gestalt
by Karenjit Sandhu
gestalt is a poetic enquiry of the Panchayat, a collective of South Asian and Black artists/practitioners involved in communal archiving, artmaking and activism in Britain from 1988-2015. gestalt consists of visual poetry, drawings and instructions which provide an alternative documentation of the materials and ephemera from the Panchayat Collection. It is a score for performance holding a spotlight on questions of race, class, gender, colonisation, erasure and collective memory.
ISBN: 9781068644672
120 pages
Date published: 10/04/2025
Paperback
For Fans of: Bhanu Kapil, Nisha Ramayya, Imtiaz Dharker
"In gestalt, skin is a disrupted and uncanny archival space. The poetic line is deconstructed into pictorial journeys of time that amass and tangle, as if knotting with the very fibres of the page, and language races against itself as a mode of documenting what is contradictory and ephemeral. Karenjit Sandhu reinterprets language with vigour and wit, crafting a live document of loose hair, the phosphorescent Indian bison and typographical dance, set amidst the underlying residue of culture and collective history." —Alycia Pirmohamed
Karenjit Sandhu's publications include Poetic Fragments from the Irritating Archive (Guillemot Press), young girls! (the 87 Press) and Baby 19 (Intergraphia Books). Her work is featured in Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry and The Blue Notebook: Journal for Artists’ Books. Sandhu's artists’ books have been collected by the Tate Archive (London) and exhibited at The Showroom (London) and Galerie éof (Paris). Her performance work has led to collaborations with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Barbican, Flat Time House and Christie’s (London), Arnolfini (Bristol) and Galerie Eric Dupont (Paris). She is a member of the British Art Network and has written for exhibition catalogues on contemporary British, European and South Asian art.
