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Raised in Palestine and currently living in Sweden, Pandagunda is a conceptional artist with a background in installation art and paintings before transitioning to 3D digital art in 2015.

“I realised I had reached a limit within the scope of my 2D work and I wanted to do more. I wanted to move the subjects within these images, to change their pauses and even change their expressions. The 3D world gave me huge possibilities to twist and manipulate, and even add, elements I couldn’t do in 2D. I discovered, in this realm, that I can utilise all the existing elements in the real world, such as liquid, metal, fire and smoke, in addition to humans and animals, all from the window of my computer screen. What is even more interesting is that I can create the physics of that world and manipulate it exactly how I want. Gravity can now push upward and fire can be made of gold.” 

Though a visual artist, Pandagunda is a firm advocate of using sound in the creative process.   

“I believe that video without a sound like a body without a soul. It elevates and strengthen the visuals. And if seeing is one experience, seeing and hearing is a totally different experience. Sound tells you that something soon is going to happen and carries you to the next frame. So, you ride the visuals.”

Pandagunda’s initial involvement with contemporary music was providing 3D animation for Rihanna (trailing MTV’s video music awards of 2016) before he created the cover artwork for TRZTN’s album Royal Dagger Ballet One and the animated passages for TRZTN’S music video ‘Hieroglyphs’. A much closer spirit of collaboration has been forged with the Icelandic musician Jónsi, starting with the animated passages for his music video ‘Swill’. Now Pandagunda has taken the lead, creating two new videos, Within and its companion It’s Just A Feeling, with Jónsi reacting to the visuals with accompanying electronic abstraction. 

The two videos illustrate and illuminate Pandagunda’s journey, both literal and figurative, from a traumatic upbringing in a hostile and supressed world to the additional prolonged uncertainty of seeking asylum in Europe, driven by the intense desire for hope, to rise above and find a semblance of peace.

“I’ve been struggling for years with anxiety and relating to others. I have always considered myself a closed box of a person, observing and judging my emotions, using them as a shield, rather than experiencing them, until I started meditation. 

“Within portrays the good stuff that can come out of the body, if we let it. The figurehead [of British poet Alfred Tennyson*] is still. He’s observing, or meditating, the stillness in ourselves, calming down the noise and thoughts and chatter in our heads, to let out the raw, clean emotions that are submerged inside ourselves, buried by anxiety, fear and self-loathing, which pour out of the statue as it cracks open. 

“The sound is another layer, to elevate and strengthen the shapes bursting out of the head. 

“The good stuff has to first come from the inside before it can materialise on the surface. It’s Just A Feeling takes the form of a human body rather than the figurehead of Within, to show the feeling of daily life and the living world, to be aware of the moment and live just in the moment – no worrying about tomorrow or ruminating about the past: to be who we really are, to shed everything we have ever learnt, about money and bills, greed, envy, revenge. To remember the valuable gift of being human.

It sounds simple but it takes hard work, to destroy and rebuild your whole identity. I have made this a main goal in my life through meditation, to witness my feelings before they are even born and to choose if I want to feel them or not. When I’m deep in meditation, I try to imagine the burst of love and positive feelings coming out of my body taking over the accumulated stress and agony of our everyday responsibilities. I believe our souls need to be cleansed every day, just like we take a shower every day when we wake up without even thinking about it.

“That doesn’t mean our agony is gone. Without it, you will never know the difference between it and living in a blissful state. It is part of being human.

“The sound is another layer, to elevate and strengthen the shapes bursting out of the body. For example, when the figurehead cracks open, you hear a boom. Collaborating on Jónsi on his video ‘Swill’ allowed for his love for nature to come to life through my animated elements, particularly as organic flowery elements bloomed from the characters themselves, which I have developed with Within and It’s Just A Feeling. 

From the emotional detail I sense in Jónsi’s music and from collaborating together, I feel we are a good match. I choose these organic shapes to come out of the statue, and he uses similar abstracted forms in music, connected to nature and the environment.”

Through the process of creativity and the understanding of the self, Pandagunda has been transformed, opening up in the same manner as the subjects in his artwork.

“With hindsight, I understand that my work has everything to do with faces, obscuring and messing them up, which I feel is the issue of my identity – to hide my past and who I am. I did not want to reveal that I was Palestinian, because people make automatic assumptions about who you are, and I wanted to be known just as an artist, free of judgement. But I now believe that my identity will support the work itself.”