Meet, Vijai Patchineelam

My practice develops within a given site, most often collective spaces, be they physical or through an event. Such as a shared studio in an old colonial Portuguese house in the port area of Rio de Janeiro; a warehouse scheduled for demolition (intended for the construction of a parking facility for a football club in White Hart Lane, London); a squatted decommissioned pharmaceutical factory in downtown Zagreb, Croatia; and more recently documenting part of a month-long march against a recent change in the Swedish policy towards asylum seekers.
The established relation to the site is that of agent and accomplice. Objects and people that inhabit the workplace are rearranged in an attempt to stage an “event.” Through interventions of austere means, work develops supporting itself in the routines and characteristics of the site. Systematic documentation is not the sole motive for these attempts, there is a conscious attempt not to treat the space as a mere background or workspace; the site is acknowledged as a conceptual starting point. The spectator is viewed as a potential participant, who can uncover the layers of complicities in the work. These complicities derive from the transfer of the site from its location into different media (photographic installations, multimedia installations and photobooks), supporting and stressing aspects that have more to do with the events that take place than the physical characteristics of the site.