Amol K Patil Born 1987 in Mumbai, India

Grounded in personal and collective histories, Patil’s work excavates the layered experiences of labour, migration and social marginalisation, particularly as they resonate through the hierarchies of caste and class that shaped his upbringing in Mumbai’s chawl neighbourhoods. Drawing on the archival legacies of his grandfather, a Powada poet, and his father, an avant‑garde playwright, Patil treats making as a mode of counter‑memory — inviting audiences into poetic yet exacting reflections on labour, movement and visibility. His projects often operate at the intersection of memory and materiality: kinetic devices, repeated gestures, bodies in motion and architectural traces become tools to unsettle conventional narratives of urban life and human disposability.

Patil’s work has been shown internationally in a spectrum of leading institutional contexts. He has presented major solo and institutional exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery in London — where The Politics of Skin and Movement marked his first UK institutional solo after receiving the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation/Kochi‑Muziris Biennale Award — as well as at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in California. Other notable institutional presentations include a solo exhibition at De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art in the Netherlands and participation in major international biennials and exhibitions such as the Mercosul Biennial, Documenta 15 in Kassel and the Gwangju Biennale. His work has also appeared in globally influential contexts like the Yokohama Triennale, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and numerous other museum and biennial platforms.

This year, Patil will have his first solo show with Galerie Peter Kilchmann, opening on 26 February at their Zahnradstrasse 21 location in Zurich. Titled The Shadow of Lustre, the exhibition continues his explorations of laboring bodies, silent histories and the traces of lived urban experience through sculpture, drawing and video, marking a significant moment in his evolving international trajectory.