-steel utensils into monumental works that reflect on labour, migration, and ritual. Between them, their works live in the collections of Tate, the Pompidou, the Guggenheim and Hauser & Wirth, and have been shown at the Venice Biennale and Victoria and Albert Museum.

In her latest role as mentor for Tiffany & Co.’s first-ever partnership with Frieze London’s Artist-to-Artist initiative, Kher has joined five other international artists in championing emerging talent. The collaboration, which underscores Tiffany & Co.’s enduring commitment to creativity and craftsmanship, celebrates artistic dialogue across generations.

Titled ‘Icons of Art’, the evening’s conversation opened with remarks from Divia Thani, who framed the night within South Asia’s meteoric rise in the global art scene. “It really feels like in the last year or two London has seen a frenzy of attention on South Asia,” she began. “From Ancient India: Living Traditions at the British Museum, to Arpita Singh at the Serpentine, to Hamad Butt at Whitechapel Gallery, and A Story of South Asian Art opening at the Royal Academy of Arts, South Asian art is everywhere.” She noted that Christie’s and Sotheby’s have reported record prices for South Asian artists, adding that “Frieze has seen a 49 per cent rise in VIP attendees from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka — with India alone up 64 per cent.”

The South Asian collector is increasingly one of the most dynamic forces in the global market today. Just days earlier, the BBC reported that Saffronart’s latest Delhi auction fetched $40.2 million (£29.9 million) — the highest-ever total for South Asian art. Industry estimates predict India’s art market will grow to $1.1 billion by 2030, even as global art sales contract (a 2024 Art Basel and UBS report recorded a 12% drop worldwide). “The South Asian art market has reached an inflection point,” said Frieze’s newly appointed VIP Consultant for India, Rhea Kuruvilla. “It’s now recognised as a dynamic ecosystem rich with history, culture, and talent, with immense potential.”

Across Regent’s Park, that potential is on full display at Frieze. This year, a record number of South Asian galleries, among them Nature Morte, Vadehra, DHE, Project 88, Experimenter, and Gallery Maskara, are exhibiting at Frieze and Frieze Masters. “I really wanted to celebrate this moment that the South Asian art world is having here in London,” Thani reflected.

The conversation unfolded with humour and candour, skipping from the rise of AI – “It’s just another tool, like charcoal, pencil or even a computer,” said Gupta – to Kher’s advice for emerging artists: “Make your own club. Don’t join ours. That’s what makes the dialogue in the art world.” Both reflected on how far Indian art has come. “We’ve come a really long way – people are curious, interested, and open,” said Kher, while Gupta added, “A lot has changed. Look at the Biennales in Kochi, Lahore, and Dhaka – they’ve given people opportunities to see great things.”

Reflecting on her own journey from West to East, Kher shared her full-circle moment with the audience. “Going to India was a calling,” she said. “I don’t think I would have made the kind of work I make today if I had stayed. Everything in India is technicolour — the sun is 180 degrees above your head. There’s no way I could have made that work sitting in London.” It all came full circle when Kher was celebrated in London years later with her first solo show in 2010. “It took me 20 years — I had to leave London to come back,” she reminisced.

For her Tiffany & Co. assignment for Frieze, Kher selected an artist whose work, she felt, hadn’t yet been seen by the world. “When you find work that you haven’t seen before, it excites you,” she said of T Venkanna. “His art lingered on me like a perfume or a smell; it stayed. There’s something awkward and disturbing about it. It goes into dark spaces – sexuality, gender, power. That’s what makes the dialogue in the art world – when somebody dares to show something we’re not all comfortable looking at.”