TARQ is pleased to present Amba Sayal-Bennett’s first solo exhibition in India, Dispersive Acts, comprising a new series of sculptures and drawings. This show forms part of a larger body of work informed by research into imperial gardens and colonial botany. Exhibited across three sites: London, Mumbai, and New York, the work traces the movement of botanical matter across different continents.
Sayal-Bennett focuses on the landmark of Rani Baug (formerly Victoria Gardens) in Mumbai, established in the 1860s as a significant British colonial project with a botanical garden and museum. At the onset, the botanical garden imported plants from Asia, Africa, and the Americas for cataloguing. Colonial botany involved processes of extraction, transfer, and erasure – extraction of plants and labour, transfer of specimens across the globe, and erasure of local knowledge. Within this context, the artist explores Rani Baug as a colonial archive, witness, and site of resistance.
Sayal-Bennett experiments with different methods to engage with this colonial history. Her sculptures abstract geometry from garden layouts and incorporate floral motifs, using industrial materials such as resin and steel. These botanical elements, made through precise machine production, allude to the unnaturalness of gardens as controlled and subjugated nature. In her work, Sayal-Bennett undercuts this notion of control by reappropriating botanical elements, central to the grammar of the empire, to generate forms that evolve through processes of disordered growth. Within the sculptures, botanical forms merge into, and overgrow, their supports. Flower motifs taken from the twenty-four Linnaean categories, foundational to modern taxonomy, are digitally redrawn, overlaid, reproduced, and dispersed across different works. This approach foregrounds disobedience and refusal as the taxonomic elements blend into each other, subverting prior histories of use.
Inspired by the revisions seen in Rani Baug, the works also incorporate art deco elements. Sayal-Bennett notes that this style, chosen by Indian architects, symbolized a move towards independence and a self-determined future, distinct from colonial influences.
The show will be accompanied by a text written by Murtaza Vali, a critic, curator and art historian. His ongoing research interests include materialist art histories, ex-centric minimalisms, ghosts and other figures of liminal subjectivities and repressed histories.
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About Amba Sayal-Bennett
Amba Sayal-Bennett is a British-Indian artist working across drawing, projection, and sculptural installation. Her practice explores how methods of abstraction are exclusionary and performative, crafting boundaries between what is present, manifestly absent, and othered. Her recent work focuses on the migration of modernist forms and their role within fascist and brutalist architecture. Using translation as method, she explores the movement of bodies, knowledge and form across different sites, processes inherent to the diasporic experience.
Amba Sayal-Bennett lives and works in London. She received her BFA from Oxford University 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. She is currently an Associate Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts. Between January and March 2022, she was The Derek Hill Foundation scholar at the British School at Rome in Italy.
Recent exhibitions include Artist’s Rooms, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2024); Geometries of Difference, Somerset House, London (2022); Horror in the Modernist Block, IKON, Birmingham (2022); My Mother Was a Computer, indigo+madder, London (2022); and Tomorrow, White Cube, London (2021).
