There is a particular kind of fatigue that sets into the art world when the same handful of names keep circulating year after year, in galleries, at auctions, on the walls of collectors who have long since stopped looking beyond a familiar shortlist. Contemporary Now was built as a response to that fatigue. Now in its third edition, the exhibition returns to Chennai from 8 to 25 August 2026, bringing together 66 artists under the theme “Practices in Continuum, Tracing the Present.” It is, at its core, an argument for looking forward rather than backwards, and for treating contemporary art not as a speculative footnote but as the main event.
Seven galleries make up this edition: Ashvita’s, Chemould Prescott Road, Chatterjee & Lal, Experimenter, Project 88, TARQ, and Vadehra Art Gallery. Rather than presenting artists as standalone names, each gallery functions as an entry point into a larger body of work, a way of tracing how a single painting or sculpture fits into years of an artist’s evolving practice. It is a structure that rewards patience over impulse, encouraging viewers to understand context before they consider acquisition.
Co-director Ashvin Rajagopalan has been vocal about the problem Contemporary Now is trying to solve. Auction houses, he points out, tend to circle back to the same seventy or eighty artists again and again, a kind of relentless brand reinforcement he compares to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, everything connected, nothing truly new. Contemporary Now pushes back against that pattern, choosing instead to make space for living artists whose practices are still very much in motion.
Despite the range of mediums and geographies represented, co-director Priyanjoli Basu has noticed a common thread running through the work. Many of the artists in this edition are grappling with the same pressing global concerns, climate change, ecology, displacement, migration, and war. What sets their work apart, however, is how personal these responses tend to be. The big, unwieldy issues of the present moment are filtered through something quieter and more internal, giving the exhibition an unexpectedly reflective undertone.
One of the more striking observations to come out of this edition is around representation. Basu notes that female artists are showing up in far greater numbers within contemporary practice, a marked departure from the Moderns era, when women were largely absent from the canon. Rajagopalan sees a parallel shift on the collecting side too, with more women stepping into that role as wealthy art-patron families increasingly let women take the lead in acquisition decisions, a change he attributes to a broader loosening of who gets to wield financial and curatorial influence within these families.
The choice of city is not incidental. Several gallerists spoke about what Chennai specifically brings to this exhibition. Roshini Vadehra of Vadehra Art Gallery sees it as an opportunity to reach audiences well outside the usual Delhi-Mumbai circuit, while Henna Kapadia of TARQ points out that many of the participating artists are showing in Chennai for the very first time. For Chatterjee & Lal, the third edition marks something more permanent: the sense that this event has become a genuine fixture on the region’s art calendar rather than a passing initiative.
In a departure from convention, the exhibition does away with traditional wall labels altogether. In their place is Eicon, a proprietary app developed by Rajagopalan and his team, which lets visitors scan an artwork on their phone to pull up detailed context and specifications. It is a small but meaningful fix for a familiar museum frustration, no more squinting at tiny plaques, no more aimlessly photographing wall text just to look it up later.
The exhibition’s ambitions stretch well past the walls of Lalit Kala Akademi. Across the city, a series of linked programmes extend the conversation further. ‘Unruly Bodies,’ staged at Alliance Française and organised by Avtar Foundation, draws a line from Modern masters like F.N. Souza and S.H. Raza through to contemporary artists such as Shilpa Gupta, alongside emerging names. Other highlights include Ashvita’s Open House and ‘Madras Abstraction,’ each adding another layer to the city-wide dialogue Contemporary Now is trying to build.
At the centre of it all, of course, are the artists themselves. The lineup of 66 spans generations and mediums, featuring names like Anita Dube, Anju Dodiya, Atul Dodiya, Jitish Kallat, Mithu Sen, N.S. Harsha, Raqs Media Collective, Reena Saini Kallat, Shakuntala Kulkarni, and the duo Thukral and Tagra, alongside a wide range of emerging voices from across the country.
Taken together, Contemporary Now Edition III is less an art fair in the traditional sense and more an invitation, to slow down, to look past the object, and to engage with the ideas and practices shaping Indian contemporary art right now. Whether you are a seasoned collector or a first-time visitor, the exhibition asks the same thing of everyone who walks through its doors: pay attention to the present, because it is still being written.
