Art Basel Hong Kong: System Overlay: Amba Sayal-Bennett
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.”
About the Artist
Amba Sayal-Bennett lives and works in London. She received her BFA from Oxford University, her MA in History of Art from The Courtauld, and her MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art. She was awarded her PhD in Art Practice and Learning from Goldsmiths and has published her practice-based research with Tate Papers. Between January and March 2022, she was The Derek Hill Foundation scholar at the British School at Rome in Italy.
Her recent solo presentations include Drawing Room Invites, Drawing Room, London, (2025); Anatomy of parts, Indigo+Madder, London (2025); Artist’s Rooms, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2024); Dispersive Acts, TARQ, Mumbai (2024); Seeded Futures, Arboreal Drifts, DIANA, New York (2024); Architectures of Excess, Carbon12, Dubai (2023); and Geometries of Difference, Somerset House, London (2023).
Her participation in group exhibitions include Proposals for a Memorial to Partition, Twelve Gates, Philadelphia (2023); Horror in the Modernist Block, IKON, Birmingham (2022); and Tomorrow, White Cube, London (2021).
