Amol K Patil’s practice unfolds through movement, sound, and pause—where performance, theatre, and installation hold memory in the body. We meet the artist at Project 88 during his ongoing exhibition A Forest of Remembrance, where the gallery becomes both a site of rehearsal and a space of quiet accumulation. Objects appear poised between action and rest, carrying the trace of gestures already performed—or yet to come.
As Patil moves through the exhibition, attention shifts to how bodies inhabit space: how they wait, repeat, resist, and endure. Sculptural forms and kinetic elements register histories of labour and migration not through spectacle, but through rhythm and restraint. These gestures are not illustrative; they are learned, inherited, and remembered.
Patil’s work draws from familial lineages shaped by storytelling and dissent. His grandfather, a Powada Shahir, carried epic narratives across villages; his father, an avant-garde playwright, staged the anxieties of displacement and migration through absurdity. For Patil, art emerges from this inheritance—not as representation, but as a lived, collective practice.
In his recent work, the city looms large: its processes of urbanisation, its architectures of erasure, and the working-class bodies rendered increasingly invisible within it. Through performance and installation, Patil builds spaces where these bodies return—not as symbols, but as presence.
In this artist film, Patil reflects on making as a form of attention—one that listens to movement, honours repetition, and insists on remembering in a world structured to forget.
