Project 88 is pleased to present Black Masks on Roller Skates, a selected excerpt of Amol K Patil’s larger project exhibited at Documenta Fifteen.
This exhibition encompasses kinetic sculpture, holographic video, music, and performance. Map-lines of migration and transformation outline a stage, with performers as if beneath the surface. They are breathing, watching the land, living, moving. It’s a wave movement, between places.
Patil builds on theatre and performative traditions nested in working-class neighbourhoods in Mumbai, as well as his own family history. His grandfather was an anti-colonial Powada performer who mixed his critique of empire with that of a violence embedded in the graded inequality of the caste system that hierarchically divides not just labour but labourers. His father, an avant-garde writer, wrote and produced protest theatre, critiqued the time of the work siren, and of sleeping in shifts, intensified this experimental, emancipatory ethos. In his father’s scripts are comma sections, with gestures and moods. Patil access these clues, this other body language.