Chronicling Mumbai’s chawls with Amol K Patil
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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. 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.
Patil’s muse is Mumbai, its chawls in particular. He grew up near these chicken-coop dwellings inhabited by the textile mill workers. In hindsight, he thinks he may have subconsciously been a witness to the happenings in these sites that he would pass on his way to school and back.
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