Karanjit Panesar, an artist and filmmaker living and working in Leeds, was awarded the 2023/24 Collections in Dialogue co-commission from the British Library and Leeds Art Gallery. The resulting exhibition Furnace Fruit is based on Panesar’s research into the Leeds Sculpture Collections at Leeds Art Gallery and the Henry Moore Institute, together with the oral history collections at the British Library and Bradford Industrial Museum. His research into the collections began with the stories of Punjabi immigrants, including members of his own family, who worked in British foundries in the 1950s and 1960s.
Panesar’s starting point for creating work is often filmmaking, and from these films he builds installations that may include sculptural objects, drawing and writing. At the centre of Furnace Fruit is a two-channel film, and embedded within an installation of timber framework is a series of photogravure prints, wall-based sculptures in metal and plaster, and collection objects. A pomegranate cast in iron melted down from a car exhaust appears both in the film and in the space.
As a British Punjabi and child of an immigrant father who arrived in England from India in the 1960s to work tirelessly in a steel factory until his health gave way, this exhibition resonated with me on a profoundly personal level. It is not often that one’s heritage and lived experiences are reflected back as powerfully as they were for me here. Panesar’s exhibition is not simply a chronology of events or a static snapshot of the past: emerging from the anchoring film and the broader body of work are complex themes of identity, connection, alienation, self-awareness and the perpetual human quest for understanding. The journey of the film’s protagonist felt deeply familiar. It echoed my own experience of untangling and embracing a fluid identity that exists at the intersection of personal heritage and a much larger socio-political landscape. Furnace Fruit places this tension at its core, interrogating how the external environment, shaped by global discourse, influences our sense of self.
As with any exhibition, the lens through which viewers engage with Panesar’s work will inevitably be shaped by their own lived experiences. Yet, there are undeniably universal themes that rise to the surface. The ongoing struggles faced by immigrants – and the generational impact of those struggles – remain a critical element of British society in the twenty-first century. Panesar’s work serves not just as a reflection of these realities but also as a space for connection and inquiry, linking histories with the present and offering viewers an opportunity to confront, question, and perhaps better understand their own place within these narratives.
Harpreet Kaur [HK]: Tell me how this project began. What first inspired you to focus on work Punjabi immigrants did in England in the 1950s and 1960s?
Karanjit Panesar [KP]: The beginnings of the project lie in a conversation I had with my great-uncle some years ago about his experience of working in automotive foundries when he first arrived in this country in the early 1960s. He told me about the huge number of Punjabi immigrants that were working in British foundries around that time; some foundries were almost completely staffed by immigrants, who were working for much less than their white counterparts.
Until then, I had mostly known of foundries in the context of bronze sculpture casting, and around that same period, major works of modern sculpture were being made in bronze by people like Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Hearing about this very different kind of foundry really stuck with me. I started thinking about an overlap of Western modernism, post-colonial capitalism and metal-working that is seen in the tension between these two kinds of foundry.
I wanted to find a route through some of this and make it into something personal. The commission involved responding to archives, and I wanted to bring them into the work so that they could be interrogated from within, rather than simply being looked at.

HK: Can you tell me about your artistic practice before this project? What kinds of themes have you worked with, and why do you use a range of mediums instead of focusing solely on film?
KP: My work has always used moving image. When I have the opportunity, I like to make whole exhibitions that use lots of different elements, with a film as a central point that feeds other things into and out of it. Each element must be able to stand on its own, but they also lean on the others. I like it when artworks are asked to do more than one thing at once. The ‘whole’ (whatever that might be) becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Planning the audience’s journey through the space is also part of my process. For Furnace Fruit, I spent a long time designing how the exhibition would flow, thinking about what people will be able to see at what point on their journey, and which things would come before or after seeing the film.
Language and the voice are recurring devices in my work, and I’m increasingly interested in the fallible nature of memory and perception. Past work has also explored some of the mechanics of filmmaking – pulling back layers of artifice and narrative time through loops and reflexivity.
In Furnace Fruit, the central film combines very ‘real’ footage from a foundry with a kind of semi-autobiographical poetry that is told through a series of still shots that feature a performer in and around my own car and under a tree. I like pulling things from different places together.
HK: What is the key message of Furnace Fruit, and who are you hoping to reach with this work?
KP: I’m not trying to make a singular point with the work. Hopefully it speaks to a few different things.
Growing up, I never really thought that the work my grandparents’ generation did here was connected to the British Empire. I wasn’t even sure what that work was. My grandparents didn’t talk about it – they either didn’t have the language for it or thought it was irrelevant. And because of the deliberate absence of imperial history in education in Britain, we are left to join our own dots.
The central film in Furnace Fruit reflects some of this personal journey. But beyond my own experience it’s also about generational distance – the gaps in understanding between those who lived through these histories and those trying to piece them together.

