Sahej Rahal: Wayfinder

The Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) presents Wayfinder, a solo exhibition by celebrated Indian artist Sahej Rahal. This exhibition is Rahal’s first presentation in Kenya and East Africa, opening on November 21, 2024, and remaining on view until March 8, 2025. Wayfinder welcomes viewers into Rahal’s world where myth, narrative, imagination, and technology intertwine to challenge conventional understandings of reality and encourages them to become active participants 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 the co-creation of 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.

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