Sid Pattni’s practice interlaces portraiture, material experimentation, and diasporic memory to explore ideas of identity and belonging. His paintings engage with the visual language of heritage and representation through a contemporary lens. Born in London and based in Melbourne, Pattni’s work is shaped by his diasporic identity and colonized ancestry. He examines the complexities of selfhood, considering how diasporic communities come to understand themselves through visual traditions informed by orientalist and colonial histories. His practice extends an ongoing investigation into the afterlives of empire.

His depictions of colonial men set against complex historical and symbolic backdrops, reflect upon the intricate visual codes through which identity—particularly Indian identity—has been constructed, distorted, and internalized. Identity is complicated in his depictions of figures such as James Skinner— an Anglo-Indian officer who embodied the contradictions of empire. While Skinner felt a genuine connection to India, he remained loyal to the British and viewed himself as part of the colonial project. He is celebrated for commissioning an extensive collection of “Company paintings,” produced by local Indian artists under the patronage of British officers. By commissioning works that reinforced Orientalist perspectives, Skinner contributed to a visual narrative that simplified and exoticised India—a place his own mother came from. This distortion not only shaped how India was perceived externally, but also how successive generations of Indians came to internalise and inhabit Western projections of “Indian-ness.”

Recently, Pattni began introducing figures of colonial-era women drawn from traditional portraiture of the period. These images were often created not to capture individuality, but to serve the ideological machinery of empire. The women function as symbols of civility, obedience, domestic virtue, or racial purity; their presence in the colonial archive speaks less to who they were than to what they were made to represent. By interrogating the conditions of their image-making, Pattni reveals how gender, like race, was constructed and codified through the aesthetics of empire. Their inclusion complicates the binary between colonizer and colonized, extending his broader inquiry into how identity is shaped through visual and symbolic systems of power.