The OPEN Design Talks by Border&Fall at the India Art Fair are framed by the often-unseen intervals within and around design practice, where ideas form and decisions take shape. Across five nuanced sessions, the programme unpacks these “spaces between” through conversations with diverse practitioners, examining narrative agency, material memory, visual culture, and the inflection points shaping both individuals and industry. As the fair’s inaugural design talks series, outlines a framework for shared authorship and collective insight, positioning India as an active, central voice in contemporary global design.
February 6-8, 2026
India Art Fair - NSIC Grounds, New Delhi, India
#1 At The Table | Feb 6th from 2.30 - 3.30 pm - Nuvama Private Wealth Verve Lounge
(register at open@borderandfall.com)
This session examines the act of gathering as a framework shaped by visual culture, method, and repeated ways of thinking. Practitioners will present visual references—from archives to materials and environments—and reflect on how these shape design decisions across food, objects, and space. Situated within the Indian context, the conversation considers a rapidly expanding visual vocabulary—one that is both richly layered and, at times, self-referential—and asks how designers sustain relevance through experimentation, iteration, and new ways of seeing…and gathering.
Daksha Salam
Multidisciplinary Designer
Prerna Garg
Founder, A Dialogue
Priyansha Jain
Founder and Creative Director, InOrdinary Practice
Tahir Sultan
CEO and Founder, Makaan
#2 The Unfinished Horizon |Feb 6 from 4.30 - 5.30 pm - Auditorium
This session engages practitioners whose work has shaped the global design landscape through attentive ways of seeing and sustained commitment to practice. It explores how expansive thinking emerges from deep immersion—within local ecologies, global exchanges, and long-term engagement—and considers how designers build frameworks of care, responsibility, and reflection. The session examines how far-reaching visions are formed, recalibrated, and extended in response to shifting contexts and evolving sensibilities.
Maximiliano Modesti
Founder, Les Ateliers 2M
Meneesha Kellay
Lead Curator, Contemporary South Asia exhibition, V&A
Nacho Carbonell
Artist and Designer
Florence Louisy
Creative Director Aequo
Malika Verma
Founder, Border&Fall
#3 Reclaiming the Made World | Feb 7 from 2.30 - 3.30 pm - Nuvama Private Wealth Verve Lounge (register at open@borderandfall.com)
The earliest objects emerged from necessity and materials close at hand. Today, amid abundance and waste, returning to what already exists carries renewed urgency. This session explores how designers reimagine material life cycles—from extraction to circulation, novelty to continuity—and how working with remnants and histories becomes a way of reading the present. It considers reuse as both an ethical practice and a form of cultural archaeology.
Lokesh Ghai
Independent Researcher and Artist
Priyanka Shah
Head Designer and Founder, SHED
Ritwik Khanna
Founder and Creative Director, Rkive City
Sarita Sundar
Designer and Design Historian - Founder, Hanno
Malika Verma
Founder, Border&Fall
#4 Commons of Design | Feb 7 from 4.30 - 5.30 pm - Auditorium
Design ecosystems rely on a network of institutions, patrons, policymakers, curators and retailers. This session examines how value is created, circulated, and safeguarded across these roles, and who gains access as a result. By analysing intellectual, institutional, and material frameworks—from pedagogy and policy to production—it considers how collaborative structures shape the cultural and economic life of design.
Michelle Millar Fisher
Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Pramod Kumar KG
Managing Director- Eka Archiving Services
Santosh Desai
Founder and Director - Think9 Consumer Technologies Pvt Ltd
Malika Verma
Founder, Border&Fall
#5 Reading the Indian City | Feb 8th from 11 am - 12 pm - Auditorium
Indian cities are layered environments shaped by histories, migrations, rituals, and everyday making. Through a series of three presentations, this session considers how designers and patrons might read these cities not as blank sites for intervention, but as places rich with cultural authorship. It asks how architecture and planning can work with what already exists—honouring inherited landscapes while enabling new forms of collective life.
Annapurna Garimella
Art historian and Designer
V Sunil
Founder, Motherland Joint Ventures
Vikrom Mathur
Founding Director, Transitions Research
Border&Fall was founded by Malika Verma, a brand strategist and vocal craft advocate whose work is centred on future narratives within craft and design. Learn more about her advisory and public engagements here 
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