ZURICH.- The Shadow of Lustre is the first solo presentation in Switzerland by internationally recognized artist Amol K Patil. The artist exhibits bronze sculptures, paintings, drawings and video works, in the pulsating lights of his poetic installations. The artist explores issues concerning the Indian caste and class system, and the invisibility of the working class in social narratives. The exhibition was created in collaboration with Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2025, curated by Amila Puzić.
This is a new chapter of the exhibition that focuses on the experiences of Dalits, members of the lowest caste in India, who moved from villages to cities and settled in the working-class neighborhoods of the artist's hometown of Mumbai.
‘’The idea of the exhibition is based on seeing and experiencing the traces of human history, lives and conversations of different generations behind wall cracks, through layers of paint, across skin and touch.’’ Amol K Patil
The first exhibition space is dedicated to the series The Shadow of Lustre, 2025 which unfold across stage- like constructions: Eight paintings, executed in ink on water-based paint on MDF, eighteen bronze sculptures, on video projection and one video installation showing parts of the human body — hands, feet, arms, torso — and traces of their labor. This body of work is grounded in the Mumbai’s mass housing complexes called “chawls” and the stories told by various individuals from the book One Hundred Years and One Hundred Voices. Dense housing structures with long corridors lined by small rooms, primarily inhabited by mill workers and working-class families who migrated to the city in search of stable livelihoods and a future for the next generation. These spaces are not merely residences but social environments where lives unfold collectively. With little privacy, domestic life spills into shared corridors; bodies, voices, and gestures intermingle. The walls bear layers of colors from different generations; the corners harbor secrets, and the kitchen still carries the aroma of freshly ground spices.
Who Is Invited to the City? (2025), a series of twelve paintings (acrylic on canvas), accompanied by a video work of the same title, is on view in the second gallery space. First shown at the Gwangju Biennale, the video unfolds in nocturnal darkness, lit only by handheld torches carried by young figures walking together through the night. The torches illuminate bare feet, jeans, hands, and fragments of bodies — but never faces. Crickets fill the soundscape, accompanied by a voice-over reflecting on light, vision, distance, hunger, and longing for a city that seems to belong to others. In search of light, the working class has travelled vast miles to reach the cities, but as they approach, they face constant struggle and the darkness of endless roads. Sounds have accompanied them during their long journeys and, this work, is used as a metaphor for their lively conversations describing life in the cities.
In the third and final space of the exhibition, the sculpture The Shadow of Lustre I is on display, illuminated by a single bulb suspended above it. The sculpture deliberately preserves a rough surface reminiscent of human skin worn by intensive labor. The multiple footprints at the bottom of the sculpture represent the miles people having walked from villages to big cities. In so doing, they protested through music, theater, poetry and spoken word, raising social awareness, demanding a recognition, and challenging caste hierarchies.
Throughout the exhibition, light plays a crucial role and subtly and meaningfully links the works. Simple bulbs, theatrical darkness, and gentle illumination create an atmosphere in which figures appear and recede, hovering between visibility and obscurity. The title The Shadow of Lustre points to this tension: lustre as shimmer, promise, or brightness, and shadow as its necessary counterpart.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication on the Amol K Patil´s broader oeuvre, with an essay by Amila Puzić and Luca Cerizza. The publication lounge will take place April 24 and the promotion will be accompanied by a guided tour of the exhibition, followed by a conversation between the artist and curator Amila Puzić.
Amol K Patil (*1987) lives and works between Mumbai, India, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He studied painting at the Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Arts and Crafts, Mumbai, graduating in 2009, and was later an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. Patil is a conceptual and performance artist whose practice emerges from the lived histories of Mumbai’s ‘’chawls’’, dense worker housing shaped by labor and migration. Growing up in this environment, Patil developed an artistic language that excavates memory through sound, gesture, and movement. He has shown works at Site Santa Fe International, New Mexico, 2025; Berlin Biennale, Berlin, 2025; De Pont Museum in the Netherlands, 2024; Gwangju Biennale, 2024; Hayward Gallery in London, 2023; Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India, 2022-2023; Documenta Fifteen, Kassel, Germany, 2022.
Amila Puzić is an art historian and educator based in Gothenburg, where she works as curator at Röda Sten Konsthall. She has curated extensive number of art projects in public spaces, as well as discursive and performative programmes and exhibitions in the white cube and beyond. She co-curated the Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 58th Venice Biennale represented by artist Danica Dakić in 2019. She curated Amol K Patil's first solo exhibition The Shadow of Lustre at Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg in 2025.
