London will have a new South Asian arts festival. The nine-day event will take place in South Kensington’s cultural quarter next summer, featuring artists from India and its diaspora. The festival will be organized by the Great Exhibition Road Festival (led by Imperial College London), Serendipity Arts, an Indian arts nonprofit, and several leading London museums.
The roster of London institutions involved in the festival includes the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Natural History Museum, Royal Albert Hall, Royal Geographical Society, Royal College of Music, Royal College of Art, the Science Museum, and the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. The festival will take over Exhibition Road in South Kensington’s cultural quarter from June 19 through June 27.
The festival will feature emerging and established artists from India and its diaspora. The program will span visual art, music, dance, new media, and food. It will take place in galleries, concert halls, cafés, and outdoor spaces. Six women curators have been appointed: Veeranganakumari Solanki and Nancy Adajania (new media), Latika Gupta (visual arts), Preethi Athreya (dance), Sneha Khanwalkar (music), and Elizabeth Yorke (culinary arts).
Serendipity Arts has an annual festival in Goa, India, which celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2025. Since 2016, it has drawn more than one million visitors and participants and supported more than 10,000 artists. This new festival will build on the work the nonprofit has done in Goa. “South Asian creativity cannot be understood through a single discipline, tradition or geography,” said Shefali Munjal, the co-founder and patron of Serendipity Arts, to The Arts Newspaper. “It lives as much in food, sound and movement as it does in a gallery.”