Raheel Khan (b. 1992, Nottingham) is the latest artist to take part in Goldsmiths CCA’s ongoing commissioning series Episodes, which provides an emerging artist, graduated five years or less from art school, with their first institutional exhibition. His practice sees him constructing environments where sound and objects converge, forming landscapes that reflect on design infrastructures and their containment of communal memory. Khan’s work is guided by a compositional and research framework that abstracts the terms machine, devotion and acoustic, into themes addressing policy, time-loops, mystics, religion and frequencies. Drawing from lived experiences and collective consciousness, he treats his sound work in galleries as resonant forms, primarily working with electroacoustic and vibrational sensibilities. Sculptural installations and assemblages are often made from reclaimed material sourced from people and places, and are staged to reconsider our relation to product, belongings and object histories. For his new commission, Khan engages with ideas of paranoia and safety; an enquiry which plays out across this exhibition and a series of events at Goldsmiths, Camden Art Centre and London Performance Studios.
At Goldsmiths CCA, Khan will present a large-scale sculptural installation in the double height Oak Gallery, that draws on The Memory Police (1994) by Yōko Ogawa. This surreal dystopian novel describes an authoritarian state that enforces the disappearing of objects and their associated memories. Drawing on this exploration of time, surveillance, and objects’ ability to hold histories, the installation incorporates found front and internal doors, behind which lie spaces that house various resonant objects and gestures. The work extends his research into contemporary political realities, in which individuals must navigate various structures of control through poetics of the domestic, public and private.
The new commission at Goldsmiths CCA project is part of a series of interconnected events by Khan, running across institutions in London during the autumn. Responding to the exhibition’s themes through sound and live performance, each element of the programme has been developed with collaborators.
