Offsite9: Sahjan Kooner: Frozen Archive for MOON/ish.exe
Sahjan Kooner’s work for Offsite9 explores the relationships between migration, technology and lineage through a new video installation titled Frozen Archive for MOON/ish.exe
Working with a network of people, the video looks at the connections and futures that bring people together and forge bonds across time and space. A set of recurring motifs, including archival and digital imagery alongside virtually rendered environments, will blend with testimonies, song and resistance to weave a work that defies gravity and location.
Can you tell us about your initial ideas?
Originally I was thinking about the things people carry with them as they migrate: technologies, stories, ideas, social structures, bonds and lineages. I got really interested in my family's version of this. These are things that travel across space and time, linking it to science fiction and the future as well as origin stories such as the desire to have a ‘true’ story of India. The proposal brings all this together with stories of people I don't know, and never will, via the archive. A hallucinogenic whirlpool of ideas generated this work.
How are you working with communities?
I'm always quite sceptical of that word but I think of it in terms of being tethered or bound to people I don't know though we had a similar journey to get here. When I talk about community, I talk about gathering and congregating. The work incorporates multiple positions, multiple histories and futures, and counterpoints to the history that are recorded through existing power structures.
And with archives?
It’s a mixture of working with families that I know, my own family's archives, and working with a broader set of institutional archives in order to think about the future of archival behaviour.
How has the work developed since your proposal?
Wider questions have arisen; representation, value, inheritance, the future. I work a lot with my family and we congregated to make a video and in it we go to the moon through the technologies of imagination, drones and GoPros. It comes from an image left by an astronaut from the Apollo 16 mission of a family, leaving traces of humanity on the moon, and then I found out that the photos were made white by solar radiation. India is also developing a space system, like a lot of countries and I became really interested in our family as being active in our next migration, our next technological leap. It also includes 3D creatures I make that look like me and discuss their own production. It's a complex and very deeply moving work. I want it to feel like a dream.
You’ve shown work before in the city …
Yeah, a lot of the previous work was laying the groundwork for this. I restarted my practice two years ago and questions around liberalism’s violence in the West and existing within colonial infrastructures have been important to me. I work in video installation specifically because it does this weird thing with your body, mind and your consciousness, a bit like being in a black hole or worm hole. As before, I’m also still working a lot with terracotta clay because it's malleable.
How will the work include voice?
There will be layers of augmented digital voiceover that I'm writing a script for. It's not like a script for a film, it's more to do with the work discussing its own production and the relationship to the images that people are being shown, like the part that is me and my family gathering together. We'll be opening up and unpacking the production together.
The work opens with a song by Sophie, the musician and producer, who died in 2021. Sophie was taking a photograph of the moon on her roof in Athens and she fell off. Sophie was a really powerful and incredible person who was really important to the queer community, making tools for musicians and trying to shape shift. Her ambient song Pretending opens up the work and the visual commonality of the moon is important.