The Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) presents ‘Wayfinder‘, a solo exhibition by Mumbai-based artist Sahej Rahal. This exhibition is Rahal’s first presentation in Kenya and East Africa, and it opens on 21st November 2024.
Sahej Rahal, DMT: Distributed Mind Test (DMT), 2023. Multiplayer video game.
Wayfinder welcomes viewers into Rahal’s world, where myth, narrative, imagination, and technology intertwine to challenge conventional understandings of reality and encourage them to participate actively in Rahal’s ever-expanding cosmology. Rahal’s practice comprises a journey through evolving mythologies that span sculpture, performance, video, and digital media.
Wayfinder will feature two major video works shown alongside a selection of drawings from The Book of Missing Pages (2018-2023) and three new sculptural works. Distributed Mind Test (2023) is a multiplayer video game where players become fractured impulses of thought embodied within a young non-human creature navigating a world engulfed in perpetual night following an unknown cataclysmic event that has exhausted all human life. Anhad (2023) is an interactive AI simulation where viewers encounter an AI-controlled entity whose limbs carry recorded notes of Hindustani music, which emanate as they wander a digital forest, receiving audio input from the physical world to generate an infinite song.
Wayfinder is the first exhibition where these works are shown together, offering the audience access to various faces of the ecosystem that Rahal has developed in his practice. The title Wayfinder reflects Rahal’s interest in storytelling and myth-making as a means to explore alternative possibilities of being. Rahal describes his work as an invitation for audiences to “actively participate in how this narrative evolves.” In Rahal’s speculative world, each artwork is a portal into alternative realities where audiences are invited to journey, question, and ultimately participate in co-creating a new mythic landscape. As viewers engage with his diverse media, they collaborate in assembling, dismantling, and reimagining these stories—transforming Rahal’s mythology into a shared space of discovery. By navigating these fictional worlds, Rahal’s work encourages a reexamination of our place within existing narratives, proposing ways we might imagine and inhabit worlds beyond our own.
Sahej Rahal (b. 1988) is a storyteller who weaves together fact and fiction to create counter-mythologies that interrogate narratives shaping the present. Rahal’s myth world takes the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, video games, and AI programs that he creates by drawing upon sources ranging from local legends to science fiction. He renders scenarios where indeterminate beings emerge from the cracks in our civilisation.
Rahal’s participation in group and solo exhibitions includes the Biennial of Moving Images at Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, the Gwangju Biennale, the Liverpool Biennial, the Kochi Biennale, the Vancouver Biennale, MACRO Museum Rome, Kadist SF, ACCA Melbourne, and 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, the first Human-Machine Fellowship organised by Junge Akademie ADK, and the Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellowship 2024.
The exhibition will be on view from the 21st of November, 2024, until the 1st of March, 2025. For more information, please visit Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute.
