On The Rise

After two decades of lightly skewering xenophobia and framing his diasporic experience in humorous videos, British-Gujarati artist Hetain Patel’s work has acquired an undertone of anger — slinging him into the most potent phase of his career yet.

- VIVEK MENEZES

GIVEN OUR SURREAL, roller-coaster pandemic times, it has become even more difficult to tease out historically significant new trends in the international art world.

This is because only a few certainties remain: consumption and connoisseurship continue to migrate to digital screens, moving images reign paramount, production values matter more than ever, and— crucially—political awareness must be uncompromisingly fine-tuned to global preoccupations.

In this novel paradigm, bristling with complex challenges and the ever-present opportunity to “go viral” to billions of eyeballs at once, 41-year old Hetain Patel has unexpectedly cata pulted himself into the handful of the most compelling artists in the world.

The British-Gujarati artist’s videos—which date back to 2007 on his YouTube channel—were always supremely clever, sly, and hilarious in the grand British tradition of wonderfully educated performers, like Monty Python, who utilize the potential of subversive slapstick.

His earliest videos ridiculed xenophobia with understated humour, but more recently Patel has begun to mine another register altogether. Drawing from deep residual anger about contemporary racism and colonial history, Patel’s newest works are powerfully raw. They situate him more in the vein of Hanif Kureishi, the brilliant British novelist and filmmaker who straddled similar multiple worlds in the 1980s.