Sahej Rahal & Pallavi Paul – 2014 Residency Artists
India
Bio
Sahej Rahal’s artworks revel in masculine fantasy, whilst also mocking its affectations. The solitary characters he essays seem to have emerged from Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces refracted through George Lucas’s Star Wars series. The nature of these characters, like that of the peculiar beasts he fashions, is often ambiguous. While their nature might be indeterminate or protean, these personages all appear like irruptions of a semi-mythic realm in contemporary life. Rahal has recently been part of many high profile residencies including Bar1, Bangalore, 2011; FUTUR foundation, Zurich, 2011; INLAKS Shivdasani Foundation sponsored residency at KHOJ international artists’ association, New Delhi, 2013. Pallavi Paul is a film researcher and video artist based out of New Delhi. A graduate of AJK MCRC, New Delhi she is currently a PhD student at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. Her MPhil thesis titled ‘The Trouble of Testimony’ looked at the independent political documentary in Post Emergency India with a special emphasis on the use of video technology. Her first independent video works Nayi Kheti and Shabdkosh have shown at Tate Modern Gallery London (2013), 1OO years of experimentation a festival by Films Division (2013), MAMI (2013) and KHOJ, New Delhi (2014) , Experimenta (2014). For their Vancouver Biennale Residency, Sahej and Pallavi worked collaboratively. While trained in different disciplines of painting and film, as artists Pallavi and Sahej have constantly found themselves trying to reach out to a large range of formal and methodological ecologies. Ranging from sculpture, performance, research and writing they have found their creative velocities often unsettling and reformulating our ideas around art practice. The moving image form has been central to this experience. Film, in their individual practice, has become the site where all our experiments with material, costume, objects, found footage and text , not only coalesce but begin to take on a life of their own.
Click here to view a video interview with Sahej Rahal about his installation at the 2016 Liverpool Biennial.
