Sahjan Kooner’s sprawling project will explore the histories and future(s) of their ancestral village in Punjab in North India. Using a lens of science fiction and fantasy, and working with artist collaborators Sophie Chapman and Gary Zhexi Zhang, their mom, their family in India, school children in Aston in Birmingham, technologists, and Sikh and Punjabi community groups in Wolverhampton, they will develop an immersive installation that blends personal experience with technology and ecology. They will be working with a collaborative and contaminating approach to infect and alter the histories and future speculations of the site, conjuring a visitation of the village to the gallery which will delve into the lineage of the lives, mutations, migrations, technologies, sociologies of the inhabitants of the village.
Sahjan is working with Eastside Projects as an Incidental Artist across 18 months, developing a project that will culminate in an exhibition in our main gallery alongside online elements that will launch in October 2023, and travel to Kunstahl Gent in Belgium in early 2024. ALIENVillage is co-commissioned by Eastside Projects, Kunsthal Gent, and UP Projects and supported by Arts Council England and the Henry Moore Foundation.
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.
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