Amol K Patil, Black Masks on Roller Skates,

Project 88 is pleased to present Black Masks on Roller Skates, a selected excerpt of Amol K Patil’s larger project exhibited at Documenta Fifteen. This exhibition encompasses kinetic sculpture, holographic video, music, and performance. Map-lines of migration and transformation outline a stage, with performers as if beneath the surface. They are breathing, watching the land, living, moving. It’s a wave movement, between places.

“I vibrate with a legacy,” Patil says. There’s an insurrectionary history that the artist comes from. In this exhibition, he reawakens it. Patil builds on theatre and performative traditions nested in working-class neighbourhoods in Mumbai, as well as his own family history. His grandfather was an anti-colonial Powada performer who mixed his critique of empire with that of a violence embedded in the graded inequality of the caste system that hierarchically divides not just labour but labourers. His father, an avant-garde writer, wrote and produced protest theatre, critiqued the time of the work siren, and of sleeping in shifts, intensified this experimental, emancipatory ethos. In his father’s scripts are comma sections, with gestures and moods. Patil access these clues, this other body language.


Biography:
Amol K Patil (b. 1987) is a conceptual and performance artist based in Mumbai. After his education in the visual arts from Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Arts and Crafts, Mumbai, his work has explored the intersection of performance art, theatre, music, kinetic art and video installation. He has initiated and has been part of several collective practices and has participated in exhibitions around the world since 2013.

Patil’s work excavates and investigates family traditions: his grandfather was an interpreter and a poet (Powada Shahir, a troubadour telling epic stories as he went from one village to another); and his father was an avant-garde playwright who addressed issues such as the devastating effects of immigration and its traumas through absurd situations in his plays. Patil, and before him, his family, has considered art as a method of resistance. In his recent work, he has been researching the processes of urbanization and invisibility of the working class in urban imaginaries. His projects build counter-memory and contesting narratives that describe and disturb the relationship between communities and their environments.

Patil’s works have been shown at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi (2022- 2023), Documenta fifteen, Kassel (2022), Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama 2020), Goethe- Institute / Max Mueller Bhavan, Delhi (2019), The Showroom, London (2018), Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2017), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017), Pune Biennale Habit-co Habit, Pune, (2017), Dakar Biennale, Dakar (2016), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015), ParaSite, Hong Kong (2014), and Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2013).


Amol K Patil, Black Masks on Roller Skates, Installation View, Documenta Fifteen, Kassel, 2022. Supported by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India, and Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai

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