essay

Unheimlich Manoeuvres In Brexitstan

Commissioned by the New Museum, New York, on the occasion of the 2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage

Published by Phaidon in Songs for Sabotage, 2018

From severed heads to swastikas and jack boots, a cartoon lexicon of ambiguous grotesqueries permeates all of Hardeep Pandhal’s work. Like the acerbic caricatures of eighteenth-century satirist James Gillray deftly re-penned by the quivering hand of psychedelic animator Sally Cruikshank, this lurid repertoire of interchangeable emblems functions as a metamorphic code to delineate the violently wavering boundaries of race, class, and gender. Whether working in video, animation, spray-painted wall pieces, or rap mixtapes, Pandhal uses such imagery as a caustic shorthand, the potent graphemes of which might be assembled and recombined to satirize ideas of cultural fixity through symbols commonly used to compound and solidify identity. 

In video animations such as The Rebirth of Sacred Cow (Remix) (2017), and Career Suicide (2016), dead rappers bear witness to still-animate severed arms emblazoned with Union Jack tattoos dunking basketballs in a terminal expression of toxic (and always racialized) masculinity. Scholarship scrolls segue seamlessly into pigskins and penises. Married Men confront Bachelors in video-game street fights, and the turbaned soldiers of the British Army’s Sikh Regiment appear to channel the supernatural potency of the Sikh martyr Baba Deep Singh, whose decapitated body, legend has it, continued to fight the Afghan army during the 1757 Battle of Amritsar. In Pandhal’s image-world, no signifier exists beyond the threat of graphic dismemberment, and everything quivers with a recombinant energy.               

This imagery finds an intergenerational expression in the series of knitted garments the artist has produced in collaboration with his mother—a burgeoning wardrobe of knitted sweatshirts and draft blockers bearing the skewed likenesses of Tupac Shakur (2Pac Jumper by Mum [2012]) and anthropological filmmaker Bruce Parry (Bruce Vest by Mum [2012]) amongst others. These collaborations are themselves digressions through difference. As a second-generation British Sikh raised in the industrial West Midlands city of Birmingham and now based in Glasgow, Pandhal speaks little Punjabi, while his mother speaks limited English. The textiles produced from their conversation betray an intimate negotiation of generational divergence, gendered material vernaculars, and the mutability of heritage.   

For the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, “heritage” presented a discursive practice that not only informed the way individual subjectivities might be constituted via personal or familial biography, but a process through which nation-states might compound power by mobilizing a collective social memory through acts of selective remembrance. Hall suggested that such hegemonic strategies might be countered by marginalized groups through both a radical awareness of the symbolic power of representation and the “constructed and thus contestable nature of the authority which some people acquire to ‘write the culture’ of others.”[1]

In a contemporary British context—where diversity quotas may be employed by public funding bodies such as the Arts Council England to stimulate equal access to opportunities for artists of colour—such drives towards inclusivity may perform the inverse effect of racial and cultural determination. Artists are not only pigeonholed in identities that don’t necessarily correspond to their experiences, but are demanded to deliver essentialist and dysphoric performances of their heritage.

Maybe such dysphoria provides the allegorical index for the multiple instances of decapitation that have permeated so much of Pandhal’s practice? Lopped heads, the deposed seat of identity, frequently sputter into the air. Bulbous pacifiers are placed atop headless bodies to comprise hapless composite entities that execute a charade of absurd behaviors and cultural disorientations. For his 2015 exhibition “A Neck or Nothing Man” at Comar Arts on the Scottish Island of Mull, Pandhal transformed the sinister anthropomorphic guillotine depicted in George Cruikshank's satirical cartoon A Radical Reformer (1819) into his own sadistic “attraction.” He invited visitors to place their own heads into its bloodied aperture, suggesting the kinds of institutional violence that the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille would evoke when he proposed that the museum was itself a guillotine, rendering objects (and in this case, subjects) innocuous through their display.

Rap happens to be a fundamental component of Pandhal’s expanded practice, and his articulations of acculturation and the clichéd expectations of multiculturalism find an intensified lyrical acuity in the disquieting albums he’s recorded with fellow MCs Ghoul Baby and Mr Ugly (Leeds and New York-based artists David Steans and Joseph Buckley). His 2017 release A Nightmare On BAME Street charts the withered terrain of a post-Brexit Britain still caught in the grip of government-imposed austerity and a fully mobilized yet wholly misplaced immigration anxiety. Pandhal’s rhymes perform an “unheimlich maneuver,” where spitting verses might work to exorcise bilious thoughts on the state of the UK as an acidic purgative. His alter-ego Pakiveli (a moniker modeled after Tupac’s mythic pseudonym Makaveli) indulges an ease with cultural transitions that performs a playful riposte to that singularly idiotic tendency of British racism which indiscriminately labels any discernibly Asian person a “Paki” (Pakistani).

In his 2017 film Konfessions of a Klabautermann, commissioned for Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, the artist calls upon the mischievous spirit of a Klabautermann (a water sprite once popular in nautical mythology) to inflect a sobering lecture on the violent events of the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre of 1919. Pandhal recapitulates this instance of imperialist murder—a catalyst of the emancipatory Home Rule Movement in the Punjab region of colonial British India—before the institutional trappings of his talk unfurl into a candy-colored music video mocking the current Conservative government for its reactionary and inhumane policies that have, since 2010, deftly circumscribed a new era of hostility towards migration. Jallinwala Bagh is a story unfamiliar to most white Britons, whose national pride remains peacefully aloof to difficult Imperial histories. But as the UK lurches to enact its withdrawal from the European Union and narratives of nationhood and nostalgia are instrumentalized to serve political gains against a backdrop of far-right militias and casual bigotry, Pandhal’s historically charged invective is a necessarily obstinate counter voice that works to sidestep divisiveness through humor, besmirchment, and a demonstrative free play of identities. As a Klabautermann would say, “a threat to a threat, it’s time for a wind up.”

[1] Hall, Stuart, 'Whose heritage? Un-settling 'the heritage', re-imagining the post-nation',Third Text, Issue 49, Winter 1999-2000, p.7