Hardeep Pandhal: Plebeian Archive

Plebeian Archive is a multi-media installation punctuated with large scale wall drawings of Bhagat Singh, an activist who disguised himself by cutting his beard and replacing his turban with a trilby to commit violent acts of protest during the Indian independence movement. The wall marks have been made spontaneously using spray paint to frame the distinct visual language of the surrounded works and to wrestle with the implied risk associated with the medium and choice of subjects. Free-standing screens recalling the ‘comic foreground’ - public sculptures depicting satirical or idealised scenarios with ‘head holes’ to imply viewer participation - divide the space and unite Pandhal’s subjects. The reflexive spectatorship provoked is intended to parallel Pandhal’s awry mediation of his own subjectivity, to think through its constitution. The installation includes works made on paper and made via conversation with Pandhal’s mother (with whom he shares a Punjabi/English language barrier), in response to censored letters and photographic scrapbooks associated with the British-Indian regiments, palimpsests that contain seldom-explored narrative structures and conflicting opinion. Pandhal discusses his practice alongside his wider influences in a recently filmed public ‘in-conversation’ event at Drawing Room, where this work was developed. He has re-worked this footage and presented it across multiple screens within the installation, incorporating nonlinear modes of address, parodic language and home movies. Working at the limits of postcolonial discourse, Pandhal’s Plebeian Archive explores the displacing affects of mimicry, difference and acculturation.