Exploring his own cultural dislocation from his first-generation British-Sikh parents, Hardeep Pandhal constructs a whimsical, nightmarish reality, blending nostalgia with critique. Deriving motifs from mass media and entertainment industries, the artist confronts historical violence and pressures of cultural assimilation. On acknowledging the frustrations of a post-truth and decolonial world, Hardeep channels these anxieties into satirical cartoon worlds—deliberately crafted in a disjointed and non-linear composition. 

Hardeep critically analyses British Raj nostalgia and how the traumatic past keeps coming back in a distorted form. Instead of minimising brutal realities of racial violence disguised as nostalgia, Hardeep separates himself from the shallow, detached irony of internet meme culture. Unlike the cynical “nothing really matters” attitude, his use of irony serves as a tool for critique and reflection. The severed limbs framing the work is another discomforting acceptance of the violence so obviously at play. 

Thinking through Sigmund Freud’s theory on dreams, the artist visualises the signs of collective amnesia—the coercive forgetting imposed on lived social experiences—by scattering cartoonish doodles in the work. By subverting cartoons, a seemingly innocent and pure construct, the artist uncovers the warped experiences of children of hybrid identities. He does not tip-toe around colonial history but instead turns these sanitised symbols of empire into offensive, exaggerated and cartoonish forms, forcing a reearthing of narratives of the past.