Three large otherworldly sculptures stand on geometric plinths in a gallery with dark carpeted floor. Behind them lay amorphous floor cushions in dark blue and green. The backdrop to the scene is a large corner projection showing the alien-like creatures depicted in the sculptures come to life in a familiar yet strange world.

Sahej Rahal:
Mythmachine

Sahej Rahal Mythmachine (installation view), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Photo: Rob Harris. © 2022 Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art

It can be said that many of the ideas and systems that scaffold the world are built on myths. The capitalist economy of endless growth is one of them. Meritocracy is another. In simple terms, myths are stories, but not all stories are myths. Some stories grow and thicken over time, accumulating more weight, importance and power. Other stories are buried, ignored or denied. Stories are frameworks for understanding the world and devices for building new ones. In her much-referenced 1986 essay, ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, Ursula K. Le Guin considers the carrier bag as the earliest cultural technology, a tool for gathering and sharing. In her introduction to Le Guin’s essay, Donna Haraway speaks of ‘urgent questions about how to tell stories that can help remake history for the kinds of living and dying that deserve thick presents and rich futures’. The relational role of stories cannot be underestimated in their potential to build alliances, to ignite empathies and extend the limits of our perceptions, whilst also being capable of the opposite. 

What does it mean to create the possibility for ‘thick presents and rich futures’? Whilst this question is rooted in the world, it is also cosmic.

Within this thickening, this complexity, emerges Mythmachine, a body of work by artist Sahej Rahal (b. 1988, Mumbai) at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. Rahal’s practice is a kind of archaeology that interweaves multitudes of stories from many sources. The worlds he assembles through installation, sculpture, illustrations and AI programmes open up cracks in dominant cultural narratives and invite you to peer into them. Commissioned as part of Baltic’s ongoing ‘play’ strand, the world of Mythmachine takes the form of a game, a proposition, a mechanism, a carrier bag. Spanning two interconnected spaces within Baltic, the work is structured through two distinct modes of encounter: an immersive audiovisual installation and sculptural landscape in the first room, which leads to an almost temple-like display of small sculptures on plinths in the other. The sculptures are accompanied by two copies of Secret Origin, an illustrated zine made by Rahal, from which a large-scale illustrated wallpaper designed by one of the exhibition’s curators, artist Kinnari Saraiya, covers the far wall. 

Detail view of one of Rahal's alien creatures.
Sahej Rahal Mythmachine (detail), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Photo: Rob Harris. © 2022 Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.

Within the twilight of the first room, Mythmachine folds you into the rhythm of a melancholic refrain as glistening, black, tar-like creatures move above, below and through semi-desolate landscapes of familiar but unidentifiable vegetation. Everything is in motion, restless, like the moment of pressing ‘resume’ halfway through a videogame – the technology through which Mythmachine has partly been built. A heavy sepia mist gives the impression of morning, a linguistic association I immediately make with ‘mourning’ through the vocal soundtrack that resonates through my body, reaching into others in the space. Sung by Niyati Upadhya, who describes herself as a vessel through which sound emerges, her voice brings Mythmachine into being. A vessel becomes a portal, the song an unbroken continuum that I struggle to find words to describe, borrowing them from Rahal instead. Language, in fact, is entirely absent from the experience. Instead, I am lulled somatically as I try to piece together what I am seeing, hearing, sensing, feeling. The work is of the world, and also not. The tools I would normally use to understand it – to categorise its parts and slot them neatly into my own frames of reference – are missing. 

Within this virtual world, chimeras appear at the centre; strange, fossilised creatures whose limbs respond to sounds that contact mics pick up in the space. The speech and touch of those who enter Mythmachine trigger the chimeras to initiate different parts of the song, translating chaos into the sublimely harmonious. Like an octopus, the chimera’s cognition appears to operate within its feet, its communication system intuitive rather than language-based. Programmed with an AI script that is capable of singing – through Upadhya – infinitely into the future, this somatic intelligence is fluid and protean, its decision-making logics as ungraspable as the landscape which it responds to, and which responds to it. This strangeness – ‘that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience’ as Mark Fisher puts it in The Weird and the Eerie (2016) – holds a mirror up to the fictions on which our categories of understanding the world are built. 

