At this exhibition, TARQ stages two distinct artistic positions that probe how knowledge is constructed, inherited and embodied

Cabinets of curiosity once tried to organise the world through adjacency. A shell beside a surgical instrument, a relic beside a map, a fragment beside a tool. The logic was associative rather than fixed, built through instinct, trade, accident. Meaning emerged through proximity. You learned by looking across, not down a line. That impulse has not entirely disappeared. Contemporary exhibitions still return to it, arranging objects as a way of thinking aloud. What sits next to what begins to matter as much as what each thing is.

All you need to know about Art Basel Hong Kong 2026

That sensibility feels close to TARQ’s presentations at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026. Split across two sections of the fair, the gallery places Amba Sayal-Bennett and Parag Tandel in orbit around a shared concern without forcing them into the same room. Their practices move differently, materially and conceptually, yet both circle the question of how knowledge takes form. How it is built, how it travels, how it settles into objects.

Sayal-Bennett approaches the body through systems that attempt to stabilise it. Tandel works from within a community where knowledge is carried through ritual, labour and ecology. Between them, a set of tensions gathers rather than resolves. Authority and inheritance. Translation and continuity. The diagram and the lived.

Sayal-Bennett’s System Overlay unfolds through drawings and sculptures that pull from anatomical imaging, architectural drafting and digital fabrication. Her lines feel precise, almost procedural, yet they never quite settle into clarity. Forms open, fold, slice across themselves. What looks legible at first begins to slip.

Drawing sits at the centre of the work, though it is never direct. “When I am drawing through the haptics of the computer touchpad I am working beside myself, as my movements are offset and reoriented across the screen,” she says. “Through this process, there is a gap and translation between my touch and the digital trace, a dynamic where my body is working at a distance.”

That distance becomes the work’s internal logic. The body is present, but displaced. Gesture exists, but elsewhere. The tools she references, X-rays, scans, anatomical diagrams, all perform a similar operation. They convert flesh into something readable, something transferable. In her hands, the line does double duty. It records and instructs. It can be replayed, extracted, turned into a path for machines. “The gesture becomes a path that can then be used to create objects by instructing machines like 3D printers or laser cutters,” she explains. “In this way, the digital drawing becomes a kind of prosthetic motor memory that extends the movement of my body.”

The sculptures follow through on that translation. Aluminium bends into shapes that feel at once engineered and tentative, like something paused mid-process. The material carries its own associations. “Aluminium has also been used in implants and prosthetics due to its biocompatible properties,” she notes. It belongs to spaces where bodies are opened, handled, stabilised.

The idea of the cut runs through the work. Anatomical diagrams depend on it, slicing into the body to produce knowledge. Sayal-Bennett treats that gesture with suspicion. “I have been thinking about the cut-through of Western anatomy as a violent and sterile perspective,” she says. “Having seen bodies in this way, I began to think about the cut-through in anatomical drawing a kind of false testimony.”

That phrase lands sharply. A false testimony suggests something that looks authoritative while obscuring its own construction. The medical image presents the body as ordered and knowable, but only by stripping away context, sensation, contradiction.

Her response is to layer rather than isolate. Drawing from syncretic medical manuscripts, she tracks moments where different systems of understanding meet without fully resolving. Western anatomical models intersect with Ayurvedic and tantric frameworks. “These drawings integrate biology into tantric and Ayurvedic understandings of the body… they maintain multiplicity within bodies and practices rather than subscribing to totalising systems,” she says.

Multiplicity becomes a way of thinking through both the body and experience. “If we think about diaspora as the passage from unity to multiplicity, then my work can be seen to follow a diasporic logic,” she reflects. “For me, this involves thinking, working, and relating to multiplicities in ways that resist singularity or classification.”

Across the fair, Tandel’s Anthems of Archipelago: We are King of Ocean moves through a different set of coordinates. Installed in the Encounters sector, the work expands outward, physically and conceptually. Eight sculptural forms rise from individual plinths, their arrangement echoing the original islands that formed Bombay. The geography is present, though altered, compressed, remembered.

The sculptures themselves feel alive with reference. Marine organisms, ritual structures, fishing practices. Yarn loops and stretches across armatures, creating surfaces that hold tension. The work draws from the bharali ritual, where structures are made to honour those lost at sea. Tandel carries that form into the space of the fair without dissolving its origin. “Bharali as an idea is translated into a ‘sculpture’. The history of its representation is now seen in a broader context, but its concept will always be rooted in local emergency and local intelligence.”

Local intelligence is a precise phrase. It points to knowledge built through repetition, attention, necessity. The Koli community’s relationship to the sea is not abstract. It is lived, seasonal, adaptive. It sits in the body as much as in memory.

Material becomes the vehicle for that knowledge. The use of yarn comes from the act of making fishing nets, though he stops short of replicating them. “The idea of using yarn came from a fishing net, but I never wanted to knot the fishing net,” he says. The thread holds the gesture without fixing it into function.

Colour opens another register. “The colours you see are borrowed from local forest flowers from in and around Mumbai, and the forms you see are of marine organisms around the shore of Mumbai.” The palette reads as observation rather than decoration, tied to specific environments yet always shifting.

The installation remains open-ended. “This is a long term research undertaking. It is slowly growing as my research of other Koliwadas is increasing,” he notes. The work does not close in on itself. It expands as the knowledge it draws from continues to evolve.

Placed alongside Sayal-Bennett’s work, Tandel’s practice sharpens the contrast without collapsing it into opposition. One examines systems that fragment and categorise. The other works through systems that are lived, inherited, negotiated over time.

As Founder and Director of TARQ, Hena Kapadia puts it, “Ideally, any two artists we show together should have some semblance of a conceptual connection, because the concerns of the artists we work with are immediate, contemporary and deeply considered.” She continues, “Given the structure of the fair, you won’t see the two presentations together, but hopefully when you do see them separately, you can begin to consider the belief systems that we so often take for granted, in two very distinct ways.”

The separation matters. You encounter each practice on its own terms, then carry something across. A line from one space lingers in the other. A question follows you.

Scale shifts the experience again. Tandel’s installation opens out into the fair, inviting movement, circulation. “I think Parag’s work has always been ambitious in scale, and the Encounters section is perhaps the most fitting to best showcase his practice,” Kapadia notes. You walk around it, through it, between its elements.

Sayal-Bennett’s work pulls you closer. The drawings ask for attention at the level of the line. The sculptures hold themselves with a kind of restraint. The encounter becomes slower, more focused.

Across both, objects carry more than their form. A line holds a gesture that has already been translated. A thread carries a memory of labour. Aluminium points to the clinical space. Yarn points to the shoreline. Each object arrives with its own set of conditions.

At an art fair, where movement and exchange shape how work is seen, these questions take on another layer. Context shifts quickly. Meaning adjusts. What holds steady, if anything, becomes harder to locate.

Here, what remains is the object itself. Not as a fixed point, but as something that gathers, stores, and releases different kinds of knowledge depending on how it is approached. Look long enough and the systems around it begin to show.

At Discoveries (Booth 1C47) - System Overlay, a solo presentation by Amba Sayal-Bennett 

In Encounters (EN4), Parag Tandel presents Anthems of Archipelago: We are King of Ocean

Hong Kong Art Basel - March 25-29, 2026 | Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre

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