Sahej Rahal: Beyond the City of Time

“If it is indeed true that the capacity to end the story lies solely in the mouth of the teller, then in the face of imminent collapse, the only task I can imagine is to add one more turn to the tale.”

– Sahej Rahal

There are many paths beyond the city of time. Some emerge through wandering, carried by rumours and whispers. Some through hacking or rituals. Some ooze through crevices, opening rifts in the fabric of time. They can be on no map and yet still seem to be there. Sahej Rahal’s exhibition Beyond the City of Time opens as one such place, where ‘weird’ things continue to exist – our technologies mix with other times, other places, speaking objects and hybrids that remind us we never truly left the premodern world.

As our existence drifts into virtuality, it becomes increasingly urgent to trace the many histories of illusions, from ancient alchemists and medieval mystics to today’s tech wizards. Might illusions be approached not simply as deceptions, but as part of the very ground of reality, given how deeply imagination shapes our world? Such a view would unsettle a habit we’ve long carried in Western thought: to turn everything hidden or strange into a language we already know, into shapes we’ve already tamed.

Sahej Rahal’s work arises out of the traditions of the Indian subcontinent, confronting a dream-mythology that has mapped a strict social landscape for centuries. It centres on the cosmic body of Manu, imagined by the Hindu god Vishnu, as a model for inhabiting the world. Here, illusion is not something we possess; rather, the dream – of reality, of history, of our origins – possesses us. But what happens when we take possession of illusions and start to make our own?

The realms we wander through Rahal’s work are not the imaginings of divine sleepers or architects, but rather intervening spaces without a clear-cut narrative to be unpacked. His morphing biomes are populated by swarming tentacles, insect-like particles, touch-responsive mesh that all resist any attempt to establish a grand arc of history. Instead, they bring back the ancient meaning of the word ‘thing’: an assembly or council where our ancestors gathered to settle their disputes.

The exhibition spans across media, from painting and drawing to audiovisual installations and sculptures. It encompasses key works from Rahal’s evolving oeuvre, among which are The Book of Missing Pages, the virtual landscapes of Anhad (The Unscalable) and Atithi, and the cooperative multiplayer world of Distributed Mind Test (DMT).

Curators: Edith Lázár, Eva Drexlerová