Hardeep Pandhal works predominantly with drawing and voice to transform feelings of disinheritance and disaffection into generative spaces that bolster interdependence and self-belief.

Applying practices of associative thinking, his research-led projects exhibit syncretic strains of post-brown weirdness. Across media, his works are imbued with acerbity and playful complexity, at once confrontational and reflective.

In a new work for the biennial titled Colouring In: A Coming of Beige Story (Colorblind Edition), Pandhal presents an urban fantasy across writing, drawing, and sound that tells the story of a brown man on a collective quest to see a black metal gig. The quest culminates in a battle between his party and a group of racist black metal fans, climaxing with “tentative stomps to the head” of the central character.

Adopting the textual format of a typical role-playing adventure, the artist started with writing a short, skeletal origin story to a life-comic that will be periodically written and illustrated during the remainder of his life.

This story does not appear in the exhibition in text form; instead, the artist presents fifteen hand-drawn monochromatic illustrations accompanied by music from a limited-edition cassette tape made by the Dungeon Synth composer Vandalorum, whose music the artist describes as a “synthetic yet sympathetic” refraction of the story and its themes of transformative headlessness, imaginative play, and collective world-building.

The work testifies to the artists’ ongoing research around fantasies of race, difference, and darkness and their influence on policies of oppression, where fiction and reality converge.

To coincide with the presentation at the museum, a new video work will be published online, along with a newly commissioned text.

Hardeep Pandhal lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.
Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Goldsmiths Centre of Contemporary Art (2020); Tramway, Glasgow (2020); New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2019); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2019); South London Gallery, London (2018); New Museum, New York (2018); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (2018); Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2017); and Modern Art Oxford, Oxford (2016).

Pandhal’s work is part of a number of prestigious public collections, including: Arts Council Collection, UK; British Council Collection, UK; and Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow. He was shortlisted for the Jarman Award (2018) and selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2013).