HK: In the film, there’s a powerful line:
‘Sometimes the light on the steel around his wrist is the sun on our ancestors’ swords.
Sometimes it’s the red glare of his furnace years, river and village in the rear-view.’
Could you tell me more about these phrases and their significance within the context of the work?
KP: The line connects the men from Punjab who worked in the foundries in the 1950s and 60s to Sikh traditions surrounding metal – specifically here the kara (steel bracelet) which is integral to Sikh identity and lineage. There’s something about looking back in time – back to the ancestors, back to the foundry, the image of ‘back home’.
But the line is spoken by the film’s protagonist, who is this history’s inheritor, not its actor. It goes back to the rupture of generational distance I spoke about earlier: it is the protagonist’s projection of the other person that he is with – who could be his father or grandfather – rather than that person’s own thoughts.
The line is trying to imagine some of the emotional dimension of the journey these workers undertook when coming to England. The work isn’t a straightforward celebration or an ‘immigrant story’ in black and white. It’s about working with the layers of history and making them part of a larger conversation, rather than presenting them as static or archival.
HK: The pomegranate features prominently in the film and exhibition. Is it a metaphor?
KP: The pomegranate is a vehicle for multiple ideas.
There’s a real story behind it: as a child on a visit to see family in India, I remember sitting under a relative’s pomegranate tree and feeling this profound sense of dislocation – a mix of belonging and un-belonging. It was a complicated experience that has stayed with me since.
The pomegranate in the exhibition is cast in the iron of a melted-down car exhaust, which is one of the parts that would have been made in the automotive foundries. The process of melting the exhaust down and recasting it is shown in the film. I wanted this act of transformation or shapeshifting to be at the heart of the work – it was a way for me to work with history, to reshape it rather than just present it.

HK: In your twelve-minute film set against the Ormsgill slag heaps in Barrow-in-Furness, you pair stunning visuals of the remnants of steel production with audio recordings of oral histories from two first-generation Punjabi Sikh immigrants. (The piece weaves together their reflections on their fathers’ work in foundries with broader themes of migration, empire, and the legacy of industrial labour in England.)
The oral histories are deeply moving, touching on sacrifices made by fathers to bring their families to the UK, the isolation faced by women who often didn’t learn English, and the physical toll of such labour. Listening to them felt personal and emotional for me, as they reflect my own family’s journey. Did anything surprise you during these conversations, and what do you hope viewers take away from hearing these voices alongside the visual of the slag heaps?
KP: Barrow has a long history of steel production. While I don’t have a personal connection to the town, and I’m not at all trying to speak for it, its history aligned with the themes I was exploring. Of interest to me in the context of this work is that it was once home to a Victorian-era steelworks that made rail track, which was shipped to British colonies for civil engineering projects. Today, all that’s left of that steelworks are the slag heaps outside of the town in Ormsgill – it’s a rich psycho-geography. I wanted to draw on some of that with these disembodied voices speaking from the tapes.
It felt like a real privilege to work with the oral histories. I think what struck me the most when listening to them was a sense of absence – things unsaid or guessed at. There’s nothing in particular that I want people to take away from them, but I hope people make connections between ideas around migration, landscape and history.
HK: Why do exhibitions like this matter in 2024? Do they make a difference?
KP: Part of what I’m trying to interrogate through the work is the construction of nationhood – how myths about power and identity are created and sustained. For instance, one of the prints in the exhibition depicts a bronze bust of Queen Victoria on the foundry floor. These kinds of representations of ‘Britishness’ were shipped around the world at the same time that the rail tracks from Barrow were, so there were these two metals being used in parallel ways.
We’re living through a time of questions about nationhood – the ongoing fallout from Brexit, rising far-right nationalism, and the denial of the Palestinian people of a state. The dynamics of imperialism haven’t disappeared, they’ve just evolved.

HK: What role did your family play in this project? How have they reacted to the work?
KP: Talking to members of my extended family was a big part of the research process. It was beautiful to have those conversations and hear about their experiences. I think they were surprised I was so interested, as they hadn’t thought much about that work beyond it being a way to improve their and their families’ lives.
HK: Are you glad your grandparents moved to the UK, or do you think life would have been better if they had stayed in Punjab?
KP: I think about it often, but it’s impossible to say. It’s an alternate timeline in the multiverse. I probably wouldn’t be an artist if they hadn’t moved here. I don’t know if that’s for better or worse.
Harpreet Kaur is a speaker, writer and researcher who bridges arts, culture, and technology, currently focusing on AI and creative innovation. Based in Manchester, Harpreet is a seasoned commentator and ecosystem builder, offering a nuanced and global perspective shaped by multidisciplinary, academic and nomadic experiences.
Karanjit Panesar: Furnace Fruit is on at Leeds Art Gallery from 4th October 2024 to 15th June 2025.
This interview has been commissioned by Leeds Art Gallery and the British Library.
Published 13.12.2024 by Benjamin Barra in Interviews
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