Akil Ahamat and Sarah Rodigari
“A conversation about Extinguishing Hope”

During the opening for Extinguishing Hope, artist Akil Ahamat was joined for a conversation with collaborator Sarah Rodigari and exhibition curator Sebastian Henry-Jones.

Akil Ahamat is a Sri Lankan Malay artist and filmmaker based on Gadigal Country. The first major presentation of Ahamat's practice, Extinguishing Hope draws from cinematic languages to produce a non-narrative atmosphere the artist describes as ‘slow cinema for short attention spans.’

The exhibition explores the aesthetics and psychosocial affects of ever-unfolding disaster. Central to the work is Ahamat’s fraught, fictional, and interspecies relationship with a snail—a recurring character in their works which embodies broader ideas of truth, navigation, and escape.

Extinguishing Hope uses darkness as a motif to represent our age of hyper-rationality, producing an excess of truth that is impossible to make sense of. A key text for the exhibition is the canonical Javanese poem Kidung Rumeksa Ing Wengi (Song guarding in the night), attributed to Sunan Kalijaga, one of the nine saints of Javanese Islam. This prayer describes threats both earthly and spiritual and has journeyed from Java to Sri Lanka along with the exile of Malay peoples—Ahamat’s extended diasporic community—as an incantation for protection against the dangers of life in exile.

Extinguishing Hope is a 2024 West Space Commission, supported by Creative Australia and presented in partnership with UTS Gallery, Sydney. This conversation took place at West Space, Collingwood Yards, on 16 November 2024.

West Space gallery full of audience members sitting and standing listening to a panel discussion
an audience sits facing a panel of three people in conversation
3 people sit facing an audience during a panel discussion at West Space

Akil Ahamat is a Sri Lankan Malay artist and filmmaker currently based on Gadigal Country. In their work, they animate the non-human in order to talk to it. In the crinkles and whispers of these conversations, shapes of the inhuman forces that govern our lives emerge, as well as our relationships to them.

Sarah Rodigari is an artist whose practice addresses the social and political potential of art. Sarah's work is site responsive, employing, durational live action, improvisation, and dialogical methodologies to produce text-based performance and installations.