EMPIRE LINES

Contemporary artist Karanjit Panesar recasts stories of migrant labourers from Punjab working in British industrial foundries, exploring constructs of memory, and national myths in metal, through his film installation, Furnace Fruit (2024).
Karanjit Panesar’s practice considers the entanglements of labour, migration, memory, and empire. Furnace Fruit, their new exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery, centres on the stories of the many Punjabi immigrants who, with the end of British colonial rule in South Asia, came to the UK and worked in metal foundries in the 1950s and 1960s – including members of the artist’s own family.

Audio and sound underlie his transdisciplinary practice. Drawing on the South Asian oral history collections at Bradford Industrial Museum and the British Library in London, Karanjit’s exhibition is also an intergenerational conversation, and ongoing process of translation: ‘He’s speaking in our language, I’m listening in mine,’ says one character in the film at the exhibition’s core. Karanjit explains how he ‘embeds’ the archive ‘within the language of the work’, and wider practice of storytelling.

We journey through the steel and automotive foundries across Yorkshire and northern England, as well as Smethwick, Birmingham, in Midlands, central to his research and work. Karanjit explains how railway tracks, and statues of Queen Victoria, were exported from ports like Ormsgill, Barrow-in-Furness around the British Empire, to India, Pakistan, and Australia. We find these parallels in the foundry – a duality, not binary, also reflected in the exhibition’s titular two-channel film – as a place of both imperial and industrial expansion, and artistic production. Karanjit reflects on his own position, navigating the Morris Singer (J.W. Singer & Sons) and John Galizia and Son’s archives at the Henry Moore Institute. He shares his research into sculptors like Bernard Meadows, whose bronze castings of apples, pears, peaches, mangoes informed the artist’s work Double Fruit (2024), a pomegranate figured in both plaster, and black cast iron, as representations of nationhood and Britishness.

From facsimiles by the Boyle Family, artistic explorations of truths and myths, Karanjit explains other processes of translation. He navigates the wooden architectural structure central to this installation, drawing on his work as a technician. We explore technology in his practice – including photogravure prints, or electro-plated sculptural photographs – and ongoing research in deindustrialisation endured by working class communities across the country.

Karanjit Panesar: Furnace Fruit runs at Leeds Art Gallery until 15 June 2025, the second Collections in Dialogue co-commission between Leeds Art Gallery and the British Library in London.

Find more from Bradford Industrial Museum through Bradford 2025, UK City of Culture.

For more about artifice and film, hear Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum at their exhibition, It Will End in Tears (2024), at the Barbican in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/6e9a8b8725e8864bc4950f259ea89310

And read my article, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/pamela-phatsimo-sunstrum-barbican

For more about Ibrahim Mahama’s 2024 exhibition at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, drawing from archives to reconstruct railway lines, and mineral extraction in West Africa, hear the artist’s episode about Sekondi Locomotive Workshop (2024): pod.link/1533637675/episode/ed0be49d016ce665c1663202091ce224

For more about Pakistani and South Asian diasporic communities in Birmingham, and domestic labour in the Midlands and ‘Black Country’, listen to artist Osman Yousefzada on Queer Feet (2023) at Charleston in Firle: pod.link/1533637675/episode/6ca95c67d24936cff9d2d478f4450cf2

And read my article, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/osman-yousefzada-at-charleston-in-firle

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠⁠patreon.com/empirelines