Humanizing Mumbai's chawls

Amol K. Patil's first solo show in the US archives the chawls of Mumbai and joins a larger discourse on displacement

- Trisha Mukherjee

Trapped. Suffocated. Silenced. Amol K. Patil's bronze sculptures make an unsettling, thought-provoking impression. As faces and limbs jut out of cloud-like entities, they perpetuate an anticipatory sense of escape.

Patil is a chronicler of life, or, seen another way, time. The subjects of his sculptures are workers at Mumbai's textile mills. They live in chawls, and toil all day to eke out a living. And Patil captures them in action, as layers of dust, fabric scraps and rubbish stick to them.

"I use performative body language. It represents the things that people in the area work with, and around. I wanted to show how the body is always moving. So many of these workers are actually from outside the region, and they take their stories wherever they go. That is the idea behind the cloud-like shape of the body," the artist explains.

TREATISE ON DISPLACEMENT

To the urban lower- and middle-class in India, Patil's sculptures would probably seem like art imitating life. For the upper-class though, the depiction is far removed from reality as they understand it. It's interesting, then, to wonder what emotion these sculptures will evoke for viewers in the United States, when they are showcased at the Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive (BAMPFA) in California as part of Patil's first solo in the country. It is titled A Forest of Remembrance, and has been curated by Victoria Sung, Phyllis C. Wattis and Margot Norton of BAMPFA.