Amba Sayal-Bennett
Aliquot, 2026
Steel, bronze, silver and silicone
108 x 55 x 81 cm
42 1/2 x 21 5/8 x 31 7/8 in
42 1/2 x 21 5/8 x 31 7/8 in
Amba Sayal-Bennett's work stems from proximity to the medical encounter: initiated through her observations of cadaveric dissection at university, and more recently a request made to her family member to...
Amba Sayal-Bennett's work stems from proximity to the medical encounter: initiated through her observations of cadaveric dissection at university, and more recently a request made to her family member to donate their brain to scientific research. From these points of contact, the work opens onto a wider inquiry into the economies of gifting and donation that govern human tissue — the ways a language of generosity and stewardship can subtly legitimise forms of extraction, and how bodies, once ceded to techno-scientific systems, are fragmented, encoded, and folded into a vast, largely unrecorded biocommons.
‘Aliquot’ traces the afterlives of matter transformed by Western medical science. Cast in sterling silver, bronze and stainless steel, the sculpture draws on anatomical drawings and diagrams, rather than direct scans of the body. Each form is mediated through a process of digital drawing before being printed and then cast in metal: gesture is offset, recorded, and repeated through machinic action, a motor memory that simultaneously displaces and re-inscribes the artist’s hand. This second-handedness intimately structures the work. To work at a remove is to acknowledge that some experiences — grief, loss, consent on behalf of another — operate across a distance. Within Sayal-Bennett’s work distance occupies an ambivalent position, also functioning as an infrastructure of support and protective mechanism, allowing difficult material to be approached obliquely.
This logic of second-handedness extends to material uses within the work. Sayal-Bennett traces the afterlives of silver recovered from redundant NHS X-rays, converted into valuable bullion and processed by the Royal Mint into jewellery pieces — a double extraction in which the residue of the body-rendered-image is spun into new worth. Read alongside colonial-era pharmacological texts which recast South Asian Ayurvedic silver-leaf (vark) preparations in the language of Western materialism, this work tracks how value is produced through processes of circulation — as bodies, objects, and knowledge are stripped and reconfigured in order to traverse regimes of value.
‘Aliquot’ traces the afterlives of matter transformed by Western medical science. Cast in sterling silver, bronze and stainless steel, the sculpture draws on anatomical drawings and diagrams, rather than direct scans of the body. Each form is mediated through a process of digital drawing before being printed and then cast in metal: gesture is offset, recorded, and repeated through machinic action, a motor memory that simultaneously displaces and re-inscribes the artist’s hand. This second-handedness intimately structures the work. To work at a remove is to acknowledge that some experiences — grief, loss, consent on behalf of another — operate across a distance. Within Sayal-Bennett’s work distance occupies an ambivalent position, also functioning as an infrastructure of support and protective mechanism, allowing difficult material to be approached obliquely.
This logic of second-handedness extends to material uses within the work. Sayal-Bennett traces the afterlives of silver recovered from redundant NHS X-rays, converted into valuable bullion and processed by the Royal Mint into jewellery pieces — a double extraction in which the residue of the body-rendered-image is spun into new worth. Read alongside colonial-era pharmacological texts which recast South Asian Ayurvedic silver-leaf (vark) preparations in the language of Western materialism, this work tracks how value is produced through processes of circulation — as bodies, objects, and knowledge are stripped and reconfigured in order to traverse regimes of value.
