About the Actant
© Sahej Rahal
Sahej Rahal’s installations, films, performances, and video-games, chart a constructed mythology that he creates drawing upon sources ranging from folklore to sci-fi. Rahal’s participation in international institutional exhibitions include the Vancouver Biennale, Canada, (2019); Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, (2018); MAC Birmingham UK, (2018); CCA Glasgow, (2017); PRIMARY Nottingham, UK (2017); Liverpool Biennial, (2016); Setouchi Triennial, (2016); Jewish Museum, New York, (2015); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, (2014); MACRO Museum, Rome, (2014), Galleria Continua, France, (2014) and Art Stage Singapore, (2014). Rahal has also had three major solo exhibitions at Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai. He is a recipient of the INLAKS Emerging Artist Award 2012; the IFA Critical Arts Practice Grant 2014; the Forbes India Art Award, 2014, the Cove Park/Henry Moore Fellowship, 2017, and most recently the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation Installation Art Grant 2019.
© Sahej Rahal
Antraal: An unruly AI program has become sentient by learning to build new limbs around itself to dance with, and with each new limb it learns new moves, dancing with no end in sight, a congregation of contingencies gyrating towards infinitude. While narrative can be a cohesive tool in sequencing even the most unfathomable of contingencies in retrospect, it can’t quite contend with them in real-time, as they occur, overflowing with affective charge. How then, does an incident converse with its own telling, particularly when the incident has no intention of ending? Beginning with this question, this project proposes a game of world building inside an AI simulation where the self and the construct provoke each other.
