Overview

Hetain Patel is a UK-based artist whose practice, spanning a number of different media, is often performative in nature. Whilst identity formation has been central to his concerns since the beginning of his career, more recently this idea has been seen through the lens of imitation, in particular through language and physical movement. Increasingly Hetain’s work is populated by characters, both fictional and real, in relation to which the artist juxtaposes himself in moments of elision and dissonance.

For his first solo show in India, the artist will be showing a number of major new works, including single and multi-channel video work and photographic prints. The exhibition will be presented in two parts in order to show the full breadth of Hetain’s practice.

Part I (13 January – 4 February) showcases To Dance Like Your Dad (2009), a single channel video, and Mamai (2012), a 5 channel video installation. In these works, featuring Hetain’s father, mother and grandmother, he is interested in the body’s ability to hold and create cultural memory. Here, repetition and imitation become tools to excavate the body’s history.

Part II (9Feb – 3 March), features The First Dance (2012), a single channel video, and Eva (2012), a new and ongoing body of photographs. As with the works in Part I, Hetain is interested in the body’s ability to hold and create cultural memory from both popular culture and his own inherited cultural history. These works, both featuring the artist’s wife, frames his identity between the domestic settings we see here in Part I, and further afield in the fantasy of kung fu blockbuster film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.