Project 88 is pleased to present Black Masks on Roller Skates, a selected excerpt of Amol K Patil’s larger project exhibited at Documenta Fifteen. This exhibition encompasses kinetic sculpture, drawings, holographic videos, music, and performance art. Map lines of migration and transformation outline a stage, with performers as if beneath the surface. They are breathing, watching the land, living, moving. It’s a wave movement, between places.
“I vibrate with a legacy,” Patil says. There’s an insurrectionary history that the artist comes from. In this exhibition, he reawakens it. Patil builds on theatre and performative traditions nested in working-class neighbourhoods in Mumbai as well as his own family history. His grandfather was an anti-colonial Powada performer who mixed his critique of empire with that of a violence embedded in the graded inequality of the caste system that hierarchically divides not just labour but labourers. His father, an avant-garde writer, wrote and produced protest theatre, critiqued the time of the work siren, and of sleeping in shifts, intensi-fied this experimental, emancipatory ethos. “In my father’s scripts are comma sections, with gestures and moods. I access these clues, this other body language,” he explains.
Powada, a musical performance of traveling troupes, can be traced to the thirteenth century where, in kings’ courts, poets composed songs praising gods. In Maharashtra over the last century, the Dalit move-ment turned this devotional bias into a radical idiom to reimagine society with equality and new ideas of fraternity. A tumult of revolutionary lyrics provokes a reconstitution of publics and arenas. Many, from different cultures, backgrounds, suddenly together, in chawls, made adjustable stages, performed, and re-hearsed. Patil invites a time collaboration. Young Powada writers and musicians, the Yalgaar Sanskrutik Manch, weave their lyrics with his grandfather’s. It’s a way to think the now, combining what’s harsh and polite, sweet and silent, pitching a criticism of land politics and social separation.
Patil draws us into journeys within the city from his childhood. His father’s friend, Anil Tuebhekar, moving on skates, a broom in hand and a radio at his waist, sweeping the street, every day. He cleaned the city, but knew he wasn’t welcome into the bus or in the hotel for a drink of water. Shutting the world out with music was his individual protest. The city’s factories, mills, municipality, and public sector have contained mil-lions as workers, helpers, craftsmen, caregivers, and cleaners. Chawls, an early modern form of neighbour-hood housing unique to Mumbai, were turned by migrant labourers into dynamic sites of protest, words, theatre, music. The battle with memory, time, and politics accelerates. Construction is ongoing; there is a pit with water, it looks still, but small bubbles keep appearing, like someone’s breathing inside, someone who created this land.
