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Hetain Patel, The Other Suit, Multimedia Installation, 2015 ______________________________________________________________

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Hetain Patel, Baa's House, digital print on archival paper, 2015, 137 x 165 cm ______________________________________________________________

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Hetain Patel, The Other Suit, 2015, Installation View

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Hetain Patel, The Other Suit, 2015, lifesize sculpture, fibreglass, handpainted suit

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Hetain Patel, The Amazing You Tubers, Two Screen Projection, the Agency 2015

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“The Other Suit" , Hetain Patel

The Agency is pleased to present the latest multi-media works by Hetain Patel, following on from his recent solo presentation at Chatterjee and Lal Gallery Mumbai. His latest body of works introduces the artist’s fascination with the mass communicative powers of Hollywood and the entertainment industries. As an avid consumer himself, Patel employs similar tropes in these new works, particularly through the displacement of the popular culture icon Spider-Man. From the intimacy of his family home to the online public broadcasting of YouTube, Patel reveals a space where devotion to pop culture and art making are one and the same thing.

The Other Suit, a multi-screen video installation, shows Patel’s interest in the traces of pop culture that remain as physical memories in the body. He performs a range of male archetypes from Hollywood that have worked their way physically and lyrically into his memory. They reveal a foursome of characters that question our right to heritage and belonging. It is expressed physically and vocally, often violently, but always with the Hollywood sheen of the audio track. The piece is shot in his living room, the conventional site for watching and re-watching movies on the TV or computer screen. The installation alludes to this space sculpturally.

On repeated viewing, the deceptively sleek and fast paced editing, along with Patel’s characteristic humour, give way to darker layers in the artist’s practice in which he demands freedom from the oppressive stereotyping that has been a part of his upbringing. Placing the mainstream figure of Spider-Man crudely within the more marginalised world of his British Indian identity, he insists on the authenticity of this connection.

The exhibited sculpture is the result of three months of hand painting a Spider-Man skin onto an existing formal suit. Intricately patterned, the suit adorns a cast taken of the artist’s body, and pushes Spider-Man’s characteristic crouch into the squatting posture that ties the artist’s family to India.

This is the third Spider-Man costume Patel has made. The first featured in his live performance American Boy (2014, Sadler’s Wells, London), and can be seen in the work Baa’s House 1, where the artist poses for photographs in his Grandmother’s living room in Bolton UK, where he was born. Patel’s sits masked in his first home, squatting in front of family photographs spanning 40 years, and next to his Grandmother, the instigator of the family migration from India. The second of these suits can be seen as part of the two-channel video The Amazing YouTubers. This installation features an edited collection of YouTube videos that chart a committed community of teenagers sharing tutorials of making their own costumes, aiming to be movie-accurate to The Amazing Spider-Man films. Alongside this plays a time-lapse of Patel’s own suit making, this time revealing the patterning through a hand painted thank you letter to the man behind Spider-Man’s mask, Peter Parker. Engaging with the durational element of this activity, Patel also identifies with this online community.
Patel’s work centres around performance, which he masters skillfully to theatrical levels, including scripted dialogues and choreography, for example in his live piece American Boy (showing at Sadler’s Wells 28 & 29 May, 2015). He also applies his dance-inspired exploration of the body to examine cultural ritual as liminal space in his multi-media installation works.

Hetain Patel (* Bolton, 1980) lives and works in London.  In 2015 he will participate in the Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia, Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf, 56th Venice Biennale, Italy, SPHERES 7, Galleria Continua, Le Moulin as well as exhibiting “The Other Suit” In Chatterjee and Lal gallery, Mumbai.  He is preparing his forthcoming solo exhibition ‘ Jump” at Wood Street Galleries, Pittburgh.  His live performance TEN toured for three years and American Boy , launched at Sadler’s Wells Theatre London is still touring now.

www.hetainpatel.com