Saag and Fish Fingers

Installation view, Hardeep Pandhal, Saag and Fish Fingers, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Midlands Arts Centre.

Installation view, Hardeep Pandhal, Saag and Fish Fingers, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Midlands Arts Centre.

Installation view, Hardeep Pandhal, Saag and Fish Fingers, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Midlands Arts Centre.

Installation view, Hardeep Pandhal, Saag and Fish Fingers, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Midlands Arts Centre.

Hardeep Pandhal, Another Gray Day Above Ground, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary.

Hardeep Pandhal, Ablaze in the Northern Sky, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary.

Hardeep Pandhal, A Familial Romance, 2023; Chocolate and the Charlie Factory, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Midlands Arts Centre.

Hardeep Pandhal, Assimilatation of Sikharus, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Midlands Arts Centre.

Hardeep Pandhal, Quest Quest 4, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary.

Saag and Fish Fingers
Hardeep Pandhal
Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham
22/10/2025 – 01/02/2026

Drawing on colonial histories and contemporary pop culture, Saag and Fish Fingers presents a comic-driven universe where fantasy, personal memory and cultural commentary intersect. In it, Pandhal references the culturally diverse neighbourhoods around Dudley Road and Cape Hill, Birmingham where he grew up; a place which has shaped his perspective on community and cultural displacement. This plays out in the complex imagined world of the exhibition, the Pintooverse, which the artist has revisited throughout his career.

In the Pintooverse, Pandhal draws from video games, comics and urban visual culture to portray a character called Sepoy Man: a shapeshifting alter-ego inspired by British Indian colonial soldiers, whose adventures explore identity, masculinity and the immigrant experience today. Through grotesque exaggeration and satire, Sepoy Man confronts challenging subjects like racial stereotyping, Islamophobia and social marginalisation. Also inhabiting the Pintooverse are the Gutter People – a nod to the space between comic panels known as the ‘gutter’ in publishing – whose silenced, ghostly forms underscore questions of voice, visibility and social power.

Saag and Fish Fingers features large paintings and drawing, alongside earlier work by the artist. The final work in the exhibition is a new installation, co-commissioned with Outer Spaces, which brings together freestanding wooden cut-outs and a new sound work. It began as a satirical drawing produced by the artist, translated and transformed for the exhibition. The satirical humour and layered symbolism throughout the exhibition draw from multiple influences, such as the aesthetics of H.R Giger and Jean Michel Basquiat; graffiti and urban visual culture; colonial histories; and parodies of pop-culture. Blending art, gaming and storytelling into a coherent whole, the exhibition invites audiences to explore the boundaries between fantasy and reality, the individual and the collective, and the local and the universal.

Hardeep Pandhal is a British Indian artist born in Birmingham and now based in Glasgow. He grew up in the Cape Hill area of Birmingham, a part of the city not traditionally associated with the arts due to its working-class, migrant population. Pandhal went on to study in Leeds, earning a BA from Leeds Beckett University in 2007, before moving to Glasgow, where he completed an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2013. Since then, Pandhal has built a national and international profile, creating work that includes works on paper, large scale drawings, installation, digital video and his own rap music.

Pandhal has held solo exhibitions at The Drawing Room, London (2024), Tramway, Glasgow (2020), and New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2019), Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2017) and his work has featured in major group shows including New Art Gallery, Walsall (2023), the British Art Show (2021–22), Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (2020), Eastside Projects (2017) and Modern Art Oxford (2016). In 2018 he created an open-ended artwork for the facade of Birmingham’s Eastside Projects. He received a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists in 2021, was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2018, and was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2013.

Photo credit: Tegen Kimbley