Hannah Sykes : 20th March 2013: Hetain Patel

Throughout this lecture he kept saying, that when people asked about his work, or for the reason for his ideas for his work, he was always “too embarrassed to say it is Art”. I do not understand this personally, because if it is art, i know some people do not understand the background before the piece of art, however since it being art this knowledge is always challenged and people accept it. Everything is seemed to be being accepted to be art in this present day. Even the strangest of things that you would just walk straight past is classed as art.

I do personally not think we should be embarrassed as artist, we should embrace our creativity. His embarrassment did not show through the lecture though. However he began with a short introduction about himself.

He described himself as a visual artist, whom started his studies at Salford for his Foundation degree. Then from this moved to do his BA: Fine Art, at Nottingham Trent University. He stated that his degree was very broad and you tried out different things rather specialising in something straight away. From finishing his degree he has become a freelance artist for the past 10 years. With this he has exhibited at Galleries showing his photography work and his film. Since the past few years he has been introduced with performance which he has shown at some Live Theatres.

His first works were ‘Sacred Bodies’, he embedded his native culture of the Indian Culture from his parents and brought this through pattern and colours in which he drew on his own body, and photographed these. They were in pairs or in sets of threes, and always on a blank background which made the pattern shine through. I found these very mesmerising. The patterns were so detailed and very strong and powerful. I really liked these. They were life size photos which were exhibited over numerous galleries.

With these photos being exhibited for several years he said that he thought that he had become a bit static with progressing anywhere. He then developed these photographs, by actually filming the process of himself drawing and painting on his own body, and these videos became exhibited in galleries and in some parts he actually performed live performances at galleries. He showed us a video of one of these live performances which involved another person: Henna Artist. At first she was a bit hesitant in what she was going to do, as she did not really understand. However when beginning everything seemed to fit together and when she saw the finished product she was amazed. She actually improvised doing the henna on patells back, and with it being filmed live, this was projected on a screen in front of him which he then immediately transferred onto his front. It was magical to see, and how fast the overall pattern emerged.

He went on explaining his other video performances and one which was a video ” To dance like your dad”. This was a video of his dad explaining and exploring his car factory and how everything worked. It was an accidental video to which Hetain reflected and copied the video at the same moment of his dad however in a empty room. He spoke the same speed, same words, and also he copied his exact body language and movement.

Progressing along with his work, he moved forward with more videos and live performances. One being a live performance of a collaboration with another woman and a DJ. Hetain himself wanted to try communicate with sounds rather than words. He spoke in another language and with this translated it to his drum in front of him. The DJ would then make sounds ‘beat box’ and then translate these through his computer and mixer, then randomly a woman joined in. These carried on with the sounds individually until they merged together when all the sounds became one and all at the same time.

He carried on with this theme, and created more live performances, however in one performance included how we can mirror each others identity: accents: body languages.

Finally his last film, was a liver performance which kind of included everything together. First being an explanation of his dad and how he tried to copy him for 3 months by shaving his head like how his dad did when he came to England and how it started to grow as a side partin and a moustache. He included humour which i found interesting within his video.

He live acted the ” Too dance like your dad” video, and played both the videos and actually copied it on stage also. Finishing with a reanactment of the KungFu Film, live on stage with another woman however a film that he had produced within the background. The film included 6 split screens of 6 different view points of his reanactment of the film on the street. He did not use a sword but the total opposite: metre ruler. I found this very interesting seeing all the different view points.