published in Art India, April 2018, Volume 22 Issue 1
Hetain Patel’s video installations provoke Anuj Daga to think about performative worlds and their complex anxieties.
One notices the laborious pace of Hetain Patel’s quasi-photographic video work The Jump exhibited at Mumbai’s Chatterjee & Lal from February the 1st to March the 10th. Dressed as Spiderman, Patel stages a scene from the Hollywood film – he leaps like the superhero in his grandmother’s house as family members watch by in amazement. In the video of the jump stretched to about six minutes, projected in two settings back to back – one in the living room and the other against a neutral background – the act sets a strange dialogue between the wondrous and the absurd. As the viewer shuttles between two staged and carefully overlapping slow-motion videos installed back to back, the referentiality of the supernatural and the domestic begin to interchange. It is in the constructed lapse of time that one comes to terms with the spectacle of mundaneness as well as the ludicrousness of the spectacle.
Patel is a UK-based artist of Indian origin and his works explore these two worlds in close contact with each other. These works were recently also shown at Manchester Art Gallery. In a well-crafted performance that takes place between two individuals before their marriage alliance, Patel proposes a setting in which personal relationships get forged and the dance of life gets underway. Presented in order to question the boundaries of rituals, race, class, physical access and language, Don’t Look at the Finger opens up ways where bodies communicate and connect beyond words.
If only the story had not resolved itself neatly towards the end, it would have left the viewer moved and intrigued by its cinematic setting, pace and choreography. Patel makes the film accessible but also inaccessible – moves and gestures do not always add up predictably. Patel’s strategic experiment with narrative refers to Hollywood and some of its tropes but also destabilizes our expectations from time to time.
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