RR Recommended: Jaya Asokan's Favourite Galleries Around The World

Jaya Asokan is not short of opinions on where art is heading next. As Fair Director of the India Art Fair, a graduate of Parsons School of Design in New York, and one of the most influential figures shaping how South Asian art is presented on the international stage, she spends her year travelling between studio visits, biennale previews and gallery openings from Delhi to Venice. In conversation with Robb Report India, she mentions her favourites. The Venice Biennale one moment, the Ladakh Biennale the next, before circling back to something closer to home her enduring affection for gallery neighbourhoods, from Mumbai's Fort and Colaba art district to the Lodhi Road cluster in Delhi. She is emphatic, too, that South and Southeast Asian art deserves a far bigger seat at the global table. Below, in her own recommendation, are five galleries and design spaces she returns to.

VāYU, Delhi

Tucked into the Lodhi Road market in the heart of Lutyens' Delhi, VāYU Design for Living is like a living archive of Indian material culture. Founded by Parsons-trained designer Vivek Sahni, the space moved into its current home after several years inside Bikaner House, expanding along the way to include a dedicated exhibition space, Gallery VāYU. The result is a rare hybrid, part concept store, part curated gallery, where hand-carved Naga wooden panels might sit near contemporary ceramics, Phulkari textiles or mid-century furniture. Sahni describes the project as a platform for "preservation, innovation and dialogue," built on the belief that craft is a living, evolving practice rather than a museum relic. Gallery VāYU's rotating exhibition programme, which has recently turned its attention to contemporary ceramic practice, sits alongside the store's permanent collection of textiles, sculpture and folk art. For Asokan, it is precisely this refusal to separate "craft" from "fine art" that makes VāYU essential viewing.

Nilaya Anthology, Mumbai

Ask design director Pavitra Rajaram what Nilaya Anthology is, and she will tell you, what it is not. "It's not a brand, it's not a product," she says of the project. A considered dodge that says as much about its ambition as any straightforward description could. The Sanskrit word nilaya means "dwelling"; an anthology, a gathering of stories. Together, they describe a Mumbai space built to hold both at once. A material world that is, in Rajaram's words, "both material and immaterial, tangible and intangible, because that is also how culture is." Nilaya Anthology positions itself as a new kind of cultural project for India's design scene built around narrative and craft heritage as much as around finished, sellable objects. For Asokan, its arrival on the international design stage marks something significant.

Galleria Continua

Few galleries have taken the idea of "unexpected exhibition spaces" as literally as Galleria Continua. Founded in 1990 by Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi and Maurizio Rigillo inside a former cinema in the medieval Tuscan town of San Gimignano, the gallery has spent three and a half decades expanding into some of the more improbable corners of the art world. In 2004, it became the first foreign gallery with an international programme to open in Beijing; in 2007, it added a rural outpost in Les Moulins, outside Paris, built for large-scale, site-specific work; by 2015, it had installed itself in a 1930s cinema in Havana's Chinatown, deliberately choosing community-facing programming. More recent additions read like a tour with a space inside The St. Regis Rome, a historic parish building in São Paulo, an intimate room in Paris's Matignon district and most strikingly, an outpost inside Dubai's Burj Al Arab. What unites them, according to the gallery's own guiding philosophy, is a commitment to connecting contemporary art with the specific local culture of each place it enters. For Asokan, Galleria Continua is a case study in what an international gallery can look like when it treats geography as a curatorial tool.

David Zwirner, London

David Zwirner needs little introduction, but its scale still bears repeating: five cities, more than seventy artists and estates on its books, and a program that moves fluidly between primary market discoveries and secondary market heavyweight. The gallery opened in 1993 on Greene Street in New York's SoHo, relocated to Chelsea in 2002, and began its international expansion a decade later with a Mayfair gallery on Grafton Street in 2012 — its first foothold in London, and the branch Asokan singles out here. Since then, the gallery has continued to grow at pace: Hong Kong followed in 2018, Paris in 2019, and Los Angeles arrived in 2023 with a standalone building added the following year. Every one of Zwirner's spaces, notably, has been designed by Selldorf Architects, giving the gallery's disparate locations a shared architectural language. Beyond its exhibition programme, the gallery has built out a genuine publishing and media arm: David Zwirner Books, launched in 2014; the podcast Dialogues, now in its tenth season; and Utopia Editions, its fine art print imprint. For Asokan, the London gallery represents a benchmark for how a commercial gallery can operate at global scale while still backing genuinely experimental, artist-led programming.

neugerriemschneider, Berlin

Founded in 1994 by Tim Neuger and Burkhard Riemschneider in Berlin's Mitte district, neugerriemschneider has spent three decades quietly shaping the careers of some of the most significant conceptual and installation artists working today. Its roster reads like a contemporary canon including Olafur Eliasson, Ai Weiwei, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tobias Rehberger, Isa Genzken and Elizabeth Peyton among them. The gallery has built its reputation on meticulously staged solo and group shows that favour ambitious, often site-specific installation work over easily transportable objects, and it remains a fixture on the international fair circuit, with a regular presence at Art Basel. For Asokan, neugerriemschneider is a reminder of what sustained, artist-first gallery representation can achieve over the long term.