Small Fires Everywhere, All The Time

Sid Pattni’s practice is concerned with how aesthetics shaped under empire can be reclaimed and reconfigured to tell new stories about migration, memory and identity. In Small Fires Everywhere, All The Time, faceless figures sit at the centre of sumptuously embellished portraits edged by ornate decorative borders, each adorned with painted floral patterns, gold-leaf animal motifs and hand-beaded appliqué. Wrapped in opulent regalia and pictorially ensconced within their nested frames, Pattni’s subjects project the pomp and grandiosity of historical portraiture, but with only their eyes left floating amid a cosmic, void-like abyss. Stripped of what is conventionally read as a portrait’s defining feature, these eyes without a face upend the power dynamics of their historical precedents and send us looking for markers of identity and meaning within the structures and stylised flourishes that enclose them.

“This body of work explores the psychological afterlife of empire,” says the Naarm/Melbourne-based artist and 2025 Archibald Prize finalist. “The paintings depict women who historically operated as symbols of purity, civility and moral authority, helping construct a hierarchy that cast the West as ordered and the colonised world as unruly and inferior. Rather than depicting individuals, these paintings treat them as an ideological apparatus that enforced power through imagery.”

Referencing Mughal miniatures, Indian textiles, British botanical illustration and 19th-century Company Painting – a genre that is itself a complex hybrid, melding Rajput and Mughal traditions with Western conventions and shaped by fraught politics of patronage and spectacle – Pattni weaves a dynamic tapestry from styles, symbols and compositional logics remixed and remade. The resulting works ask how selfhood might be similarly pieced together – cut from the cloth of cultural inheritances and external projections – and how internalised hierarchies might be unsettled by imagining their visual antecedents anew.

“Growing up within the Indian diaspora in Australia, I recognise how inherited visual hierarchies continue to organise my own mind,” says Pattni, who was born in London and spent his early years in Kenya before moving to Melbourne via Boorloo/Perth. He describes his latest series as less concerned with historical reconstruction than with interrupting history’s lingering psychological echoes. “Repainting these figures becomes an act of re-encounter.”

In these acts of re-encounter, the flattened pictorial space and nested framing of Mughal miniatures become forms of containment; their embellishments a site of critique. “The animals surrounding the figures function simultaneously as record and metaphor,” he says. “They reference the impulse of classification and documentation imposed by the British while resisting containment through constant movement, reflecting an identity that is negotiated rather than fixed.”

Small Fires Everywhere, All The Time arrives after a banner year for the artist, who was shortlisted for the 2025 Archibald Prize and Lester Prize and presented his first solo exhibition with Michael Reid Sydney after joining the gallery’s stable in May. The exhibition is Pattni’s most ambitious solo presentation to date and commences a series of major projects, culminating in the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts residency in Paris – awarded by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and accompanied by Pattni’s first solo exhibition at Michael Reid Berlin.

“Pattni invites us to examine the inheritances that exist within the subconscious of our collective and individual psyche,” writes Louise Martin-Chew in an eight-page Vault magazine cover story. “His criticality sits within an aesthetic that is richly decorated, beautiful and seductive.”

For enquiries, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au