“Extinguishing Hope”
Akil Ahamat
16 Nov → 18 Jan 2025
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 their fraught, fictional and interspecies relationship with a snail – a recurring character 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, Sat 16 Nov, 4 → 6pm
Akil Ahamat was joined by artist Sarah Rodigari for a conversation, led by exhibition curator Sebastian Henry-Jones. Listen on Offsite.
Publication Launch, Thurs 12 Dec, 6 → 8pm
Designed by Alex Tanazefti, the Extinguishing Hope publication features essays by Archie Barry, Sebastian Henry-Jones, Melissa Ratliff and Bahar Sayed expanding on the ideas in the work and tracing their evolution across Akil’s broader practice. Purchase a copy.
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.
