Asia NOW, the boutique fair devoted to contemporary art from Asia and its diasporas, has launched a new programme called New Voices at its 12th edition, which runs until 24 October at the Monnaie de Paris against the backdrop of Art Basel Paris. The initiative gives emerging curators a larger role by spotlighting five independent curatorial platforms, with South Asian practices playing a particularly prominent role.

Founding director Alexandra Fain chose the programme's first five participating spaces and collectives with team members Salome Fau and Krishna Kapadia, drawing on their research and networks alongside existing collaborations. All the projects are being presented for the first time, and several were newly commissioned for the fair, including a site-specific passageway and a participatory food installation.

Among the participants, TAK Contemporary, founded in 2023 by three curators of Indian heritage and recently opened in its first permanent Paris space, presents Baagh Bageecha, bringing together nine artists who explore gardens as places shaped by memory, labour and everyday rituals. The non-profit Brief Shalimar and curator Zara Sajid collaborate on Halfway Garden, drawing on the gardens of longing and deferred promise in Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poetry alongside the transitional space of a halfway house. Still Other Collective's Fivefold: The Anatomy of Chaos pairs a five-hour performance by Paris- and Delhi-based Sehaj Malik with a participatory installation, while Plasma Contemporary presents Poojan Gupta's A Walk Through Beliefs, a site-specific passageway composed of roughly 105,000 empty blister pockets joined together by hand, reflecting on healing, devotion and collective memory. The fourth instalment of 2 Curators 1 Collapse's RING/CAM series also features.

New Voices follows the fair's 2025 introduction of The Third Space, which placed installations and moving-image works throughout the building. Fain described the new programme as a connecting thread between discovery and familiarity, spanning performance, installation, sculpture and curatorial practice. Alongside it, more than 70 galleries are exhibiting, including Esther Schipper, pairing Prabhavathi Meppayil's meticulous abstractions with Tseng Chien-Ying's ink-and-colour deities, and first-time exhibitor Whitestone, handing its booth to Singaporean duo Chow and Lin, whose photographic surveys document how much food a poverty-line budget can buy.