How does one conceive a world, what constitutes a world? What are the ways in which we put these worlds together? How do we narrate them ourselves and how do we make incursions into worlds to come? These are questions that guide Rahal’s practice as an artist, a storyteller, someone who is ‘trying to enact the hand that the oracle plays’, as he puts it in our conversation, to ‘turn the narrative that is being presented into a stranger form’. Language is one kind of world-building architecture, one that has given rise to extinction stories and scenarios that follow chronologically from current crises. Mythmachine proposes a different kind of architecture that emerges from different models of intelligence and ways of knowing. It is a subversive machine, programmed as a game by the hand of an oracle. It asks you to take the idea of the story and the game together without knowing any of the rules, to participate in its lack of causality, its incoherence and uncertainty. In Rahal’s words, to ‘peer into the outer limits of the world or the systems that we find ourselves subsumed by, especially the ones that have been imposed by language’. 

Softly lit plinths supporting maquette sculptures of mythical creatures line the walls of a darkened room. Covering the far wall is a detailed monochrome wallpaper design.
Sahej Rahal Mythmachine (installation view), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Photo: Rob Harris. © 2022 Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.

I look for clues in the second room that constitutes Mythmachine, a kind of reverse antechamber with a quietly spiritual atmosphere that lends a particular sense of preciousness and mysterious power to the objects within it. Through this reading, Secret Origin appears as a grimoire or sacred doctrine, in the sense that it provides no answers, only further breadcrumb trails to follow as you wish, or not. The narrative structure of Secret Origin stretches back centuries into the past and rushes forward millions of years into futures as it weaves together a fragmented and partial cosmology that also feels like an entirely accurate summary of the end-times that we are living in, and how we got here. It opens with a beautifully poetic passage, ‘Our universe is a collection of holes. Vast and ancient emptinesses, that could drown out the oceans, the skies, the entire nuclear arsenal of a million stillborn stars. Eternal passageways, that lead to the open mouth of the final night into which all suns shall fall, eventually’. It is a reminder that whilst English is a colonial and disciplinary language, used otherwise it can also conjure the magical, spiritual and sublime. It can stretch extinction narratives through space and time, and twist them into infinite possibilities. 

Passages in Secret Origin start to give shape and context to the worlds that Mythmachine summons. References to the ways in which colonial extraction projects have shaped the world contextualise the aesthetic of the chimeras that Mythmachine revolves around. Emerging from capitalism’s ‘theology of petroleum’, they are creatures imbued with an agency that reflects our desire for and reverence of their materiality. The imperialist and destructive logics of capitalism have a bedfellow in the project of Modernism, with its singular vision and machinic fantasies. Le Corbusier, a fellow traveller of the far-right in 1930s France and an architect of cultural erasure, also appears in Secret Origin. Tasked with the design of a new capital city within the Indian territory of Punjab, Corbusier’s vision for the ‘moonlit city’ of Chandigarh was built on the rubble of twenty-seven villages that were razed to the ground to make way for it. Corbusier’s concrete utopia – dreamed up as a kind of machine – attempted to cement a singular idea of ‘the future’ whilst being built on practices of extinction, a literal burial of the past. 

I take these thoughts back into the main room, and become absorbed once more into Mythmachine. I am participating, along with everyone else in the space, but not knowing how. Mythmachine’s non-linearity and fuzzy causality speaks to the emergent complexity of a world that has been terraformed by practices that seek to discipline or destroy its interconnectedness. Upadhya’s song shifts and changes, the chimeras turn, their huge scale and oily-looking sculptural counterparts catch a reflection from the projected landscape surrounding us. A child shouts loudly from the room next door. I think of Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body – how seemingly unconnected actions in one place become inscribed onto another, altering the second body, the planetary body. 

What does it mean to create the possibility for ‘thick presents and rich futures’? Whilst this question is rooted in the world, it is also cosmic. In a conversation with Rahal, we speak about time itself and its relationship to the concept of a future. In his words, ‘The ends of the universe are holes. These points at which the universe falls onto itself. Time collapsing in black holes, time stretching into infinity as an idea’. We circle back to language with the Hindi word ‘kal’ (कल); there’s no tomorrow or yesterday, only ‘a day away from now’. From this vantage point, there is no singular chronological extinction narrative or architect of the future. Paraphrasing Iranian philosopher Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Rahal notes, ‘if the power to end the tale lies in the mouth of the teller, then it is their job to make this moment of extinction everlasting’. The story continues, for as long as it can, never quite arriving. The game is always in the moment of ‘resume’. As Le Guin writes, ‘Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.’

Sahej Rahal: Mythmachine is on display at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Gatehead) 24 September 2022 – 12 February 2023.

Laura Clarke is a curator based in Sheffield.

This review is supported by Baltic.

Published 30.01.2023 by Aaron Juneau in Review

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