South Asia's largest arts festival comes to South Kensington for nine days from 19 June 2027, with the V&A, Science Museum and Royal Albert Hall as partners.
The organisation behind South Asia’s largest multidisciplinary arts festival is bringing a new festival to South Kensington next summer. Serendipity Arts Festival London will run for nine days, from Saturday 19 June to Sunday 27 June 2027, across Exhibition Road and the streets and buildings around it, Serendipity Arts announced on Tuesday.
The festival is being made with the Great Exhibition Road Festival, which is led by Imperial College London, and with the Science Museum, V&A South Kensington, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal College of Music, the Royal College of Art and the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.
No artists, events, times or prices have been published yet. Serendipity Arts says further details of participating artists, commissions and events “will be announced in the coming months”.
What is planned
Serendipity Arts is a not-for-profit cultural organisation from India. Its flagship festival, held every year in Panjim, Goa, has free public access and takes over heritage buildings, public spaces and other venues across the city.
For London, the organisation describes Exhibition Road as “a cultural laboratory, where cultures, disciplines and ideas already coexist”. It says the festival will connect South Asian artistic practice with the partners’ collections and expertise “across art, science, music, film, design and education”, and that “internationally recognised figures will appear alongside a new generation of artists, performers, musicians, filmmakers, designers, craftspeople and food practitioners from South Asia and its diaspora.”
The programme is not meant to stay inside the museums. In Serendipity Arts’ words: “From galleries and concert halls to foyers, cafés, and outdoor spaces, the festival will invite audiences to experience familiar places in new ways. London’s South Asian communities will be at the heart of the programme, alongside audiences from across the city.”
The six curators
An all-women team of six curators, across generations, will shape the programme:
- Veeranganakumari Solanki (New Media), exploring how images connect disciplines
- Latika Gupta (Visual Arts), bringing Indian art and material cultures into dialogue
- Preethi Athreya (Dance), rethinking movement and the body
- Sneha Khanwalkar (Music), creating experimental compositions from local sounds, instruments and voices
- Elizabeth Yorke (Culinary Arts), exploring food’s potential to shape a more sustainable future
- Nancy Adajania (New Media), examining the connections between media art, cultural exchange and public life
What the founders say
Sunil Kant Munjal, Founder and Patron of Serendipity Arts, said: “For over a decade, Serendipity Arts has created spaces for South Asian artists to experiment, exchange ideas and find new ways of experiencing culture. Bringing that vision to London, in partnership with some of the city’s leading cultural institutions, marks a significant new chapter for us. It is an opportunity to place our artists, our ideas and our cultural conversations within a truly global context, and to build lasting connections between South Asia and the world.”
Shefali Munjal, Co-Founder and Patron of Serendipity Arts and Serendipity Arts Festival, said: “South Asian creativity cannot be understood through a single discipline, tradition or geography. It lives as much in food, sound, and movement as it does in a gallery. Our curators, working across generations and disciplines, will bring that richness into museums and public spaces across Exhibition Road, with London’s South Asian communities at the heart of the programme.”
It has been on Exhibition Road before
Some readers will already have seen Serendipity Arts’ work here. In June 2026 it brought two projects to the Great Exhibition Road Festival and the Science Museum. Giants on the Move, directed by puppeteer Dadi Pudumjee and presented with the Ishara Puppet Theatre Trust, was a 30-minute street parade of giant puppets and live percussion along Exhibition Road on 6 and 7 June 2026.
The second, नैनन की ठगी / Eyes Shall Deceive, by composer Sneha Khanwalkar and artist Sudarshan Shetty, combined 16mm film, live music, sound and visual storytelling, and was staged at the Science Museum’s Lates, its adults-only evenings. It will be shown again in Goa this December.
The exchange also runs the other way. South Kensington institutions will take part in the 11th Serendipity Arts Festival in Panjim, from 13 to 20 December 2026. The Goa programme will include the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, a moving-image and archive project made with the Royal Geographical Society and the British Film Institute, and work from the Serendipity Arts Foundation and Royal College of Art artist residency.
The Goa festival in numbers
The Goa festival marked its 10th anniversary in December 2025. Since it started in 2016, Serendipity Arts says, it has welcomed more than one million visitors and participants from over 50 countries, supported more than 10,000 artists and created more than 5,000 project-based jobs across more than 50 sites in Panjim.
What it means for you
- Dates: Saturday 19 June to Sunday 27 June 2027, on and around Exhibition Road, SW7.
- Tickets and prices: not announced. The Goa festival is free to the public, but Serendipity Arts has not yet said whether London events will be free or ticketed.
- The programme: artists, commissions and events are due “in the coming months”. The festival’s London page is at serendipityarts.org.
- Getting there: South Kensington station is the nearest Tube; see our Kensington tube and travel page and the latest on step-free access works at the station.
We will add the programme to our What’s On in Kensington listings when it is published. For more to do now, see things to do in Kensington.
Source: Serendipity Arts press release, 20 October 2026.
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