Working at the limits of postcolonial discourse, Hardeep Pandhal’s practice explores the displacing effects of mimicry, difference, and acculturation. For his drawings, knitwear, video, and installations Pandhal incorporates nonlinear modes of address, parodic language, and home movies. For example, the artist has created free-standing screens recalling the “comic foreground”–public sculptures depicting satirical or idealised scenarios with “head holes” to imply viewer participation. The reflexive spectatorship provoked is intended to parallel Pandhal’s awry mediation of his own subjectivity, to think through its constitution. “I am interested in how degrees of political correctness shift over time, and how these shifts expose seemingly permissible forms of inhumanity. Not without risk taking, I believe art can both confront and sublimate the tragic to convey otherwise unrepresentable ideas, address situations of compromise and articulate marginalised positions,” says the artist.

He has had solo exhibitions at Collective in Edinburgh and David Dale in Glasgow. He was selected for the 2013 Bloomberg New Contemporaries, exhibiting at Spike Island in Bristol and London’s ICA. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Castlefield Gallery in Manchester, East Street Arts in Leeds, and Project Space Leeds.

Courtesy of David Dale