Moving between contemporary art, cinema and performance, Patel brings seemingly disparate influences into the same world — from martial arts, Hollywood cinema and cars to migration, family histories and the everyday experience of British Asian life. Humour, choreography and acts of transformation recur throughout his work, challenging assumptions about authenticity, belonging and who gets to occupy particular roles or spaces.

Increasingly, these different strands of Patel’s practice are converging through world-building. Drawing on British Asian experience, ancestry, popular culture and
speculative imagination, his recent work is developing a distinctive form of British Asian Futurism: creating fictional worlds rooted in recognisable people, places and lived experience, while opening them towards alternative possibilities and imagined futures. Working across painting, moving image, performance and emerging technologies, Patel uses imagination not as an escape from reality, but as a way of seeing and reshaping it. This evolving body of work is also informing his development of a feature film rooted in the landscapes and communities of northern England.

Patel’s work has been presented internationally at institutions and events including Tate Modern, the Venice Biennale, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Sadler’s Wells and BFI London, as well as on public screens in Piccadilly Circus, London and Times Square, New York. His films and performances have reached audiences of more than 50 million online, including his TED talk, Who Am I? Think Again?

He received the Film London Jarman Award in 2019 and the Best International Film Award at Kino der Kunst in 2020, and was included in British Art Show 9. In 2021 he received both a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Artist Award and a Henry Moore Foundation Award. His major Artangel commission, Come As You Really Are, celebrates the extraordinary creativity of people’s hobbies and continues to tour across the UK.

Patel’s work is held in public and private collections internationally, including Tate, the British Council Collection, Government Art Collection, Arts Council Collection, M+ in Hong Kong, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi and Fondazione In Between Art Film in Rome. He is represented by Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai.