“Shall We?" presents the artist playing dinner host to a party of four. While the guests freely talk, raise glasses and motion to pass food, the occasional passer-by and the signage surrounding disrupt this otherwise familiar scene. Set in a lifestyle store to a score of ambient muzak, Patel establishes a disjunction between the participant’s actions and their actuality. This private dinner party is public. There is no food, so if one wills, they must pretend.
Furthering Patel’s interest in “play” as a means to examine contemporary experience and situations, in “Shall We?” Patel utilises the artifice inherent in both the setting and the performances to subtly question contemporary social conventions. Meccas for ready-made “better living”, the lifestyle store is an anywhere non-place characterised by the international language of mass produced design. With “Shall We?” Patel invites us to question our role in the consumption of this global economy of “lifestyle”.
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