Sahej Rahal
The comic imagines a quasi-historical etymology of ‘Insaan’ the urdu/hindi word denoting the Human, long after they have faded away.
Shrota conjures a horned bipedal creature who wanders the twilight landscape of a virtual biome. This biped is not driven by a single brain but a congregation of multiple AI scripts that are attached to the virtual bones within its polygonal body. the separation between the mind and limb of the organism are enmeshed and indistinguishable from each other. Furthermore, each of these scripts is capable of ‘listening’ to sound from the physical world, picking up audio cues through the computer’s microphone. This audio feedback interrupts the motion produced by the scripts inside Shrota, causing the creature to dance with chaotic abandon across the porous boundaries of the physical and the virtual.
Forerunner orchestrates a strange narrative of that dovetails passages from Jorge
Luis Borges with archeological accounts of a Tughlaq-era hunting lodge in Delhi (that,
according to some historians, doubled as an observatory) and the story of a sage
who mysteriously disappeared from there, giving the lodge its current name, Pir
Ghaib. The film chases the strange histories of this site, following the figure of the
the hunter, the mystic and the explorer, as they move between the porosities of myth and memory.
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About Sahej Rahal
Sahej Rahal is primarily a storyteller. He weaves together fact and fiction, to create counter-mythologies that interrogate narratives that shape the present. This myth-world takes the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, and AI programs, that he creates by drawing upon sources ranging from local legends to science fiction. By bringing these into dialogue with each other, Rahal creates scenarios where indeterminate beings emerge from the cracks in our civilization. Rahal’s participation in group and solo exhibitions includes the Liverpool Biennial, the Kochi Biennale, the Vancouver Biennale, the MACRO Museum Rome, Kadist SF, ACCA Melbourne, CCA Glasgow. He is the recipient of the Cove Park/Henry Moore Fellowship, Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship and most recently the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation Installation Art Grant in 2019.