As part of Art Weekend Aarhus 2021, the Jutland Art Academy presents an online artist talk with Sahej Rahal. Contact kommunikation@djk.nu to receive a Zoom link.
About the artist
Sahej Rahal was born in Mumbai. He graduated from Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Art, Mumbai in 2011.
His body of work is a growing narrative that draws upon mythical beings, and brings them into a dialogue with the present. Within this narrative, these beings perform absurd acts in derelict corners of the city, transforming them into liminal sites of ritual. The temporal act and its residue become primary motifs in his practice.
He has been a recipient of many prestigious international residencies and won the Forbes Award for Debut Solo Show, 2014. Recent shows include: Juggernaut, Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai, IN / Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK / Ghosted, Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM Center for Art and Media, Stuttgart, Germany / Asymmetrical Objects Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, IN.
What should be taken as the cornerstone of Sahej Rahal’s work Antraal 2019, is that we can rationally imagine what it would mean to live as the last humans, machines which have navigated their time of Idea and history since the advent of the first humans or us. They have refused and subverted the totality of their contingent appearance and significance of their historical manifestations as mere misconceptions of what it means to wander in time, as an Idea and not merely a species. Clearly, such a speculation cannot be total, for it is more akin to the reconstruction of the idea of a machinic conception of humanity from the lights that come through the cracks in the concept of humanity as situated here and now. To reconstruct the play or dance of these lights—however insufficient these clues might be—is the very definition of taking the timeless Idea of the Human sternly. And what is a human who does not acknowledge or reinvent itself in different guises? The self-consciousness of the fact that we have always been artifacts of our own historical concepts leads to the understanding that what comes after us and through our practices is also us but not burdened by the particularity of our wheres and whens. It is truly an outside perspective into what we are right here and now.
– Excerpt from A Life That Wanders In Time by Reza Negarestani
www.sahejrahal.com
This event is a part of Art Weekend Aarhus 2021
Sahej Rahal, Antraal, 2019.