Hardeep Pandhal Bursary Award 2015

Glasgow based artist Hardeep Pandhal has been selected for Drawing Room’s summer 2015 Bursary Award. The Bursary Award reflects Drawing Room’s commitment to supporting the development of artists’ practice by providing opportunities for risk taking and experimentation. Pandhal was nominated by both Kate Gray (Director, Collective Gallery) and Kirsty Ogg (Director, Bloomberg New Contemporaries), ‘for his practice that encompasses drawing and its translation into other media, including knitting, and interrogates post-colonial legacies and identities in contemporary Britain.’ The selection panel included Ciara Phillips (artist and recipient of Drawing Room’s 2013 Bursary Award), Irene Bradbury (Director of Artist Liaison, White Cube) and Drawing Room co-directors Mary Doyle and Kate Macfarlane.

Pandhal experiments with non-linear modes of story-telling, parodic language and his own autobiographical content to reflect upon the displacing effects of acculturation: in coming of age, initiation and reformatory practices. He says: “I am interested in how degrees of political correctness shift over time, and how these shifts expose seemingly permissible forms of inhumanity. Not without risk taking, I believe art can both confront and sublimate the tragic to convey otherwise unrepresentable ideas, address situations of compromise and articulate marginalised positions.”  Pandhal will use the Bursary Award to develop a new body of work to include ‘comic foregrounds’ (satirical scenarios drawn onto free standing panels, with ‘head holes’ to encourage audience participation) and videos. There will be an Open Studio and in conversation between Drawing Room co-directors and Pandhal in September.

– We are delighted to have the support of Derwent for the Bursary Award