arts and design

With great art comes great responsibility: Hetain Patel, Bolton's webby wonder

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Hetain Patel remembers what it was like to grow up in Bolton as part of the “only brown family in town”. He still recalls the vicious abuse he’d receive whenever there was a special occasion and he was forced to wear his Indian formal suit: “Even just walking from the house to the car was difficult.” And he still remembers discovering kung fu movies for the first time, seeing heroes fighting in similar robes, and the transformative effect they had on him.

“It was old Hong Kong movies late at night,” he says, “and much later it was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This freeing up of the idea that a man just wears a shirt or T-shirt.”

‘I’m interested in bridge building’ … Hetain Patel.



‘I’m interested in bridge building’ … Hetain Patel. Photograph: Hetain Patel

Suddenly, Patel was able to reinvent himself, no longer an outsider in strange clothes but a kung fu hero. And why stop there? With a little imagination, he could pretend to be Spider-Man, Eddie Murphy or Michael Jackson. He became an expert mimic in the playground and, at home, he was a head-in-the-clouds fantasist, weaving Spidey-webs around his grandmother’s house with little more than a piece of string and a paperclip.

He was also laying the groundwork for an artistic career that has frequently looked back towards these coming-of-age moments, raising questions about identity, communication and cultural overlap. It’s work that has led to the 38-year-old winning this year’s Film London Jarman award, which recognises outstanding artists working with moving image.

Like Derek Jarman – the late experimental film-maker the awards are named after – Patel’s work connects with an audience outside the art world, largely because he likes to wrap them all in the language of Hollywood: epic soundtracks, highly choreographed movement, impressive slow-motion effects (filmed on a shoestring although you’d never guess). On 2017’s Don’t Look at the Finger, the turquoise and purple costumes dazzle, while the camera swings around the action in true bullet-time, Matrix style.

At first glance, it’s a high-production fight movie, but the more you look the less generic it seems. The fight seems to be taking place at an African wedding ceremony; the kung fu moves incorporate sign language. Patel has brought together different cultures and marginalised groups, using a global language we can all understand.

“I’m interested in bridge building,” he says. “It comes from a personal place of wanting to fit in and be accepted. Of course, on paper an afro kung fu sign language film with transforming costumes shouldn’t work. But when you hear or see it, you should feel instantly familiar with it.”

As a child, Patel didn’t enjoy discussing his identity: it was only through art that he felt able to express his feelings. Surprisingly for someone trained in visual art, he’s spent much of his career in dance: “I secured some funding and I went in with a naivety, not knowing the rules, which was helpful. I never had to pretend I had a dance-trained body.”

His stage work includes American Boy – which sees Patel shapeshift through a range of movie and comic-book impersonations – and American Man, a satire on misogyny that has him appearing as a “bad” Obama. Experience in the dance arena has clearly fed into his video work. In 2015’s The Jump we see Patel dressed as Spider-Man, leaping off the sofa in his grandmother’s front room while his extended family look on in smart Indian dress. It was, he says, the first sofa he ever jumped off pretending to be the superhero. The suit took him four months to make, and the day of filming was fraught as his family had not been told what to expect and his grandmother – who had been recently burgled by a gang of masked white men – spent the session berating the (white) camera crew.

“Luckily, it was in Gujarati so they couldn’t understand her,” says Patel. The resulting piece is both funny and moving, an exploration of his family’s roots (their own great leap involved moving the family to the UK) and our desire for shared experiences. “At that age, what I wanted to be most when I grew up was white,” notes Patel, who was drawn to Spider-Man because the full facial mask took ethnicity out of the equation.

He’s still working through issues with his background and you get a good sense of this in 2008’s It’s Growing on Me, a time-lapse video that shows him gradually adopting his father’s look – a moustache and side parting. The reactions to his changing image fascinated him: at first friends would make jokes about him looking like a “paedo”. (“I had a BMX at the time and it put me off going to the track because there were children there.”) People would stare at him in shops, or even tug it in nightclubs. Then he started getting discounts in Indian shops – “They’d assume I couldn’t be British-born so must be fresh off the boat” – and a newfound respect among relatives who he’d barely spoken to before. “It’s just hair, but it’s amazing the associations it brings.”

Patel’s work isn’t just for gallery audiences. He has a fascinating TED talk that plays the audience’s preconceptions (he speaks in Mandarin, which a translator turns into English, only to reveal that he’s just been repeating the same phrase over and over), while his YouTube videos can be equally engaging – his one on how to make a cup of tea found a viral audience in the Gujarati community, “which is definitely not my audience in the gallery”.

He recently secured funding for his next film, about two women who rediscover an ancient physical language that once united humanity. Inspired by the biblical tower of Babel, it will be about body swapping, and whether an increase in empathy could solve many of today’s problems. He hopes to turn it into a feature film and winning the £10,000 Jarman prize will certainly help. In fact, winning the prize means a lot to Patel in other ways. “The biggest challenge I’ve faced is being recognised as a British artist outside of my ethnicity,” he says. “I’ll get invited to do shows around the subject of diaspora or race. So to be acknowledged for the medium I’m working in, alongside peers I respect and admire? That’s yet another freeing thing for me.”

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