Hardeep Pandhal: Inheritance Quest

Hardeep Pandhal works with a singular fluency across a range of media, drawing from a vast landscape of popular culture with consummate ease. This first monograph of Pandhal’s practice references his life experience and wider Sikh heritage – the ghosts of empire slink alongside narratives of Tolkienesque fantasy; video game designer Hideo Kojima’s Solid Snake shares a backseat with an Uber Eats bag; and memories of racist invective are untwisted into renderings of the Sikh martyr Baba Deep Singh.

The British artist’s drawings, videos, installations, rap lyrics and animations offer multilayered considerations of the transformative forces of migration, historical violence and cultural assimilation. Inheritance Quest also includes texts by Zahid R Chaudhury, Gabrielle de la Puente, Hammad Nasar and Jamie Sutcliffe, along with an insightful conversation between Pandhal and the artist David Steans.

Whether exploring the orgiastic energies of empire or unpicking the biases in fantasy fiction, Pandhal riffs adeptly on the immigrant experience in modern Britain, offering an eclectic and erudite exposition of the relationship between race, place and art.