LAST CHANCE Artist’s Rooms: Amba Sayal-Bennett

Works spanning the last eight years of the artist’s practice that critically engage with the socio-political contexts of architectural heritage and modernist ideologies and aesthetics. Drawing is at the centre of Amba Sayal-Bennett’s practice, expanding across works on paper, projections and sculptural installations; she is particularly interested in the nature of abstraction, using technology in the form of language, tools, methods and materiality to stage relations and engagement between human and non-human.

Within her work, Sayal-Bennett critiques the tendency of colonial practices to decontextualise and appropriate. She traces the migration of architectural forms across continents, such as to Chandigarh in Punjab, the birthplace of her maternal grandparents, and where Le Corbusier’s purpose-built city examines the failings of modernism in post-colonial contexts. She explores modernism’s rejection of ornamentalism as well as her interest in sci-fi aesthetics, a genre which has long been criticised for its colonial overtones.