Sahej Rahal. Dry Salvages

About

During his residency, Sahej Rahal will work with found objects, created tools, costumes and instruments to develop a meandering episodic narrative, wherein absurd shamanic beings perform ritualistic acts of transit across the landscape of Nottingham. The residue of these objects and performances will coalesce through a new video that allows this evolving narrative to continue to unfold across multiple sites.

Rahal’s installations, videos and performances are part of an elaborate mythology, created by drawing upon characters from a range of sources, from local legends to science-fiction. These form scenarios where indeterminate beings emerge into the everyday, as if from the cracks of our civilisation. Rahal lives and works in Mumbai a sprawling metropolis of enormous contradictions and collisions that has shaped the playful irreverence with which he approaches art-making. Just as the city continues to absorb multiple narratives, Rahal’s works attempt to re-figure and re-interpret historical fact, offering a multitude of portals between the real and the imagined.

The Minarets have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the museum goers hesitating at the exit doors always encounter a section they haven’t visited, where behind the marketplace cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the betters. In the square there is an obsidian plinth where the old men sit and watch as their desires become memories.