TARQ is proud to announce its participation in Art Basel Hong Kong 2026 with Amba Sayal-Bennett at Discoveries Booth 1C47 and Parag Tandel’s sculptural installation at the Encounters Sector. Both displays will be on the first floor of the HKCEC, and we look forward to welcoming you there.
Amba Sayal-Bennett’s work follows a migratory logic, one that moves across and between disciplines, bodies, and geographies. Her work interrogates not only how knowledge is formed and imposed, but how it might be reimagined. Showing two new sculptures alongside a series of fourteen drawings, System Overlay expands further from her recent body of work informed by architecture and medicine.
Her intergenerational narrative and diasporic experience are a theme in Sayal-Bennett’s layered works, where clean, machine-like lines trace and transform organic forms. The works explore how European medical diagrams decontextualize the body through processes of fragmentation. Further, she works with computer-aided design software to create her sculptures, reflecting on the role of human and non-human agents in the formation of these histories.
Drawing remains central to Sayal-Bennett’s practice, becoming a method and subject matter. In their digital form, her drawings are instructional—lines become vectors, tool paths for machines to follow, curing resin or casting aluminium. Yet there is a distance: working through the touchpad, she is beside herself, her gestures offset and reoriented across the screen. This translation recalls the displacement of the body in anatomical imaging, where presence becomes diagram, and gesture becomes abstracted.
Sayal-Bennett’s cut-away, sculptural forms, rendered in neutral-toned resin or metals that bend and fold like paper, translate visceral human physicality into something sanitized and mechanical. In doing so, she further observes the inherent violence in the anatomical cut-through as a sterile perspective. In her hands, the act of cutting becomes a site of inquiry—marked by clarity and conceptual weight. The cut, for her, is never neutral: it transforms the body into an object, rendering it seen, mapped, and reassembled.
Writing about Sayal-Bennett’s work, Elaine ML Tam notes, “The ‘part’ acquires altered resonance to those that contend with dislocation or displacement, for it begs the diaspora’s question. No longer merely a term in a conceptual apparatus, the ‘part’ becomes cross-hatched by issues of difference, localisation and the discontinuous self.”
At the Encounters sector, Parag Tandel’s Anthems of Archipelago: We are King of Ocean explores how the Koli (fishermen) community’s consciousness and knowledge has evolved through generations and their ancestral bond with the sea. The work was selected by a Curatorial Group of four Asia- based curators, led and advised by Mami Kataoka, Director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, alongside Isabella Tam, Curator of Visual Art at M+; Alia Swastika, a curator, researcher, and writer based in Jakarta; and Hirokazu Tokuyama, Senior Curator of the Mori Art Museum.
As the earliest inhabitants of Mumbai, the Koli community has for generations cultivated intimate knowledge of the tides, marine ecosystems, and coastal rituals that shape their consciousness. Their livelihood, spirituality, and identity are inseparable from the ocean. The installation composed of eight sculptures are layered with meanings. Using yarn to create marine-inspired talismans, each sculpture honors traditional rituals. The foundational armature refers to structures used in an annual ritual or performance called bharali, which serve as a tribute to those who have lost their lives at sea, serving as protective charms. The sculptures also feature non-anthropocentric icons inspired by marine life such as sea fans, sharks, manta-rays, and crustaceans. Tandel’s use of threads is akin to the tactility and spontaneity of the act of weaving fishing nets. It pushes the artist to play with form, colour and texture.
Further, the installation design features custom plinths, each representing one of Bombay’s original islands, forming an archipelago. This design reflects Mumbai’s evolving topography and the shrinking mangroves, holding ancient narratives within their changing landscapes.
Systems Overlay and Anthems of Archipelago will be on-view from 25th to 29th March, 2026 at Art Basel, Hong Kong.
Words Platform Desk
Date 23.3.2026