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

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

West Space is proud to present the debut 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. Curated by Sebastian Henry-Jones, 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.’

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. Writer Melissa Ratliff considers the snail as "the artist's maybe alter-ego: an avatar, carbon-based kin, night dweller, hero of defensive adaptations."

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?

Read Tongue becomes hand becomes world by Melissa Ratliff.

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, Sarah Rodigari and Sebastian Henry-Jones had a conversation about the work, and tracing its evolution across Ahamat's practice. Listen on Offsite.

Publication Launch, Thurs 12 Dec, 6 → 8pm

Extinguishing Hope is accompanied by a publication featuring new writing by curator Sebastian Henry-Jones, Archie Barry, Bahar Sayed and Melissa Ratliff, designed by Alexander Tanazefti. The publication is available in the gallery, and also can be purchased online.

Extinguishing Hope travels to UTS Gallery, Sydney, 13 Feb → 19 May 2025

This debut solo presentation of Akil Ahamat’s practice is presented in partnership with UTS Gallery, where it is presented directly after West 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.
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.

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.