“Extinguishing Hope”
Akil Ahamat
16 Nov → 18 Jan 2025

Publication Launch, 12 Dec, 7 – 8 am

Akil Ahamat, 'Extinguishing Hope', 2024, still from moving image.

West Space is proud to present the first major solo presentation by Akil Ahamat, as part of our 2024 Commission series.

Combining sound production, literary studies, media theory and filmmaking, Extinguishing Hope articulates the aesthetics and psychosocial affect of always and ever-unfolding disaster. The work draws from big and small screen cinematic languages to produce a non-narrative atmosphere Akil describes as ‘slow cinema for short attention spans.’

Extinguishing Hope sees Akil further exploring his fraught, fictional and interspecies relationship with a snail – a recurring character in his works that embodies broader ideas of truth, navigation, and escape. Reminiscent of absurdist theatre, Extinguishing Hope presents variations of the same scene, in which the pair rehearse divergent and plural sensings of their situation.

Built in a games engine, within the world of Extinguishing Hope darkness is a motif representing our age of hyper-rationality, producing an excess of truth that is impossible to make sense of. Through hidden looping techniques that resemble the mechanics of social media platforms, the recursive gamespace inhabited by Akil and the snail becomes a site to consider the formation of our subjectivities under these conditions. How are our desires, imaginations and experiences shaped by crisis, as it is mediated through our information-saturated reality?

Drawing from Islamic theology, philosophy and the poetry of language and speech, at the core of Extinguishing Hope is the question, ‘how do we find our way in the dark?’

Extinguishing Hope is a West Space Commission, supported by Creative Australia and presented in partnership with UTS Gallery, Sydney.

Programs

Opening Celebration, Saturday 16 November, 4 → 6pm

Featuring a conversation with Akil Ahamat and artist Sarah Rodigari.

Publication Launch, Thursday 12 December, 6 → 7pm

Join us to launch the Extinguishing Hope publication by Akil Ahamat with designer Alexander Tanazefti and featuring essays by Archie Barry, Sebastian Henry-Jones, Melissa Ratliff, and Bahar Sayed.

The evening will feature readings by Archie Barry and Sebastian Henry-Jones, and a conversation with Akil Ahmat.

2 large screens stand on the floor of West Space Gallery. There are black cords that drape across the roof and all around the space.
2 large screens stand on the floor of West Space Gallery. There are black cords that drape across the roof and all around the space.
Two figures stand in the gallery observing the artworks. There is a large screen showing a close figure and a fire in the background of the landscape on screen.
A figure in green pants stands under a parabolic speaker listening to an artwork.
a panel of three people sit in conversation in front of an audience
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.