HARDEEP PANDHAL AND LEILA TAYLOR IN CONVERSATION
To coincide with his exhibition Ensorcelled English: Prestige Repellent, Hardeep Pandhal invited writer and designer Leila Taylor to share and discuss her research on the gothic in Black culture, horror, and the aesthetics of melancholy. Stemming from different entry points, they discussed key aspects of their practices, identifying and bridging convergent themes and tropes.
In her book, Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, Taylor asks what does Goth style looks like if one isn’t British, European or White? More specifically “What are the signs and accoutrements of African American gothness? Is there such a thing as Afrogoth?”
In the spirit of Taylor’s question, Pandhal works through ideas for a yet to be named Goth style through artistic-led investigations and expressions. Based partly on lived South-Asian diasporic experiences, his works are dedicated to the transformation of feelings of disinheritance and disaffection into generative spaces that bolster interdependence and self-belief.
Coalescing around a socially distanced Halloween period, Pandhal and Taylor take you on a dark ride into the horrors of the western imagination.
BIOGRAPHIES
Hardeep Pandhal (b. 1985, Birmingham) lives and works in Glasgow. He received a Leverhulme Scholarship to complete the MFA programme at The Glasgow School of Art in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include: Confessions of a Thug: Pakiveli, Tramway, Glasgow; Paranoid Picnic: The Phantom BAME, New Art Exchange and Primary, Nottingham (2018); Self-Loathing Flashmob, Kelvin Hall, Glasgow International 2018, Glasgow; Liar Hydrant, Cubitt, London (2018). Recent group exhibitions include: Is This Tomorrow?, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); 2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage, New Museum, New York (2018). He was shortlisted for the 2018 Film London Jarman Award.
Leila Taylor, author of Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul is a writer and designer whose work is focused on the gothic in Black culture, horror, and the aesthetics of melancholy. Her work has been published in The Journal of Horror Studies, The New Urban Gothic: Global Gothic in the Age of the Anthropocene, and Flugschriften: Dispatches from the Institute of Incoherent Geography, and The Repeater Book of the Occult. She has given talks for the International Gothic Association in Mexico and the U.K. and Morbid Anatomy in New York. She received a Masters in Fine Arts from Yale University and an MA in Liberal Studies at The New School for Social Research. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she is Creative Director for Brooklyn Public Library.
To coincide with his exhibition Ensorcelled English: Prestige Repellent, Hardeep Pandhal invited writer and designer Leila Taylor to share and discuss her research on the gothic in Black culture, horror, and the aesthetics of melancholy. Stemming from different entry points, they discussed key aspects of their practices, identifying and bridging convergent themes and tropes.
In her book, Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, Taylor asks what does Goth style looks like if one isn’t British, European or White? More specifically “What are the signs and accoutrements of African American gothness? Is there such a thing as Afrogoth?”
In the spirit of Taylor’s question, Pandhal works through ideas for a yet to be named Goth style through artistic-led investigations and expressions. Based partly on lived South-Asian diasporic experiences, his works are dedicated to the transformation of feelings of disinheritance and disaffection into generative spaces that bolster interdependence and self-belief.
Coalescing around a socially distanced Halloween period, Pandhal and Taylor take you on a dark ride into the horrors of the western imagination.
BIOGRAPHIES
Hardeep Pandhal (b. 1985, Birmingham) lives and works in Glasgow. He received a Leverhulme Scholarship to complete the MFA programme at The Glasgow School of Art in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include: Confessions of a Thug: Pakiveli, Tramway, Glasgow; Paranoid Picnic: The Phantom BAME, New Art Exchange and Primary, Nottingham (2018); Self-Loathing Flashmob, Kelvin Hall, Glasgow International 2018, Glasgow; Liar Hydrant, Cubitt, London (2018). Recent group exhibitions include: Is This Tomorrow?, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); 2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage, New Museum, New York (2018). He was shortlisted for the 2018 Film London Jarman Award.
Leila Taylor, author of Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul is a writer and designer whose work is focused on the gothic in Black culture, horror, and the aesthetics of melancholy. Her work has been published in The Journal of Horror Studies, The New Urban Gothic: Global Gothic in the Age of the Anthropocene, and Flugschriften: Dispatches from the Institute of Incoherent Geography, and The Repeater Book of the Occult. She has given talks for the International Gothic Association in Mexico and the U.K. and Morbid Anatomy in New York. She received a Masters in Fine Arts from Yale University and an MA in Liberal Studies at The New School for Social Research. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she is Creative Director for Brooklyn Public Library.
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