Third Text

10 April 2026

Jelena Sofronijevic

Amol K Patil’s practice is situated around the social struggles in Mumbai, India. Inspired by his father and grandfather’s creative approaches to resistance against repressive social orders, through his artistic practice Patil tells the stories of those fighting systems that assign people to work in subterranean darkness (the sewers, mines and underbelly of the city). Through sculptures, poetry, drawings and video, he continues an artistic lineage that shares the struggles of those in dire poverty. Jelena Sofronijevic speaks with the artist, on the presentation of his installation Who is invited to the city? in a group exhibition at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh.

Amol K Patil, Who is invited to the city?, 2026, installation view in ‘The dead don’t go until we do’, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, 7 March – 30 May 2026, photo by Sally Jubb

Jelena Sofronijevic:    The group exhibition ‘The dead don’t go until we do’ considers the strength of family, friends and communities across generations. ^[1]  The exhibition’s title is drawn from a poem by Jackie Kay and your work, Who is invited to the city?, is a continuation of your practice exploring the creative works of your father, an avant-garde playwright, and your grandfather, a poet and powada singer, ^[2] and their migration to Mumbai. The eponymous film in the installation also references the poet Namdeo Dhasal, one of the founders of the Dalit Panthers (1972), a social movement aimed at destroying caste hierarchy in Indian society. Could you talk about the relationship between caste and creative practice in your work?

Amol K Patil:    I feel it is important for me to return to the spaces where the conversation began, particularly the housing societies around where I grew up. It was always there, the caste conversation, although not too loud, but it was very silent. I began exploring and emerging into these conversations. For me, spending time understanding these histories is essential, and it has shaped the way of looking at and with certain things. It is something to see how these communities have spoken about these issues before, and how they have developed their own ways of discussing them, one of which is powada, as you mentioned. I am seeing a lot of poets, writers and speakers, and how they started reaching out to people. I was fascinated by that, and this is something I became interested in, bringing these conversations into a global platform with my art practice and translating to the world through my visual language.

JS:    I entered your practice through ‘The Politics of Skin and Movement’, your first institutional solo exhibition in the UK, held at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2023. The exhibition was presented to you as the first recipient of the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation/Kochi-Muziris Biennale (DBF-KMB) Award. Sound was a central component in that exhibition, which included pulsing sands in cabinets, and the mechanical whirring of factory machines. Elsewhere, writer Pranita Thorat has evoked the importance of light as medium in your practice. ^[3]  Could you talk about the role of darkness in the installation in Edinburgh, particularly in the film?   

AKP:    Light plays a crucial role in my process. I often work with a strong contrast between the darkness and light, which allows me to play with the dynamics, creating a theatrical environment. The space becomes almost like a backstage area where the darkness dominates, and specific elements are revealed through spotlights. I feel in such a setting the storyline or the characters are defined. The installation, the darkness of the video, and the particular gestural elements emerge within the darkness. It shifts the narrative, giving the gesture a spotlight to become the focus at that point. The gesture becomes the storyteller at the moment in the given time, and again it shifts to another gesture, and the cycle continues. I am interested in how the darkness and light could interact and narrate more dramatic tension as we see it.

Amol K Patil, Who is invited to the city?, 2026, installation view in ‘The dead don’t go until we do’, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, 7 March – 30 May 2026, photo by Sally Jubb

JS:    With the searchlight in the film, I think of the work of Soumya Sankar Bose, who uses photography, film and archive to reconstruct overlooked histories and folk theatre practices. The sense of looking is continued in your drawings, layered onto the walls of the exhibition space, in which imagined figures appear as though looking through the cracks of the walls of the chawls, tenements built for Indian workers by the British government under the Bombay Development Department (BDD) from 1920. In your sculptures, often a body part, an arm or leg, reaches out of an abstract mass. These research-based drawings are quite different, and for locals to Edinburgh, may recall the large-scale works by Ibrahim Mahama installed at the nearby Fruitmarket Gallery in 2024. ^[4]  Could you talk about the role of drawing in your practice?

AKP:    Drawing is something that, for me, is a kind of a regular exercise, an everyday process of observation. Through drawings, I try to reflect on the lives of these communities and the dramatic relationships that exist within their environment. Many of these drawings emerge from observing how people live within constrained spaces and how they have adapted the city and moulded their lives. These living conditions often involve layers of generational conversation, shared conversation, and negotiating spaces. The drawings are about how people transformed a limited environment to survive and continue to live. The idea of the cracks or fragmentary spaces often appears in these drawings; these cracks symbolise the generational experiences that have passed and lived through the layers of paint over time.

Amol K Patil, Who is invited to the city?, 2026, drawing, installation view in ‘The dead don’t go until we do’, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, 7 March – 30 May 2026, photo by Sally Jubb

JS:    Your work widely explores how ‘cities… are built on bodies’. The ‘unfinished’ bronze of your sculptures – which, at the Hayward Gallery, embodied the ‘dirty and calloused skin of manual workers’ – here emerges only briefly, out of pressed, and ghostly, white clothing. How do you explore the relation between the working body and the city through your use of materials?

AKP:    The materials in my work sometimes function metaphorically, and sometimes I try to use real objects to portray people – like the clothes that the working-class people wear in general, or objects such as the radio, among other things. However, when I am using bronze as a medium, it becomes more metaphorical in context; I wanted to bring the conversation of developing the hard skin that these labourers have, who work in the harsh sunlight, or in generally harsh conditions, resulting in damage to their skin. With the sculptures, I try to bring those elements into the work.

