Manifesta purposely strives to keep its distance from what are often seen as the dominant centres of artistic production, instead seeking fresh and fertile terrain for the mapping of a new cultural topography.
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Sahej Rahal, IN
Final Forest, 2021, © Sahej Rahal. Photo © Manifesta 14 Prishtina / Ivan Erofeev.
Sahej Rahal is primarily a storyteller. He builds mythological worlds by drawing upon sources ranging from folklore, philosophy and archaeology to science fiction. These worlds examine the present between the borders of the real and the imagined.
Conceived for the Museum of Kosovo, Rahal’s installation, Final Forest, weaves counter-mythologies against the exclusionary metaphysics of the Indian caste system. At the same time, it imagines exit ways towards a multitude of possible futures.
Encompassing video, sculpture, drawings, and artificial intelligence programs, the artist’s storyline intertwines with the museum’s own narratives of neolithic civilisation and militant resistance. Here, at the interface of past and future, Rahal orchestrates a rehearsal ground for cohabitations and kinships between human and extra-human forms of thought and being, staged on the borderlands of myth, machine, mind and memory.