Hayward Gallery / Southbank Centre

In a movie theater, a discarded popcorn kernel comes to life.

Patel’s new film Trinity, continues his exploration of language and physical communication, centring on the discovery of a martial language that once united humanity. Interspersed with visual references from his life – both his artistic practice and his Indian cultural heritage, the film features two women – a young British Indian woman (played by Vidya Patel) and a young Deaf garage worker (played by Raffie Julien) – engaging in a fight, creating a unique physical language weaving together martial arts and sign language. A coming of age story intermingled with supernatural references, Trinity transforms traditional Indian practices with a recognisably Hollywood approach, employing an epic soundtrack and fight choreography. The film explores the representation of the British Indian experience on screen, emphasising the female voice, intergenerational conflict and the truth that our bodies hold beyond language, foregrounding a strong sense of hope.

The first film in the series, 'Relic 0' forms part of Larry Achiampong's Relic Traveller: Phase 1, a multi-disciplinary project manifesting in performance, audio, moving image and prose. Taking place across various landscapes and locations, the project builds upon a postcolonial perspective informed by technology, agency and the body, and narratives of migration. Relic 0, which is the prelude to the series, is a short film that moves between African and Western based vistas and focuses on specific architectures of colonialism as delivered by an anonymous narrator. These discoveries deliver poetic moments of the sublime met with increasingly harrowing tales of trauma - speaking to the sinister way that states of anxiety, fear and displacement are both generated and policed in postcolonial society. The throb of the electronic score and ringing clarity of the narrator's testimony usher in a new landscape and temporality, born from cracks in a traumatised, apocalyptic present.