Art Mumbai
TARQ is delighted to return to Art Mumbai 2026 with works by 13 artists exploring and imagining the relationships between family, ecologies, faith, technology, and the cyclic processes of creation and destruction. Extending beyond the booth presentation, “Trembling Bench”, a sculptural installation by artist duo Pors & Rao will be displayed as part of the Sculpture Park curated by Veeranganakumari Solanki.
Al-Qawi Nanavati shares with us “Looking for You, Far Away, Above and Beyond” series: eleven paper works, made in one day, are letters of remembrance to her late mother. Her mother’s clothes, transformed beyond recognition, become the search for her mother as the kozo fibre mirrors her strength. Maternal figures take many forms as Boshudhara Mukherjee’s “Dream Catcher” began during a visit to her ailing aunt, whose beloved pastels, indigo and lace seeped into the work. Crochet and weaving keep her aunt’s dreams and memory safe. These relationships are further developed as Natasha Preenja aka Princess Pea recalls childhood rituals of sacred threads and inherited prayers in her “RITUALS – Warriors” series which imagines the missing woman: fearless, unaware of her power, bound by social pressures, a warrior ready to break free.
In another vein, Amba Sayal-Bennett’s “Lateral” follows a migratory logic across disciplines, bodies and geographies. Cutting European medical diagrams, Sayal-Bennett exposes the violence of anatomical fragmentation, turning the body into an object: seen, mapped, reassembled. Parag Tandel, in tandem, maps Tethys in “Ancestors”, casting oil pipes and marine life in fossiliferous Habur stone. Once an ancient seabed, he simultaneously sets petro-capitalist extraction in Jaisalmer firmly against the Koli community’s embattled coastline and monumentalises an ancient, erased ocean in what is now a desert. The figure of the ocean continues in Saju Kunhan’s “Forbidden Sea” as he revisits an old map of the Dead Sea, earth’s lowest, saltiest, lifeless water, transformed into a dense, perilous forest: golden for its holiness, tense from geopolitics.
Pors & Rao evoke the spectral figures of “Phantom Observer #1”, a hanging mobile of shy shapes alongside the “Trembling Bench” and “Trembling Chair”, which shudder when approached, casting viewers as figures evoking comical fear as the motion in one corner reverberates throughout their bodies.
Pratap Morey’s “Brink of Supernova – II” draws on the mushroom cloud to liken urban redevelopment to construction and destruction. Through architectural drawing, it mourns vanishing sky and asks: is urban hysteria self-destruction? Rah Naqvi, on the other hand, revisits the cyclical process of life through “a lineage to dirt”, using indigo and soil from the artist’s mother’s plants to transform the body into a forest. Mushrooms mark death and rebirth as nothing in a forest is ever truly dead, but waiting to evolve.
From the earth, Rithika Merchant’s “STAR MAP I” and “STAR MAP II” look to the cosmos as they centre astronomy as religion, alluding to astral cults and ancient sun worship. “TAPROOT”’s communal gathering casts nature and cosmos as life givers: a creation myth. Twinning faith, Ronny Sen’s “Rudiment” is set in 2045 amid climate collapse and rogue AI. At secret WWII Bengal airfields, a surviving wooden dog, an analogue learning machine, questions the limits of technological data, inaccessible and unknowable.
Drawing on architectural motifs, Vishwa Shroff’s “Izaare” series from the Jaipur Centre for the Arts creates a shared language with Aaraish fresco Karigars, using the “Izara” skirting motif and evoking Stella’s drawings, empty stage sets. Philippe Calia’s “Imaginary Museum” series draws on his archive of Indian museum photographs. Colour-pencil drawings, UV-printed on acrylic, hover over each photograph, a gap holding light and shadow.
Together, these works trace the threads that bind us to one another, to the earth, to the divine, and to the machines and structures we build, and the cycles of creation and decay that run through them all. Rooted in memory and research, and reaching toward the cosmic, the booth invites visitors to slow down, look closely, and sit with what endures and what disappears.
