A Fair Evolves: Melbourne Art Fair 2026 and the Promise of FUTUREOBJEKT

The Fair itself delivered its familiar promise: a curated cross-section of contemporary art, anchored by vanguards of the gallery world such as Sullivan & Strumpf, MARS Gallery, Sophie Gannon, Alcaston Gallery, Niagara Galleries, Nasha Gallery, Roslyn Oxley9, Walkatjara Art Gallery, Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert and Justin Miller Art to name a few, whose commitment to their artists remains the bedrock of the whole enterprise. Their booths operated less as selling floors and more as considered arguments for the work they champion. The atmosphere was warm, attended, alive with the energy of people who genuinely care about what they are looking at.

And then there was the other direction entirely. An experiential precipice resting at the navigational heart of the Fair.

FUTUREOBJEKT — the new collectable design salon conceived by Melbourne Art Fair as a platform for contemporary design, architecture, and the crafted object — announced itself not with a press release but with a spatial shift. One crossed a threshold, and something changed. Observers at the vernissage described it as standing at a cliff's edge above a new world: no soft landing, no gentle introduction. A precipice. This is, of course, exactly the point.

The material language was immediately legible. Mirror surfaces and frosted glass. Burnished silk alongside pewter steel. Bulbous objects that trapped light like rainbows compressed into form, suspended above a wobbly, arrested landscape. It was tonal, yet it wound up feeling eternal, an embrace delivered by a presence outside of time and trend. People moved through it differently than they moved through the rest of the Fair. Nearby, Brahman Perera’s design interpretation for Bollinger defined a space draped in luxuriant linen folds, tempered by casually slung rope, and his signature dervish pendant upturned, rising like an elegant lamp post amongst the stands, open to the heavens as though waiting for something to be poured into them, found an alliance with the curation at FUTUREOBJEKT. Different languages dovetailing through a shared tempo.

First Nations making held its ground throughout — motifs encircling and framing work, country rendered in colour, texture, and pattern. These works acted as sentinels, refusing to be contextualised purely as decoration. They were a whole other conversation happening simultaneously: one about whose hands have shaped this country's objects for far longer than any contemporary design movement. That the Fair is attempting to hold this alongside collectible design, without flattening either, is a genuinely complex curatorial undertaking, and one that deserves to continue openly.

No editorial worth its salt avoids the harder observations. FUTUREOBJEKT is, in its first year, doing what first years do: testing its footing. The ambition of the concept outruns, in places, its current execution. Some works felt caught between registers — too knowingly commercial for the disruption the salon promises, too experimental for comfortable acquisition. The curatorial voice, while present, has room to grow more confident. A salon of this kind lives or dies on the strength of its editorial position, and what it excludes matters as much as what it includes. That clarity is still arriving.

The broader Fair, too, continues to navigate structural tensions common to events of this scale: the economic realities that shape what galleries bring; the fine line between accessibility and dilution; keeping energy consistent once the vernissage buzz has long dissipated. These are not problems unique to Melbourne, but they deserve honest attention.

Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, FUTUREOBJEKT is the most interesting thing to happen to the Melbourne Art Fair in some years. The decision to build a design arm into a contemporary art fair speaks to a genuine cultural shift: the boundaries between collecting art and collecting design are dissolving, and the crafted object increasingly shares collectors, conversations, and cultural weight with the gallery work beside it.

The people moving through the crowd at the Fair this year were, perhaps inadvertently, the most concise argument for this fair's direction: those who collect art, the people who collect objects, and the people who simply love beautiful and challenging things made by skilled hands may, in fact, be one and the same. Melbourne Art Fair is building a home for all of them. FUTUREOBJEKT, is the most exciting room in that house.

The precipice, it turns out, has a view worth looking at.

Words by Tiffany Jade. Find our more about Melbourne Art Fair via their website and Instagram. Feature image by Annika Kafcaloudis. All other photography by Daniel Grima.