In South Asian societies, the notion of ‘home’ extends beyond a physical structure and encompasses ancestry, memory, lineage, and community, where individual identity is deeply intertwined with collective belonging. However, the meaning of ‘home’ is also continually redefined by state authority, urban expansion, and nuanced mechanisms of social regulation. Method’s presentation at ARCO Madrid 2026, curated by Sahil Arora, brings together four South Asian artists — Sajid Wajid Shaikh (Mumbai, India), Shamir Iqtidar (Rawalpindi, Pakistan), Ammama Malik (Rawalpindi, Pakistan), and Syed Ali Sarvat Jafri (Faizabad/Ayodhya, India) — whose works interrogate what remains of 'home' when its tangible and symbolic foundations are destabilized.

At the heart of this presentation is Sajid Wajid Shaikh’s fractured concrete grill, an architectural form prevalent in South Asian urban environments where jalis and grilles serve to safeguard privacy within densely populated neighbourhoods. Its damaged condition signifies the diminishing boundary between public and private spheres, a transformation exacerbated by mass surveillance, moral policing, and pervasive anxieties about observation. Soft white balloons emerging through the fissures suggest that even within rigid structures, moments of gentleness persist.

Iqtidar’s small figurative paintings, visible through these apertures, enact a choreography of tenderness under constraint. Young Pakistanis are depicted in gestures of touch, leaning, and hesitation that appear both intimate and precarious. The viewer’s gaze becomes implicated, reflecting a South Asian sociocultural context in which privacy is largely unattainable and domestic spaces are rarely exempt from scrutiny. These paintings underscore that expressions of affection are often relegated to the periphery of domestic life.

Ammama Malik’s veiled female figure, visible only from the rear of the booth, underscores architecture as a gendered system. In numerous conservative South Asian contexts, women occupy concealed spaces, not solely due to modesty but as a result of enforced invisibility. However, Malik’s spatial arrangement also signifies resistance: invisibility becomes a strategy for asserting presence against restrictive structures.

Syed Ali Sarvat Jafri’s sculptures, constructed from 17th-century lakhori bricks salvaged from demolished homes in Faizabad, embody the exhibition’s political dimension. These bricks serve as witnesses, material remnants of lives erased by contemporary redevelopment and, increasingly, by punitive demolition practices targeting minorities in India. The bulldozer has emerged as a political symbol, dismantling not only physical structures but also the concept of constitutional protection. Within this framework, Jafri’s bricks function as archives of violence and resistance, asserting that erasure is never absolute.

Throughout South Asia, rapid gentrification, forced migration, internal displacement, and socio-religious polarisation are redefining the meaning of home. Neighbourhoods are depopulated under the pretext of development, with escalating rents displacing working-class families to the urban margins and communal anxieties increasingly determining where you can belong. Method’s booth articulates this contemporary state of unsettlement, presenting ‘home’ as a site of both beauty and vulnerability; of memory and disruption. By assembling these perspectives, the exhibition constructs a fragile architecture that acknowledges loss yet resists resignation. If home is rendered insecure, the artists propose that it may be reconstructed through intimacy, remembrance, and the persistent assertion that, even amid destruction, life continues to seek renewal.

‘HOME?’ curated by Sahil Arora and presented by Method, is on view at Booth 90P13, ARCO Madrid, at IFEMA MADRID from March 4-8, 2026.

Learn more about the exhibition here.

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