In The Shadow of Lustre, Amol K Patil exhibits mixed media including video works, in the pulsating lights of his poetic installations. The artist explores issues concerning the Indian caste and class system, and the invisibility of the working class in social narratives. – The idea of the exhibition is based on seeing and experiencing the traces of human history, lives and conversations of different generations behind wall cracks, through layers of paint, across skin and touch. – Amol K Patil He grew up near the mass housing complexes called ”chawls” in the working-class neighborhoods of his hometown Mumbai. In search of work and a better future, the Dalits, members of the lowest caste, moved from the countryside to the city and settled in chawls like these. The Dalit, commonly known as ”the untouchables”, mainly work as cleaners or factory workers. Patil is influenced by his grandfather, a Dalit poet, and his father, an avant-garde playwright. Informed by his family archive, he marks a collective experience of working class in the urban and cultural landscape of modern India. The exhibition warns that the issue of class doesn´t only concern education, work and cultural background. It emphasizes that understanding the basis on which class positions are determined helps to uncover the structures of power and exploitation in our society.
Amol K Patil
Amol K Patil (b. 1987, Mumbai) is a conceptual and performance artist whose practice emerges from the lived histories of Mumbai’s chawls, dense worker housing shaped by labor and migration. Growing up in this environment, Patil developed an artistic language that excavates memory through sound, gesture, and movement. His works often weave together performance, kinetic installation, and video, transforming personal and family archives into living settings where objects, such as an old Dictaphone, industrial sirens recorded by his father, or his grandfather’s Powada protest verses, become active voices.
Drawing from a lineage of resistance, Patil extends the legacies of his grandfather, a protest poet, and his father, a theater activist, into his own multidisciplinary practice. Through these inheritances, he stages counter-memories that challenge caste hierarchies, migration politics, and the erasure of working-class lives within urban modernity. His recent projects expand this research into the constructs of urbanization, reimagining relationships between humans, soundscapes, and landscapes.
Amol K Patil (b. 1987, Mumbai) has shown works at the Site Santa Fe international, New Mexico, 2025; Berlin Biennale, Berlin, 2025; De Pont Museum in The Netherlands 2024, Gwangju Biennale 2024; Hayward Gallery in London 2023; Kunstenfestivaldesarts, in Brussels 2023; Documenta Fifteen, Kassel, Germany, 2022; Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India 2022-2023; Yokohama Triennale (Yokohama, 2020); Goethe- Institute / Max Mueller Bhavan (Mumbai, 2019), Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan (New Delhi, 2019); The Showroom (London, 2018), Tensta konsthall (Stockholm, 2017), Pompidou (Paris, 2017); Pune Biennale Habit-co Habit (Pune, 2017); New Galerie (Paris, 2016); Japan Foundation (Delhi, 2015); Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 2015); Kadist Art Foundation, (Paris, 2013) (Text by Zasha Colah).
