The artist Hardeep Pandhal. All photos Joel Chester Fildes
This article originally appeared on VICE UK
There is very little recognition of contemporary British Asian artists working in the mainstream UK art scene today. Sound like a bold statement? Let's take a look: there's Anish Kapoor, whose huge biomorphic sculptures first came to prominence back in the 1980s. Kapoor went on to great success, winning the Turner Prize and exhibiting everywhere from the 2012 Olympics, the Rockefeller Center, to inside the Tate Modern and outside the Millennium Dome. His work has also netted him a CBE. So yeah, Sir Anish Kapoor is doing OK for himself.
So Kapoor's the big household name, but what about other British Asian artists? There's photographer and filmmaker Zarina Bhimji (shortlisted for the 2007 Turner Prize), multimedia artist Shezad Dawood (who has exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery and whose Future Light is currently showing at the Vienna Biennial), audio sculptor Haroon Mirza (winner of the Silver Lion for Most Promising Artist at the Venice Bienalle, 2011), and multimedia artist Chila Kumari Burman (exhibited at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the V&A).
These are all artists who have achieved varying degrees of success, but if you're not a dedicated follower, practitioner, or scholar of British contemporary art, you'd be forgiven for never having heard of them before. And if you do recognize the names, then would you associate them as synonymous with British contemporary art in the same way as you would, say, the likes of Damien Hirst and his formaldehyde tiger shark? Or Tracey Emin's messy bed? Or Grayson Perry's tapestries?
The YBAs still form a strong influential framework for British contemporary art, as does the Turner Prize, but if you look at these environments where modern British art routinely flourishes, it's hard to ignore the fact that the artists spawned from these creative wombs are predominantly white. The Turner Prize hasn't seen a non-Caucasian winner since Steve McQueen in 1999, and nearly all the YBA alumni are white (Hirst and Emin aside, there's Marc Quinn, Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume, Gavin Turk, and The Chapman Brothersthe notable exception here being Chris Ofili).
According to the 2011 UK Census, British Asians make up roughly seven percent of the UK population ("all white ethnic groups" make up 86 percent, Black British just over three percent). When you look at the ostensibly progressive cultural sphere of the contemporary art scene, this lack of representation for "minority ethnic artists" seems pretty surprising.
Hyperbolic Publicity
Hardeep Pandhal is a Birmingham-born artist living in Glasgow. He's gradually starting to become well-regarded in the art world (he's a recipient of the Drawing Room's Bursary Award; a 2013 Bloomberg New Contemporary and has been reviewed in Frieze, amongst other things) for his work, which incorporates an eclectic mix of video art (home movies and pseudo-documentaries), collages, drawings and paintings, sculpture, and even his mom's own knitwear (jumpers with knitted portraits of everyone from 2Pac to Bruce Parry to Sikh religious martyr Baba Deep Singh). Hardeep also happens to be a second generation British Sikh and, whether he likes it or not, he's likely to always be categorized as a "British Asian artist." I spoke to him about his experiences in the art industry and how his work (influenced by everything from satire to Sikh mythology, from rappers to racism) both embraces and rejects notions of cultural identity.
VICE: OK, first off: to quote you from one of your films (JojoBoys): "This whole thing about being British-Asian is kind of a bit weird ... Because it's the truth, but, you know, it doesn't need to be the truth." What do you mean by this?
Hardeep Pandhal: for the sake of cultural progressthe arts need to be diverse. You need to have it, to make the world more equal, but it only does it by using these terms that are problematic. It's just a mental situation.
Hardeep Pandhal is currently exhibiting a solo show, 'Plebeian Archive,' at The David Dale Gallery in Glasgow, which runs until October 24, and has another forthcoming exhibition at the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, which opens November 13.