Home? At ARCOmadrid 2026: Fragile interiors and the politics of shelter

At an art fair, architecture usually serves efficiency. Walls present paintings. Plinths stabilise sculpture. Visitors circulate, pausing briefly before moving on. At ARCOmadrid 2026, the Mumbai and New Delhi gallery Method disrupts that choreography with Home?, a presentation that unsettles the booth’s basic premise as a secure container for art. Instead, it proposes a space of fracture, exposure and uneasy shelter.

Method’s four-artist presentation turns the art fair booth into a porous architecture of intimacy, surveillance and contested belonging

The question mark in the title carries particular weight. It interrupts the assumption that home signifies stability or safety. “The question mark is intentional,” explains Sahil Arora of Method. “Home is usually understood as something stable and safe, but that isn’t everyone’s reality. For many, home can be conditional, surveilled, or politically fragile.”

Inside the booth, four artists approach this instability from different vantage points. Sajid Wajid Shaikh, Shamir Iqtidar, Ammama Malik and Syed Ali Sarvat Jafri present sculpture, painting and installation that move between personal interior and public pressure. The result resembles an architecture under negotiation rather than a completed structure.

Arora emphasises that uncertainty is central to the curatorial framework. “We wanted to hold that tension open rather than resolve it,” he says. “The question mark invites viewers to reconsider what home actually means, and for whom it functions as protection.”

At the centre stands a new sculptural work by Sajid Wajid Shaikh. The artist dismantles the familiar geometry of the concrete grill, a common architectural feature across South Asia designed to secure privacy while allowing air and light to circulate. In Shaikh’s version, the rigid lattice fractures into broken segments punctured by soft white balloons. Solidity appears interrupted by something fragile and buoyant.

The work carries an atmosphere of suspended catastrophe. Shaikh describes the underlying idea as an investigation into precarious existence. “The work highlights the fact that modern sovereignty is ultimately expressed through the power to dictate who may live and who must die,” he explains. “It works on principles of precarity and how it's just a split second away from total collapse, suspending time and giving the viewers a diorama of what it feels like to be living in ruins.”

Through the openings in this damaged grill, viewers encounter a series of paintings by Shamir Iqtidar. Their placement creates a particular choreography of looking. Instead of encountering the works directly, the viewer peers through apertures, a gesture that carries echoes of surveillance.

Iqtidar’s paintings portray moments of tenderness among young people in Pakistan. Bodies lean into one another. Gestures remain soft, unguarded. Yet these scenes unfold within a social landscape where such intimacy often exists outside public permission. Seen through the fractured architecture of Shaikh’s installation, the paintings gain an additional layer of tension. The act of viewing begins to resemble watching.

Iqtidar approaches intimacy with restraint. “I do like exploring intimacy as a motif in my work,” he says. “However I wouldn’t want this aspect to completely over power the sensibility of my work rather be there as an intangible hint towards something bigger.”

That sense of something withheld carries across the booth. Behind the grill stands a veiled female figure by Ammama Malik. Her position is deliberately obscured, partially visible through the structure that separates viewer from subject. The installation echoes a familiar spatial condition in conservative societies, where women are frequently positioned at the margins of visibility.

Yet Malik’s figure does not appear diminished. Concealment here suggests both imposition and agency. To remain partially unseen can signify constraint, but it may also serve as a strategy of survival.

For Method, these layers of exposure and concealment reflect broader social dynamics in the cities where the gallery operates. “Porosity is something we think about often,” Arora says. “In the contexts we work in across Mumbai and New Delhi, private and public spaces are rarely separate. The personal is constantly shaped by social and political pressures.”

This porosity shapes the entire spatial experience of the booth. Nothing is fully hidden. Nothing is entirely revealed.

The final element in the presentation comes from Syed Ali Sarvat Jafri, whose sculptural works incorporate seventeenth century lakhori bricks salvaged from demolished structures in Faizabad. The bricks appear worn, uneven, marked by time and use. Their presence introduces a different dimension to the exhibition’s exploration of home: historical erasure.

Jafri approaches material as a form of archive. The bricks carry traces of buildings that no longer stand, and by extension the communities that once inhabited them. “The broken lakhori bricks in my work reflect interrupted histories shaped by demolition and shifting political power in India,” he explains. “When structures disappear, it is not only architecture that is lost, but memory and identity.”

In Jafri’s sculptures, fragments reassemble into new formations. They do not reconstruct the original buildings. Instead they hold the residue of disappearance. “By reassembling these fragments, I turn erasure into presence,” he says. “Even if a place is removed, its material survives, quietly resisting forgetting. For me, belonging exists in this act of rebuilding history through matter.”

Together, the four practices resist a single visual language. Method did not aim for cohesion in form. “We weren’t trying to create visual harmony,” Arora notes. “Each artist approaches fragility from a different position, whether architectural, emotional, gendered, or historical, but they are all circling the same question: what does it mean to belong somewhere that does not fully hold you?”

At a commercial art fair, such questions might appear unusually introspective. Booths often prioritise clarity and immediate impact. Yet Method’s approach suggests another possibility for the fair format: a space where ambiguity remains intact.

Arora resists the idea that intimacy must be protected from the fair’s public environment. “Emotional intimacy doesn’t come just by looking at something,” he says. “If that were the case, we would all be emotionally intimate simply by sharing a space. We don’t need to protect it because it only reveals itself to those who really engage with it.”

Within the fractured architecture of Home?, that engagement requires patience. Viewers look through gaps, circle around obstacles, notice what lies partly concealed. The booth becomes less like a gallery display and more like a structure under pressure, where shelter exists alongside exposure.

Home, in this context, remains an open question. The exhibition offers no resolution. Instead it invites the viewer to stand inside the uncertainty.

Art Fair : ARCOmadrid 2026

Gallery: Method (Mumbai, New Delhi - India)

Artists : Sajid Wajid Shaikh, Shamir Iqtidar, Ammama Malik, Syed Ali Sarvat Jafri

Dates : March 4th - 8th 2026

Location: IFEMA MADRID