Comar Hardeep Pandhal & Frances Larson: Decapitation

To coincide with his solo exhibition 'A Neck or Nothing Man!' at Comar, the Isle of Mull, artist Hardeep Pandhal invites anthropologist and author Frances Larson to explore with him the history and cruelly current significance of the severed head in art, literature, and life.

The event will include the premier screening of Pandhal's new film, commissioned by Comar.

Pandhal's film is part documentary of the fabrication of a four-metre tall public sculpture installed near Tobermory harbour for the duration of his exhibition on the island. The artist has turned a Georgian political caricature of an anthropomorphic 'guillotine man' into a giant beachfront 'comic foreground' - a painted façade featuring an outlandish character with a hole cut out where the head should be.

Taking his cue from historian Daniel Arasse, who has described the guillotine as a 'portrait machine', Pandhal's video narrative encroaches upon existing interpretations of the (at once humorous and terrorising) affects of mechanical image-making.

The screening will be followed by a talk by anthropologist Frances Larson, author of Severed (Granta, 2014), a book charting the history of the severed head. Larson will survey how, for centuries, artists have wielded like razors the paintbrush, pen, and camera to fill the walls and halls of galleries and museums with heads detached from bodies.