From Saturday 24th September, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead brings a new body of work from Sahej Rahal, continuing Baltic’s ongoing strand of exhibitions that explore play.
Mythmachine is conceived as an immersive virtual playground governed by chaos, luck and chance. The exhibition includes sculptural renditions of characters that live in the virtual world created by Rahal.
This chimeric realm is conditioned by the microbial, technological, and sensorial. 3D-printed sculptural objects excavated from the depths of the artist’s mythical worlds will produce sound when touched by visitors. Mythmachine comes from the future and will transform and expand in response to players entering the gallery. It is a site for the rehearsal of co-habitation between human and non-human systems through speech, song and rhythm.
Sahej Rahal is primarily a storyteller who weaves together fact and fiction to create counter-mythologies that question narratives shaping the present. His myth-world takes the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, and AI programmes. He draws from various sources ranging from legends to science fiction, creating scenarios where beings emerge from the cracks in our civilisation.
Rahal’s participation in group and solo exhibitions includes the recent Gwangju Biennale, the Liverpool Biennial, the Kochi Biennale, the Vancouver Biennale, MACRO Museum Rome, Kadist SF, ACCA Melbourne, CCA Glasgow. He is the recipient of the Cove Park/Henry Moore Fellowship, Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation Installation Art Grant, the Digital Earth Fellowship, and the first Human-Machine Fellowship organized by Junge Akademie ADK. His exhibition Ancestors is currently on view at the JNAF gallery in the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai.