Sahej Rahal
Sonsbeek 2026
Park Sonsbeek, Arnhem
Inleiding
The Return, 2026
A storyteller and self-taught video-game programmer, Sahej Rahal’s work arises from the traditions of the Indian subcontinent, drawing on folkloric prophecies, archaeological conspiracies, hidden histories, and occult manuscripts in a practice at the border of machine, myth, and memory. Spanning sculpture, performance, film, installation, video games, and AI simulation, the artist brings together real and mythical beings, spiritual and political histories, and the science-fiction-led practice of worlding. Here he presents three newly produced sculptures that are part of a larger series. Rahal traces a fictional civilization of absurd beings performing indecipherable rituals before fleeing into the cracks of concrete, and re-emerging as calcified petro-beings. Their strange anatomies stand on familiar limbs and torsos. Their bodies are entangled with appendages, roots, and horns. Yet despite these stark differences between human bodies and theirs, there is an uncanny otherness that haunts the porous boundaries of myth and memory. Darkened with shades of black, the sculptures’ oily sheen echoes the iron deposits in the soil and the glinting surface of the park’s stream, as though the forms have arisen from the ground itself. Memory and fiction collapse within these objects that somehow speak to the viewer, and which cause mythological time to bleed into the technological present.
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About the artist
Sahej Rahal (b. 1988, Mumbai) is an artist and Assistant Professor of Design Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. Rahal’s practice draws on cross-cultural mythologies and folklore to create fictional worlds that take the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, video games, and AI simulation programs. Rahal employs various sources, aware of their cultural connotations and environmental impact: for instance, his use of terracotta references the earth as humanity’s earliest moldable medium, evoking functional and artistic traditions since prehistory; and he integrates AI and gaming technologies to design futuristic, fossil-like “mock” artifacts that blur the ancient and speculative. In his exploration of intelligence, AI is not just as a tool, but also a framework to examine alternative forms of cognition. Rahal has had solo exhibitions at venues including Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, opening February 2026; Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, 2024; Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai, 2019; MAC Birmingham, 2018; and CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, 2017. His work has appeared in group shows at venues including MUNCH Triennale, Oslo, 2025; Biennial of Moving Images, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, 2024; 13th Gwangju Biennial, 2021; and Vancouver Biennale, 2019.
Commissioned by Sonsbeek 2026