Screens of Encounter: Reading Interiorities in Amol K. Patil’s Study Oneself

“A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.”

Reading a dramaturgy of ligaments, possibilities and meanings in her poem, A Hand (2000), Jane Hirshfield inserts a proposition for the body into the deconstructed capacities of a hand. Her verse compels us to wonder: What does a body become? What does it create through its performances in the world that surrounds it? For artist Amol K. Patil, the body extends, beyond these questions, into a political gesture that asserts the right to occupy space. In Study Oneself (2020), he discusses how the apparatus of a body—and of the camera—can determine the specificities of how we view, interact and learn ourselves.

Study Oneself reinterprets the format of do-it-yourself videos that became popular during the pandemic and the lockdowns that followed. Foregrounding a relationship between the camera, the screen and a body, the video opens with the artist engrossed in watching an online “tutorial” on how to eat peanuts. The tutorial is being performed by the artist who—as he watches himself—gradually makes his way through the bowl of peanuts. On screen, we see him cracking each one to remove the contents of the shell, placing the latter outside the bowl and eating the shelled nut. Outside the computer screen, seated on a chair, Patil’s back faces the camera. As the video ends, the artist leans back on his chair, having emptied the bowl and the contents of the nuts.

A conceptual and performance artist, Patil usually finds himself leaning towards minimalistic expressions of the body, tuning into the subtleties of the mundane that inspire his work. In a Zoom conversation with me, Patil mentioned that the video work was produced during his participation in the Yokohama Triennale 2020. The curators, Raqs Media Collective, invited the artists to create short videos to convey a sense of where they were located during the pandemic. The resulting videos—including Patil’s—became an act of assimilation, bringing people and artistic practices together when most people could not travel. Recollecting his experience of the lockdown in India, he remembers the initial adjustment of having to move in with family. As Patil’s practice centres the act of observing and learning from the lives of the working class, his time during the lockdown meant structuring a more meditative process of learning to read his surroundings. He began concentrating on the formalisms of his house and its objects as well as the mannerisms of his family, especially as his studio space merged with the domestic.

Study Oneself is a glimpse into Patil’s practice where the body of the artist is construed as a possible apparatus in itself, existing alongside the actual cameras and the computer screens. A crucial shift that Patil observed during the lockdowns was the intensity of having to acknowledge the screen as an inseparable, indivisible component of daily functioning. His immediate environment was accommodating multiple body languages—persisting outside and parallel to his own—in the light of the simultaneity produced by coexisting presences across multiple screens. Noting the associations that were now being formed with the virtual, Patil began thinking of the kinds of relearnings and reattachments unfolding in front of him. The prospect of “learning online” was programmed world over as a real necessity, and the resulting modalities through which people were choosing to learn together virtually provided intriguing glimpses of other lives through the screen.

With regard to Study Oneself, Patil spoke of how when he performs for people and/or the camera, there is a strange equivalence that is produced, influencing the creation of a certain type of publics that in turn engender different spaces. Patil believes that there is often a tendency to try and separate the audience from what faces the performer. However, with multiple characterisations defining each performance, it is much too difficult to isolate one’s body language from the viewer and what they see. Here, the gestural quality that enunciates the relationship between the body and the camera becomes important to spotlight. Elaborating on his decision to record a take on the phenomenon of tutorials, Patil says he was drawn to what peanuts could be interpreted to represent. The manner in which we choose one part of the groundnut and discard the rest can be read as materialistic. He also spotlights the meditativeness of this act—the careful segregation, the counting, and the decisiveness or dismissiveness that drives our consumption.

Fields of Vision, VAICA’s festival for 2021 announced its first week of experiments in video art under “Cartographies of Sensation.” As part of Week One, the curatorial endeavour took to mapping the self across threads of perception, observation and a slowing down of experiences. Amid this, Patil’s work positions the body as an accumulation of what surrounds it and what it sees—multiple body languages, apparatuses and myriad labouring existences—and proceeds to perform a reclamation of the haptic within video art. When asked if this work might spur a series along the same lines, Patil said he wishes to further his experiment with feedback cameras, in order to complicate as well as convey the convolutions that define any relationship between the camera and the body. Speaking of his impression of the festival, Patil appreciated the specificities offered by the platform, especially its collation of performance art that further creates publics, criticalities and spaces of discussion.

To read more about the video works screening at VAICA's Fields of Vision, please click here.

To learn more about Amol K. Patil’s work, please click here and here.

All works by Amol K. Patil. Images courtesy of the artist and VAICA.