Art world report·London
Four steel screens, one restless sun: Tarini Sethi's utopia lands in Regent's Park
New Delhi-based Tarini Sethi's "The Sun Bathes Its Friends and Neighbours" — four cut-steel screens where daylight does the sculpting — is on view at Frieze Sculpture in Regent's Park through 1 November, presented by Rajiv Menon Contemporary.

New Delhi-based artist Tarini Sethi has installed a walk-through steel environment in the English Gardens of Regent's Park as part of Frieze Sculpture 2026. Titled "The Sun Bathes Its Friends and Neighbours" and presented by Rajiv Menon Contemporary, the 2026 work groups four stainless-steel screens cut into hybrid figures that visitors can move between. It is on view from 16 September through 1 November. The industrial material is only half the work. Sethi treats daylight as the real medium: as the sun crosses the park, the perforated panels throw layered shadows that stretch the figures well beyond the steel frames. Small kinetic faces hang from the screens and turn in the wind, and the artist expects dust and patina to settle on the surfaces over the run, binding the piece ever more tightly to its setting. In her own account of the work, she describes the sun as a kind of conductor, shifting the sculpture's theatre across the day. The piece condenses a practice rooted in India's visual traditions — mythology, miniature painting, tribal art — redirected toward imagined utopias in which the body can transform without limit. Sethi (b. 1987), who trained in drawing at Pratt Institute in New York, previously built intricate figures and surreal landscapes by cutting handmade paper and lighting it from behind; the steel screens carry that long-standing interest in negative space, light and change into a far more public scale. Frieze Sculpture, now in its 14th edition and curated for a fourth year by Fatoş Üstek, places eleven international artists across the park around a theme of hybridity — materials, bodies and urban systems crossing into one another. With Frieze London and Frieze Masters opening 14–18 October, the free outdoor show is the one part of Frieze season already open to the public, and Sethi's sun-driven screens are among its most photographed stops.


