Edinburgh Printmakers
until January 5 2020
Four stars
Hangovers of Empire hang
heavy over Alberta Whittle and Hardeep Pandhal’s work, seen here in tandem
responding in part to Edinburgh Printmakers’ former tenure as the North British
Rubber Company. They’re there in Alberta Whittle’s two short films, What Sound
Does The Black Atlantic Make? and Sorry Not Sorry, that form the centre-piece
of her contribution to this exhibition curated by the Mother Tongue
organisation. They’re there too in Pandhal’s short animation, BAME of Thrones
(trailer) and his Happy Punjabi Gothic series of eight etchings.
Both of Whittle’s films
are collages that join the dots of the black experience, from colonial cannon
fodder serving queen and country, to the Windrush generation patronisingly
welcomed off the ships with requests to sing calypso. Fast forward a few years
on, and marches by the National Front and inner city riots look like troubling pre-cursors
to where we are now. Today’s institutionalised racism is exposed by an
impassioned Diane Abbot and David Lammy, and is as easy to see through as are the
three wall pieces of totems produced in Whittle’s home country of Barbados.
Three sculptural installations, Exodus – Behind’s God’s Back, Grave Liners for
the Dispossessed and Hindsight is a Luxury I Can’t Afford, are similarly
personal evocations of a largely hidden history.
Pandhal’s punningly
named BAME of Thrones (trailer), originally commissioned by Channel Four, is a
tellingly silent comic-book style rap-based depiction of a migrant-based
culture under watch. His Happy Punjab Gothic series draws from a drawing by
nineteenth and early twentieth century Indian satirical cartoonist
Gaganendranath Tagore that looks at the commodification of education in
colonial era India. Pandhal’s updates show how education has been monetised in
an explicitly political fashion. Such oppressive ideological constructs are
laid bare throughout an exhibition that reclaims assorted hidden histories as a
glaring reminder of the roots of the state we’re in right now.
The List, October 2019
ends
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