Karanjit Panesar Refuses to Be Consumed

In Greek mythology, Persephone, goddess of Spring, is abducted by Hades, king of the underworld. Her father, Zeus, demands her release but, after being tricked by Hades into eating seeds from a pomegranate and thereby tasting the fruit of the underworld, Persephone is obliged to return for six months every year, her descent marking the onset of Winter.  

Pomegranates loom large in Karanjit Panesar’s ‘Furnace Fruit’, an exhibition responding to Leeds Art Gallery’s collections and the artist’s own diasporic family history. In this meditation on the duality of diasporic identity, Panesar draws on the rich symbolism of the pomegranate and embraces recent interpretations of the Greek myth, which recast Persephone as a subversive border-crosser moving with agency between two worlds. 

Double Fruit (all works 2024), a rough iron pomegranate cast from the melted iron of an automobile exhaust, welcomes exhibition visitors. The work speaks to Panesar’s family history: after emigrating from Punjab to the UK in the 1950s and ’60s, members of his family worked in steel and automotive factories. The pomegranate references a significant personal memory of India, Panesar tells me, the details of which he refuses to divulge. 

Dualities are further explored through the provocative association of artistic and industrial metal-casting. During the period when Panesar’s relatives relocated to Britain, industrial foundries relied upon immigration from Commonwealth countries to address labour shortages. At the same time, British artists were pushing the boundaries of bronze sculpture at art foundries. From the gallery’s collection, Panesar highlights the cast fruits of sculptor Bernard Meadows. Exquisitely rendered in bronze and plaster, Meadows’s pears, apricots and a mango rest in museum-style display cases – designed by Panesar as part of the large wooden structure that houses the entire exhibition. The fruits sit among fragments of automotive sand-casting moulds from West Yorkshire Foundries, the broken pieces like bits of human bone. By presenting these objects together, Panesar questions the social construction of value whereby certain forms of making are privileged and others disregarded.

Alongside the casts hang five photogravure prints, each titled either Untitled (John Galizia & Son Ltd. Foundry) or Untitled (J.W. Singer & Sons Foundry), which are composed from Panesar’s research photos from the two titular foundries. Photogravure propaganda prints – many depicting in-progress monumental statues of Queen Victoria later to be installed across the British Empire – were widely circulated during imperial rule in India.  

At the heart of the exhibition is a two-channel film, Furnace Fruit, which juxtaposes footage of the fabrication of Double Fruit with a staged and highly gestural encounter between two men and a car. Tightly cropped shots of body parts performing with the car – hands gripping the steering wheel, long fingers curling lovingly around a window – are spliced with fiery scenes from the furnace. The film’s voice-over is a semi-autobiographical mythologized prose poem, compiled from memories, family narratives and two oral histories featuring first-generation Punjabi Sikh immigrants, chosen by Panesar from the Bradford Heritage Recording Unit. At one point in the film a hand rests atop a car as the voice-over declares, ‘We’re component parts of a whole story’.

This phrase seems to capture the broader essence of ‘Furnace Fruit’: the works on display are like seeds in a pomegranate, combined in jewelled unity, as personal reminiscences intersect with histories of empire. Yet, for all the exhibition’s exploration of family accounts, there remains a sense of emotional distance. In a context in which Western institutions frequently encourage minoritized artists to instrumentalize their identities for cultural consumption, Panesar’s refusal to do so becomes – like Persephone’s movement between two worlds – a partial reclamation of agency that is both generative and transformative.

Karanjit Panesar’s ‘Furnace Fruit’ is on view at Leeds Art Gallery until 15 June. The exhibition is the culmination of a 2023/2024 Collections in Dialogue co-commission between Leeds Art Gallery and the British Library

^{Main image: Karanjit Panesar, ‘Furnace Fruit’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: © Karanjit Panesar and Leeds Art Gallery; photograph: Rob Battersby}