A Knot in the Thread

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Flinders Lane Gallery is delighted to be exhibiting the first Melbourne solo for award winning emerging artist Sid Pattni, who was the recipient of the 2024 FLG Emerging Artist Award.

A Knot in the Thread continues Pattni's interrogation of how colonial aesthetics continue to shape diasporic self-perception. His intricately layered canvases borrow visual languages from Mughal miniatures, Company paintings, and botanical illustrations, not in homage, but as a form of critical reclaiming. They attempt to reassemble fractured histories, to acknowledge how images once used to categorise and control can be repurposed to tell stories of resilience, hybridity and becoming.Artist Statement This body of work explores how the lingering effects of colonial history continue to shape identity—especially for diasporic communities like my own. The pieces investigate how Western reinterpretations and appropriations of traditional Indian imagery have created a hybrid visual language that both distorts and redefines what it means to be ‘Indian.’ Rather than presenting identity as fixed, my paintings challenge binary oppositions—coloniser versus colonised, authentic versus inauthentic—revealing instead an interplay of memory, cultural negotiation, and internalised histories. Ultimately, the works invite viewers to reflect on how the remnants of colonial narratives persist in our collective psyche and influence the ongoing process of identity formation.

About the Artist

Sid Pattni is an award-winning Australian artist of Indian heritage whose practice explores the intricacies of identity, culture and belonging within a post-colonial framework. Working as a multi-disciplinary artist, Pattni merges iconography found from a range of sources including Mughal miniatures, Company paintings and botanical drawings to critically examine the legacy of empire and the complexities of diasporic identity. Themes of hybridity, erasure, and belonging recur throughout his work. His first solo in Sydney last month was a sell-out success. Pattni was the recipient of the 2023 Kennedy Prize for his embroidered portrait of Mostafa “Moz” Azimitabar, and was invited to participate in the International residency program (in partnership with Perth Institute of Contemporary Art) at Khōj (New Delhi, India) in 2024. Further recent accolades include being selected as a finalist in the Archibald Prize (2025), the Lester Prize (2025, 2024 and 2020), the National Emerging Art Prize (2024), the Len Fox Painting Prize (2024) and the Blake Prize (2021), amongst others.

WATCH ON INSTAGRAM - SBS INTERVIEW

CATALOGUE ESSAY by JASMEET KAUR SAHI, 2025

Change the subject

One look at Sid Pattni’s paintings and you know nothing is what it seems to be – there is more being said than what a single glance will reveal.

Be it the featureless subjects, their faces filled with stars of the night, shapely eyes staring out, framed in florals. Or the floating botanical fractals dancing like oil on water in bright bold colours that captivate yet resist easy identification – Pattni’s work demands that we not just observe but actively engage.

There is a sense of play and performance in his layered works. The process begins digitally, where he collects and manipulates designs and images, before they are realised in their fullness on a physical canvas. Pattni’s visual language is a collage of influences that range from the motifs and graphics in the Indian / Mughal miniature style to the European-style Company paintings that British officials in the East India Company commissioned during their time in pre-Independent India.

These influences only scratch the surface of these works. Beneath this assembly laid out in rich oil paint is a narrative of re-contextualizing and reshaping mythologies that through the commissioning of art by colonial powers have in some way shaped the way India and Indians have been viewed. Art, that was executed by Indian painters hybridising technique and tradition, and sometimes even the truth.

These mythologies have favoured and celebrated the name of the patron (East India Company) over the name of the artists, who were sometimes unknown, but on most occasions were renowned painters working in the courts of the rulers of Awadh, Calcutta, Madras and so on.

It would be simplistic to crown Pattni’s work as a reclamation of any kind in the vein of – if they could, so can I – because even though the paintbrush can be mightier than the sword, for Pattni reclamation is an ‘almost futile cause’ and something of a ‘hollow term’.

Instead, this son of the diaspora, a person of Indian heritage, born in Kenya, raised in London, who came of age in Australia on Aboriginal land, takes the historical elements of colonialism, power, artistic representation (or lack thereof), and the visual language of Indian painting traditions, and reconfigures notions of identity and belonging through hybridity and assemblage. History cannot be ignored, this is certain.

There are, although, ways to re-create and forge something new from the plural and intersecting histories that have shaped Pattni’s sense of self – an act of re-making that is quite deeply embodied in his work.

During our conversation he shares that growing up Indian in Australia has often been an act of dulling many parts of himself that are Indian, and he’s frequently questioned this within himself. Pattni suggests that perhaps it’s time to encourage others to raise these questions and find their own answers.

‘History is not going to paint a full picture and maybe it’s our imagination that has to fill in the gaps,’ he adds.

The fact though remains, whether our histories are entangled or knotted together, what we are left with is this: can those histories and their contemporary manifestations be detangled or do we simply change the subject?

A Knot in the Thread is Sid Pattni’s first solo exhibition in Victoria.