11 October – 19 November 2023
HENI Project Space, Hayward Gallery
The Politics of Skin and Movement comprises kinetic works, bronze sculptures,drawings, and moving images. These small-scale works are installed on and around wooden structures that mimic the furniture commonly found within offices that administer land ownership in Mumbai. Here, their drawers are filled with sand in place of paper records.
Patil’s work explores the relationship between bodies and urban environments, and engages with ideas of touch, skin, politics and access. For Mumbai’s lower caste citizens, hands and feet are the tools with which they perform menial labour. In Patil’s installation, bodies are represented through these visible parts. The rough texture of the unfinished bronze recalls the dirty and calloused skin of these manual workers, who exist in close proximity to the dusty, polluted ground of Mumbai’s urban sprawl.
The installation also draws upon Patil’s family archives and the legacy of his grandfather, a poet, and his father, an avant-garde playwright. Two of his grandfather’s unpublished poems addressing India’s caste system have been updated in collaboration with a poetry collective from Mumbai. Translated into English for the first time they appear alongside the drawings and objects in the installation. Their political concerns are echoed in the contemporary protest song that plays from a portable radio in a video shot on the city’s dockside.
The scale of Patil’s installation reflects the restricted means and status of lower caste workers. Within this context of limitations, small gestures and subtle movements become intimate meditations on the body’s capacity to feel and breathe.
