Archive
Harmeet Rahal
Contraband Zindabad
10.08.2024 – 22.09.2024
Flatland Projects is delighted to present the first solo institutional exhibition Contraband Zindabad by Harmeet Rahal. This exhibition has been commissioned following Rahal being awarded the 2024 Flatland Solo Exhibition Prize, which was designed to allow an artist based in the UK their first solo commission in a UK institution.
To arrive in defiance of old customs, is to become contraband. The coastline is in a state of unrest, mirroring lunar rhythms. It dances with the moon, advancing and receding as the tides change, dissolving boundaries between land and sea.
Contraband Zindabad is a gathering of fugitive stories adrift on the fuzzy edges of spatio-temporal borders. Pulling from Bombay and Bexhill’s parallel histories of smuggling gangs, this slippage is imagined as the Underworld - a subterranean web of passages that enable free movement and illicit circulation. On both coasts, smuggling gangs incited a widespread moral panic, perhaps out of shock that fugitives had taken trade into their own hands. In spite of this turbulence, there was a hushed reverence from local communities. These outlaws, by reclaiming trade from the hands of the state, had become folk heroes in the cultural imagination. Haji Mastan from the Bombay Dockyards becomes ‘Sultan Mirza’, and from the Little Common Gang, Thomas Shoesmith becomes ‘Boathook’.
The journey of contraband is not an escape from turmoil, but a movement towards new possibilities. In this body of work, Harmeet Rahal builds an assemblage by sampling uncertain, bootlegged histories. A layered audio-visual installation floats between fact and fiction, navigating notions of counterfeit personhood, fugitive existence, and resistance.
The installation is centered on a film, composed of a series of poetic monologues delivered by faraway friends. An android cameraphone trespasses in-between digital and physical spaces, stitching together insurgent footage with pirated bollywood films and fever dreams. Salvaged images leak off of screens, gluing onto walls and seeping into fabric. Cassette tapes and nautical instruments act as anachronistic time-keepers, searching for a melody within constant displacement. Salvaged objects carry a dissonance within them, in remembrance of a conflicting past that continues to repeat itself. That which is deemed unlawful, will eventually outlive us. Contraband Zindabad.
Harmeet Singh Rahal (b.1996) is an artist from Mumbai, India, now living and working in London. His recent work explores cyclical time and the poetics of resistance. He did his MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London, and his BFA at Rachana Sansad AFAC, Mumbai. In 2023, he was awarded the Almacantar Award for his MFA degree show, and was a finalist for the CIRCA Prize. In 2024, he was a recipient of The British Council Venice Biennale Fellowship Programme, and the Flatland Solo Exhibition Prize. Recent presentations include Elsewhere Blues at the British Pavilion in Venice, Bloomberg New Contemporaries at Camden Art Centre and the Selected 14 UK Screening Tour programmed by Video Club and Film London.
This exhibition has been generously supported by funds from Arts Council England, Rother District Council, and Talent Accelerator.