Home? Method at ARCO Madrid
Curated by Sahil Arora | 5th Mar - 8th Mar 2026
Home? Curated by Sahil Arora
Home is a paradox: the sanctuary we long for, yet a promise increasingly dismantled. Across the world, war reduces houses to rubble. Urbanisation erases neighbourhoods and the histories held within walls. And even where structures remain, the idea of home as a private haven is invaded by the prying gaze of neighbours, the state, and the quiet surveillance of daily life.
At Method's booth in ARCO Madrid's Opening section, four artists trace this broken promise, constructing a vision of home as it truly is today: fragile, watched, and contested, yet still a site where tenderness and memory fight to survive.
At the centre stands Sajid Wajid Shaikh's eroded concrete grill, traditionally built to offer privacy within crowded urban life. Here, it is broken geometry, its apertures no longer protective but exposing. Soft white balloons push through the cracks, vulnerability forcing its way through what was meant to be permanent.
Through these gaps, viewers encounter Shamir Iqtidar's intimate paintings of young people in Pakistan—moments of affection that cannot unfold freely in public. You look as neighbours do, an uneasy gesture revealing what society conceals. Home is not a refuge from the gaze but a place where the gaze follows you inside.
Behind the grill, visible only from the rear, hangs Ammama Malik's veiled female figure. Her placement echoes how women occupy the unseen spaces of conservative environments. Hiddenness becomes both constraint and quiet defiance—claiming space when you are not permitted to be seen.
Completing the booth are Syed Ali Sarvat Jafri's sculptures, built from 17th-century lakhori bricks salvaged from demolished sites in Faizabad. These fragments are material archives of homes that no longer stand, casualties of a city reshaped by political forces. They carry the weight of lives and stories that refuse disappearance.
Together, these works create a booth-sized home: porous, contested, intimate, unstable. A space where safety is both held and threatened. Where walls erode, the gaze is ever-present, and yet something persists—through tenderness, memory, and the insistence of being seen on your own terms. This is home now. This is what remains.
ARTISTS ON VIEW //
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AMMAMA MALIK
Ammama Malik (b. 1992) is an oil painter whose work bridges classical techniques with contemporary expression. A graduate of the National College of Arts (2016) and the Florence Academy of Arts (2018), she is deeply committed to the craft of painting, drawing inspiration from Renaissance and Baroque masters. Her compositions prioritize rich, expressive brushwork over words, creating evocative pieces that honor tradition while resonating in the modern art landscape.
SAJID WAJID SHAIKH
Sajid Wajid Shaikh (b. 1989, Navi Mumbai) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice as a "scribe" documents the lived realities of minorities in India through kinetic installations, films, and drawings exploring systemic violence and resistance.
Most recetly, his work has been recognized with the Henry Clews Award (2026) and a residency at the La Napoule Art Foundation (2025), and exhibited
SHAMIR IQTIDAR
Shamir Iqtidar (b. 1999, Rawalpindi) is a visual artist and National College of Arts graduate whose figurative practice captures figures suspended in ambiguity, neither fully resolved nor dissolved, symbolizing broader fractures in community, cultural memory, and meaning. His scenes unfold in a dreamlike hyperreality where memory, place, and longing blur the boundaries between personal and collective experience. He has exhibited in Pakistan and internationally, most recently with Method at ASIA NOW PARIS and with Rajiv Menon Contemporary in Los Angeles., Shamir is the 2024recipient of the Nigaah Art Award for emerging artists.
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SYED ALI SARVAT JAFRI
Syed Ali Sarwat Jafri completed his MFA in Painting in 2009 and now works on preserving the architecture of Faizabad/Ayodhya.
Throughout his career, he has frequently reflected on the visual culture of the past, especially during the era when these mesmerizing monuments reached their zenith in both beauty and cultural significance.
ARTWORKS //
Veiled figures stand unbowed, holding their own light.
Ammama Malik grants her figures a quiet sovereignty painting grace as a formof resistance.
The Drawing of Impossible Geometries, hand chiseled onto debris from demolished homes.
Sajid Wajid Shaikh encodes the violence of erasure, transforming rubble into a cipher for collective memory.
घर (Set of 6) by Sajid Wajid Shaikh
Hand chiseling on found debris from destroyed homes.
19 x 31.7 x 5 cm | 7.5 x 12.5 x 2 in
(each)
Figures linger in the ache between time and space, suspended in uncertainty.
Shamir Iqtidar paints an unresolved present, where memory falters, community fragments, and longing becomes its own geography.
What remains of homes that once stood where a temple now claims ground, each lakhori brick an indictment.
Syed Ali Sarvat Jafri collects what power cannot erase: the stubborn archive of the unsilenced.
METHOD X ARCO MADRID 2026
BOOTH 90P13
IFEMA MADRID
4 - 8 MARCH 2026