Innocence, Permindar Kaur (1993) (EMPIRE LINES x John Hansard Gallery, Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2024)

Artist and sculptor Permindar Kaur moves between the Black British Arts Movement, the Young British Artists (YBAs), and Barcelona in the 1990s, exploring the ambiguities of Indian and South Asian cultural identities,

Nothing is Fixed is an idea that has grown from ⁠Permindar Kaur’s 2022 exhibition at The Art House in Wakefield⁠. For their latest, in Southampton, the artist brings together the public and the private, transforming the various gallery spaces into bedrooms of a home. Beds, chairs, tables, and teddy bears - ambiguous, often unsettling, domestic objects - populate the space, as well as never-before-shown works on paper, which underline the role of drawing in their sculptural practice.

Born in Britain to Sikh parents of Indian heritage, Permindar is often exhibited in the context of the Black British Arts Movement, showing with leading members of Blk Art Group like Eddie Chambers. The artist also describes their wider interactions with the ⁠YBAs, exhibitions in Japan, and influences from their formative years of practice in Barcelona, Spain, Canada, and Sweden. We discuss encounters with artists like Mona Hatoum and Eva Hesse, Helen Chadwick and Félix González-Torres, and more surrealist storytellers like Leonora Carrington and Paula Rego, alongside the material-focussed practices of Arte Povera.

We trouble the category of ‘British Asian artists’, exploring Permindar’s work with and within particular Indian and Punjabi diasporic communities in Nottingham, Sheffield, and Glasgow, in Scotland. With series like Turbans, Permindar describes how their practice has changed over time, navigating questions of identity, representation, and the binary of non-/Western/European art practices. They share their research on a site-specific public sculpture for Southampton’s yearly Mela Festival, a long-established event which represents, rather than ‘reclaims’ space for, different South Asian cultures - and lifelong learning, from younger artists.

Permindar Kaur: Nothing is Fixed ran at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton until September 2024, closing with the launch of an exhibition book of the same name, supported by Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai.

Sculpture in the Park is on view at Compton Verney in Warwickshire until 2027. Kaur also presented work in A Spirit Inside, an exhibition of works from the Women’s Art Collection and the Ingram Collection, at Compton Verney until September 2024.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2024 opens in venues across Plymouth on 28 September 2024, and travels to the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London from 15 January 2025.

For more, you can read my article in gowithYamo.

Hear curator Griselda Pollock, from ⁠Medium and Memory (2023)⁠ at HackelBury Fine Art in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/37a51e9fab056d7b747f09f6020aa37e

Read into Jasleen Kaur’s practice, and the Turner Prize 2024, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/jasleen-kaur-interview

And other artists connected to Glasgow, including Alia Syed (instagram.com/p/C--wHJsoFp6/?img_index=1), and ⁠Ingrid Pollard, in the episode from Carbon Slowly Turning (2022)⁠ at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, the Turner Contemporary in Margate, and Tate Liverpool, and Invasion Ecology (2024): pod.link/1533637675/episode/4d74beaf7489c837185a37d397819fb8.

For more about toys and unsettling ‘children’s stories’, hear Sequoia Danielle Barnes on Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby (2024) at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop: pod.link/1533637675/episode/2b43d4e0319d49a76895b8750ade36f8

And listen out for more from Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2024 - coming soon.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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