India Art Fair
At India Art Fair 2026, TARQ presents works by ten artists, each engaging with perceptions of space and place. The artists’ visual vocabularies unfold layered conversations about how our surroundings are shaped through memory, lived experience, transformation, and consciousness. They reflect on both the poetics (the intimate, emotional and sensory dimensions) and the politics (the historical, ecological, and structural forces) of the environments they inhabit and represent.
From the quiet precision of Vishwa Shroff’s window facades to the visual rhythm of Sameer Kulavoor’s city observations, there is a shared attention to how everyday spaces are charged with metaphorical readings. Shroff’s set of seventy meticulously drawn facades highlight the memory of objects from spaces left behind, through ‘drawing movement’ where similar units placed side by side become contiguous to form a single work.
On the other hand, Kulavoor’s Wall Politic series explores the various implications of walls as a symbol: both architectural and ideological, the personal and the political. A wall can be the comforting enclosure of a private space or the imposing dividing line drawn between nations, ideologies, and people.
Areez Katki and Boshudhara Mukherjee turn to the tactility of fabric, stitching and weaving, to reflect on gendered labour and cultural lineage, and personal memory respectively. Katki embroiders drawings on cotton drop-cloths found in the artist’s family home in Tardeo. They use a pictorial shorthand to understand history, referring to studies made in 2018 during site visits in Iran, where significant archeological extractions were conducted over the 18th-20th Centuries by British and French excavation teams.
As in much of Boshudhara’s recent practice, Altamire is guided by responsiveness to material rather than a fixed visual outcome. Denim and fabrics of comparable weight and thickness form the core of the composition, emphasising tactility.
Continuing the material delicateness, Parag Tandel presents textural relief sculptures in thread representing marine life that build on the layered histories of the Koli community of Mumbai. These works also feature words from the Koli Dictionary Project undertaken as part of Tandel Fund of Archives. The project comes together in a book, as a collection of words that are common to daily Koli parlance including Koli songs.
Saju Kunhan and Pratap Morey turn to the discourses of land, development, and displacement. Whether through reworked historical or cartographical maps, or fragmented urban architectures, they acknowledge how much the changing spatial dimension of our lives have an effect on culture and history.
At the center of Kunhan’s work is a map, a region under duress, encircled by a tranquil rural landscape. The village evokes memories of the artist’s childhood, introducing a personal layer of nostalgia that contrasts with the present reality of the region. The land’s historical depth and its continued significance within contemporary international politics render it metaphorically golden—valued, contested, and burdened by history.
In his photo-collages, Morey shrinks monumental urban structures to a minute scale to impart a sense of defiance. He creates compositions to instil feelings of confusion and dizzying that one might face moving in the city by extensively using images captured from metro construction and coastal road sites.
Philippe Calia, Ronny Sen and Saubiya Chasmawala employ the medium of photography in their distinct approaches. In Calia’s work, the street becomes both subject and stage, where objects and characters are infused with poetic resonance. The work captures a kaleidoscopic portrait of Nana Chowk in Mumbai, revealing the city’s surreal, elusive essence.
Presenting the first work from Sen’s new project The Sun Rises in the East, set in 2045 amid climate collapse and rogue AI. At secret Bengal airfields from World War II, Sen is sent to find a wooden dog, an analog learning machine from the 1940s, built as a covert weapon system. Its survival after a century, now alongside a sixteen-year-old boy, questions the limits of knowledge, human and artificial, across past and future.
Chasmawala revisits photographs from family pilgrimages returning to images of her younger self. The veiled marks and illegible text on these images echo the half-understood verses she once recited, speaking of a yearning for reverence. They capture the quiet weight of faith carried in childhood and the enduring power of all that remains unsaid.
Together, through drawing, textile, photography, and mixed media, the artists engage with ideas of spaces and places as a site of memory, history, discussion and imagination.
