At Home

It is with great pleasure we welcome Hetain Patel to New Art Exchange. As an artist who has emerged from the Nottingham art scene and is now achieving international success, we are proud to present his much anticipated solo exhibition, Hetain Patel: At Home. This major touring show of existing and newly commissioned works marks an important turning point in the artist’s practice. In a departure from previous self-portraiture works, Hetain will no longer be the sole protagonist in the camera’s frame, and in some cases, completely absent.

Hetain’s practice spans a number of different media such as photography, video, live art, and is often performative in nature. Whilst identity formation has been central to his concerns since the beginning of his career, more recently this idea has been seen through the lens of imitation, in particular through language and physical movement. Increasingly, Hetain’s work is populated by characters, both fictional and real, in relation to which the artist juxtaposes himself.

The works within At Home feature both family members (father, grandmother and wife) and boyhood heroes such as Spiderman and Bruce Lee. Each character offers multiple and interweaving answers to the question of where, how and by whom self is constructed. Collectively these characters extend Hetain’s ongoing interest into the body’s ability to hold and create cultural memory from both popular culture and our own inherited cultural history.

Exhibition Videos:

– Be Like Theatre

– Hetain Patel in Conversation