ONLINE Studio Visit

Get behind the scenes at this informal lunchtime conversation with artist Sahjan Kooner.

In this online event we will be talking about Sahjan’s practice and ALIENVillage, the sprawling, tentacular project they are developing with Eastside Projects that uses multiple lenses including science fiction, fantasy, world building and video games, to explore the histories and future(s) of Sahjan’s ancestral village in Punjab in North India.

Working with artist collaborators Sophie Chapman and Gary Zhexi Zhang, their mom, their family in India, school children in Aston in Birmingham, technologists, coders, ceramicists, mycelium experts and Sikh and Punjabi community groups in Wolverhampton, Sahjan is developing a multi-layered, immersive installation that blends personal experience with technology and ecology.

Sahjan is working with Eastside Projects as an Incidental Artist across 18 months with ALIENVillage culminating in an exhibition at Eastside Projects that will launch in October 2023, alongside a project website and chatbot. The project will travel to Kunsthal Gent in Belgium in early 2024. ALIENVillage is co-commissioned by Eastside Projects, Kunsthal Gent, and UP Projects and is supported by Arts Council England and the Henry Moore Foundation. Find more info here.

Sahjan Kooner is an amalgamation of inherited worlds and speculative futures, they work in a freelance capacity to support their practice and owe a great deal to their family, they are a student of the dream state. Using video and installation, they create expansive worlds that explore the traces of love, hope and imagination that make our lives possible, along with examining a debris of questions around the technological, social, and racialised structures that augment life. They live and work in Wolverhampton.