Amol K Patil, Who is invited to the city?, 2026, installation view (detail) in ‘The dead don’t go until we do’, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, 7 March – 30 May 2026, photo by Sally Jubb

JS:    All of the artists in this exhibition – Kang Seung Lee, MADEYOULOOK and Małgorzata Mirga-Tas – participated in documenta 15 in Kassel in 2022. In 2025, you twice presented work in Sweden, including at Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna, where you were an artist-in-residence with Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán amongst others, and at Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg, where some of the individual works within this installation were first presented. ^[5]  Did your practice move in response to, or relate with, this particular context?

AKP:    Yes, I do remember them from documenta. Some of us were there during the site visits, but in Kiruna, I did not get the chance to connect properly with the other residents. I don’t know how much I would be able to answer that. In general, if I speak, the artists that I meet during any visit or residency do help with developing the conversations. We spend time visiting different works, and generally exploring each other's practice does shape certain narratives. It is interesting to see how people outside India take the caste conversation, and somehow, certain ways and similarities help to navigate.

JS:    In the film, Who is invited to the city?, the narrator asks: ‘What were the imaginations like when there was no television, no cinema? Were the stories enough for them to walk barefoot from their village to the city?’ Your installation concludes with a poem you’ve written, inspired by one of your father’s scripts. In the interpretation for ‘The dead don’t go until we do’, it is suggested that you, unlike Dhasal, retain a sense of hope. Could you talk about your engagement with artistic forms of resistance, and the concept of ‘Dalit futurisms’? ^[6]

Right now, with my practice, I feel my position remains grounded in the idea of community and equality. I believe that freedom is inseparable from equality, and that issues such as caste discrimination, untouchability, and other social exclusion must be addressed. These conversations happen in many everyday spaces, such as school, college, the workplace, or any casual encounters. Although it is not as loud as it was earlier, today it is very silent. People now are aware, and these realities occur in a quiet, subtle way. Through my work, I try to find a way to address these issues, sometimes poetically, sometimes dramatically. I am interested in how art can raise these voices in different places, especially for the audience who may not be familiar with these histories. Through my practice, I aim to create work that is accessible and understandable for common people. I think that is something I look forward to.

and then what?
after all this where should I go?
the daily wages are not enough, is it enough?
or my needs are off my limits?
at midnight when the dog barks echo in the streets,
I can hear growling.
my wife lying beside me, I hear it’s her.
she said she was full and gave out the last bread to our son.
where should we go after the day winds up?
where can we rest for a while without our stomach keeping us awake?
what will be enough?
I see her, her hands are tired but they are resting now.
her skin is flushed against mine, she says she can barely feel mine.
I had washed them before but the smell doesn’t go that often.
my colleague fell sick today at work,
we all panicked,
I rushed to get some water from the nearby shop,
he gave me a bottle, an old one with all kinds of dents.
I held it in front of him, but he said he did not need it
we often sit together during the breaks and have paan,* but water...  I guess not
when will this be over?
I stared at the ceiling;
when I was a little boy,
I dreamed of a concrete one
I still do
but I feel... yes... I think I still feel
I still have sensations left in my fingertips,
but I feel tired nowadays
my limbs are weak, swollen up,
I embrace my baby girl; I realize how harsh
my skin has become.
the city never slows down,
when I sleep, I can still hear,
their voice, their dreams...
what will it cost to sleep well?
at least for a night.
my body will have to work again.
dress again,
walk again,
rush again,
run again,
starve again,
swell again,
harsh again,
breathe again.
at the end of the other night,
I feel it will dream again.

Amol K Patil, inspired by one of his father (a scriptwriter)’s scripts

* Paan leaf is also called betel leaf. It is commonly eaten in India with tobacco and other things. Whilst labourers would take paan in their breaks, they may hesitate to drink the water.
 

^[1]    ‘The dead don’t go until we do’, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, 7 March – 30 May 2026

^[2]     Powada is a traditional form of folk ballad used by the Maratha caste – rural peasants, shepherds and ironworkers – to speak of heroic deeds. This tradition later merged with protest movements, and Patil’s grandfather appropriated the form to directly criticise the British colonial and the caste systems.

^[3]     See Pranita Thorat, ‘Languages of Resistance: An Interview with Amol K Patil’, No Niin magazine, issue 30, June 2025, accessed 8 March 2026

^[4]     See EMPIRE LINES, ‘Sekondi Locomotive Workshop (2024), with Ibrahim Mahama’, podcast audio, accessed 8 March 2026

^[5]      See Jelena Sofronijevic, ‘Letter from Timisoara’, Art Monthly, no 483, February 2025; Amol K Patil’s solo exhibition ‘The Shadow of Lustre’, was at Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenberg, Sweden, 8 February – 21 April 2025 (accessed 31 March 2026)

^[6]      See ‘Osheen Siva in Conversation with Jelena Sofronijevic and Nicole Thiara’, Bonington Gallery, April 24, 2024, accessed 8 March 2026; see also Asia Forum and Asymmetry Art Foundation, A World of Many Worlds: One-Day Assembly on Global Asias, collateral event, La Biennale di Venezia 60th International Art Exhibition, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy, April 20, 2024, including contributions by Subash Thebe Limbu (Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous, 2023) and Amol K Patil
 

Jelena Sofronijevic is a producer, curator, writer and researcher, working at the intersections of cultural history, politics and the arts. Their independent curatorial projects include ‘Invasion Ecology’ (2024), ‘SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries’ (2025), and ‘Can We Stop Killing Each Other?’ at the Sainsbury Centre (2025–2026), and they produce the podcast EMPIRE LINES. Jelena is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, curating exhibitions of Balkan and Yugoslavian/diasporic artists in British art collections.   https://jelsofron.com