Exhibitions Sid Pattni A Knot in the Thread 26th August 2025 - 20th September 2025

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

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.

He 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 (2024 and 2020), the National Emerging Art Prize (2024), the Len Fox Painting Prize (2024) and the Blake Prize (2021), amongst others.

Pattni will present his first solo exhibition with Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne in August 2025.

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Sid Pattni 2025

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