खारी गाबोली | Salted Caviar: Parag Tandel

Tandel's new series, Salt Shrines (2026) elaborate on organic forms connected with offerings made for annual Bharali Puja ceremonies. These multi-layered improvisational figures crystallize reflections around Koli votive emblems, nature worship, and multispecies cosmologies. Using vibrantly hued yarn, the artist relates these to handmade labour of the Koli community: "mending nets, caring for fishing grounds and allowing catchment areas to regenerate are vital forms of knowledge and survival," he says. [6] With the annual ceremony held at full moon in October, we are also reminded of lunation (chandra) as cosmic timekeeper of seaward living rhythms and how the Koli calendar was gradually overwritten by Brahmanical Hindu calendric time. The sculptures correlate with the flora gathered around his village onto metal armatures and stand as embellished stations characterizing the ritual. Amidst urban volatility, climate emergency, and competing ecopolitical power structures, Tandel avows affect-driven inherited pathways and systems of reciprocity, asserting that "There is a strong attachment in such practices to what I call 'Koliness'-not simply as a cultural identity, but as a way of knowing and protecting the shoreline."[7]

Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Braithwaite asks in anti-colonial riddims: "Why is our psychology not dialectical-successfully dialectical-in the way that Western philosophy has assumed people's lives should be, but tidalectic, like our grandmother's-our nanna's- action, like the movement of the ocean she's walking on, coming from one continent / continuum, touching another, and then receding ('reading') from the island(s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future…"[9] Tandel treats cyanotypes as sentient imprints of a tidalectics of his own making, propelling system thinking, traditional recipes passed on from his mother, and origin stories in embodied tonalities of blue.

In the Worli Koliwada Series (2026) he inscribes early histories of this area as figured via oral records of indigenous knowledge, archeological records and coastal imaginary. Amidst fractured and delimited access to ancient Koli village settlements, which survived waves of Portuguese, Maratha and British colonization, threatened even further today by coastal road developments, bureaucratic malpractices, and oligarchic encroachment, Tandel composes an expansive window into communitarian ways of life. Literary sources on first Koli settlements and paleolithic stone tools date back to thousands of years, one among these cited by the artist is British archeologist and naval officer K. R. U. Todd's essay Prehistoric Man Round Bombay[10] (1932). Moreover, Tandel approaches local gastronomy as archeological repository, assembling recipes from the Koli diet as distinct from a metropolitan pescatarian diet, including nutrient rich foods sourced from mangrove terrains and nearby aquaculture. He documents recipes and instructions passed on from his mother, Kamal Tandel as well as families in different Koliwadas with great detail, illustrating items such as Kippered swordfish eggplant curry and dried fish ambat curry with personalized annotated flourishes.

Through a soft floor piece in the gallery, Sea of Relations (2026) the artist affirms the essential role of walking barefoot along contiguous shorelines and marshy creeks, intrinsic environs of over 250 Koliwadas across Mumbai, as well as the vitality of forging lateral connections via the rolling tides, generational transfer of folk songs, and encircling of fish nets. It also foregrounds the Koli worldview as one that bestows a horizontal and seamless relation with the sea-inscribing movement, deep interdependence and crosscurrents of knowledge that counter the toxic flows neoliberal extractivism, colonial mentality of belligerent conquest, imposition of vertical infrastructures, and ongoing conflicts gripping the Indian Ocean World.

Tandel dedicates attention toward the metabolic life of extraordinary underwater residents, such as Elysia Hirasei, a rare sacoglossan sea slug also known as salty ocean caterpillar, found along Mumbai's coast. These vibrant creatures defy boundaries between plant and animal organisms, bearing the capacity to photosynthesize or perform kleptoplasty, feeding on algae blooms and transforming solar exposure into energy. Centering the sea slug as monument in unpossessed Sun (2026), the artist reflects, "This work responds to the history of oil wars, since access to hydrocarbons has shaped geopolitical conflict, militarisation, and ecological collapse. Rather than representing war through images of destruction, the sculpture asks whether nature has already evolved a counterproposal."[13] Throughout his work, Tandel recollects Bombay Duck (Bombil), Manta rays, and olive ridley turtles as ancient migrants and guardians that are intrinsic cohabitants of these thriving waterways. They now appear to prompt new recognition on the aftermath beyond carbon capitalism, and suggest how attributes of co-existence, adaptability, camouflage and energy resilience are sustained in marine species and govern planetary entanglements.