Find Amol K Patil’s The Politics of Skin and Movement presented at and by the Hayward Gallery in collaboration with Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation and the Kochi Biennale Foundation.
Carving out a new pathway for seamless cultural exchanges between South Asia, the UK and Europe, while simultaneously supporting South Asian artists at a crucial juncture of their professional development, the new DBF-KMB Award brings together London’s Hayward Gallery, the Durjoy-Bangladesh Foundation and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foundation. In an endeavour that speaks volumes of what can be achieved through cross-cultural collaborations, Hayward Gallery will also host a public exhibition and lecture programme every alternate year and between biennales titled The Durjoy Bangladesh Lecture Series—co-curated with the Kochi Biennale—to draw on the Biennale’s rich legacy of of leading artist-curators and also creative practitioners leading the discourse in South Asian regions.
Installation view of Amol K Patil’s The Politics of Skin and Movement, 2022.
Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation and Joseph Rahul
Installation view of Amol K Patil’s The Politics of Skin and Movement, 2022.
Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation and Joseph Rahul
The very first recipient of this award—to be a South Asian artist who has not had an institutional solo show in UK before and selected by a DBF-KMB Award selection committee which includes members of the Hayward Gallery’s curatorial team and its director, Ralph Rugoff, as well as representatives from the DBF and the Kochi Biennale Foundation—is Mumbai and Amsterdam-based visual artist Amol K Patil. His installation, The Politics of Skin and Movement, finds expression again after the 5th edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale as it comes to life with new iterations in his first institutional solo in the UK.
Installation view of Amol K Patil: The Politics of Skin and Movement at the Hayward Gallery
Courtesy of Mark Blower, artist and the Hayward Gallery.
It is a constellation of art, this exhibit. Drawings, sculptures, kinetic objects and moving images appear at first glance, perhaps, as a disjointed sequence of still images but it draws the viewer in with subtle movements. “These movements are like meditations on the body’s senses—touch, sound, breathing, and other working processes—thus engaging with ideas of touch and skin politics,” elaborates Patil, who dabbles with questions of labour and casteism with respect to the body. The evocative body of work also touches upon both real and imaginary borders to reemphasise the access and movement—and subsequently, a lack thereof—that Patil’s community was afforded across time and history. A powerful statement on the human condition, his work also builds on the legacy of his family archives—of his grandfather, a poet and his father, an avant-garde playwright as they manoeuvred the sensitive landscape of labour and division in India
Installation view of Amol K Patil’s The Politics of Skin and Movement, 2022.
Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation and Joseph Rahul
“In a world that is moving faster than ever, the quiet and contemplative nature of Amol K Patil’s work prompts us to slow down, asking us to realign and refocus our eyes and minds,” says Yung Ma, senior curator of the Hayward Gallery. The exhibition also marks the reopening of HENI Project Space at the Hayward Gallery, which has presented free exhibitions from a diverse group of more than 40 international artists since its inception in 2007.
The Politics of Skin and Movement by Amol K Patil will be on display at the Hayward Gallery, London till 19 November 2023.
