23 February – 8 April 2018
Wednesday – Sunday, 12 - 6PM

The exhibition comprises four moving image works and various drawings alongside a sculpture which doubles as a seat. The works span a year’s production culminating in Hardeep Pandhal’s most recent video work Pool Party Pilot Episode showing both at Cubitt and at the New Museum, New York as part of their 2018 Triennial “Songs for Sabotage”.

Pandhal’s work employs lurid colour and content to create work in an array of media. His sketches and texts borrow from a variety of sources such as comic books and political satire and collaborations span crochet, knitting and embroidery with his mum and musical collaborations with friends and musicians.

Liar Hydrant exhibits a body of work that reroutes the misogynist and racist imagination underpinning white supremacy into cartoon phantasms that appear to affect contemporary life. The frustrations of societal structures are projected into satirical cartoon worlds, where viewers are presented with seemingly infinite perspectives of recurring yet disjointed scenes.

A Nightmare on BAME Street is an urban tableau-vivant set in a skewed version of Birmingham, in the area where Pandhal grew up. In an imagined outdoor cinema, loitering characters envision excessive scenes in thought bubbles, which also carry double entendres from the African-American verbal dueling game known as “The Dozens”.

The Rebirth of Sacred Cow Mixtape Trailer is a rap video parody integrating Pandhal’s inverted readings of ram-rod stiff Victorian ideologies. A television screen in a strip club flickers between programmes depicting bold and heroic statecraft media, where women’s roles are circumscribed through male-bonding rituals.

Konfessions of a Klabautemann is a video collage comprising multiple threads loosely anchored around male maritime coming-of-age rites, where sailors would inflict ritualised forms of abuse on their co-workers as part of initiation ceremonies. In the process, such ritual re-enactment serves, in Pandhal’s view, to repress vulnerability in the face of uncharted territory.

Pool Party Pilot Episode shows a speculative vision taking cues from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Herland and Elaine Morgan’s aquatic ape hypothesis, particularly parts where the authors describe male fears of their surroundings. Herland describes the encounter of three men with an isolated society composed entirely of women, who reproduce via parthenogenesis. The aquatic ape hypothesis aims to redress traditional evolutionary theories by focusing on the evolution of female bodies.

 –
Hardeep Pandhal (b.1985, Birmingham) lives and works in Glasgow. He was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2013), the Glasgow International Open Bursary (2013), the Catlin Art Guide (2014) and the Drawing Room Bursary Award (2015). Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Collective Edinburgh (2015) and groups shows at Modern Art Oxford (2016), Harris Museum, Preston (2016) and Berwick Film Festival (2017).

 

Graphic Design by Cecilia Serafini

Please note the exhibition includes explicit content. If there’s anything we can do to address your accessibility needs for this exhibition please get in touch: [email protected]