Blog post: Harmeet Rahal

I was awarded the British Council’s Venice Biennale Research Fellowship, supported by New Contemporaries, as part of a month-long program that gave me the opportunity to spend a month in Venice during the 2024 Biennale. Surrounded by so much art from across the world, it was hard not to feel overwhelmed, but it also gave me the opportunity to lean into slowness – reflecting on my practice while discovering new work and meeting wonderful people.

The fellowship was deeply relevant to my practice, particularly my interests in cyclical time. In Venice, I was researching smuggled histories and the role of the coast as timekeeper. As tides change, pieces of the past and future get smuggled into the present. I love the sea because of its unstable stillness – If you look at it for long enough, it starts revealing little secrets. Venice, as a city on water, became the perfect backdrop in helping me understand how history continuously washes up and recedes.

The fellowship has directly impacted my current body of work, which I began developing shortly after returning to the UK. Contraband Zindabad, my first institutional solo exhibition at Flatland Projects in Bexhill-On-Sea, makes poetry out of bootlegged histories. This exhibition feels like a natural extension of what I learned during the fellowship.

^{Harmeet Rahal, Contraband Zindabad, 2024. Installation at Flatland Projects. Photo by Phoebe Wingrove)}

In John Akomfrah’s work at the British Pavilion, water holds a memory that slips through the floodgates of the collapsing British Empire, the climate crisis, and large-scale displacements across the world. His installation Listening All Night To The Rain introduced me to acoustemology – the idea that sound acts as a way of knowing and existing within history. Everytime a sound is listened to, a story is retold. This pushed me to further experiment with listening as a method, and I began collecting audio samples and field recordings (from Venice and beyond).

On my last day in Venice, I performed a sonic intervention at the British Pavilion – a live sound piece called Azadi and Other Love Songs. The performance was sort of a response to John Akomfrah’s work, looking at how bootlegs, remixes, and repetitions can carry radical histories into the present. I held my android phone speaker against the magnetic pickups of an electric guitar, and we listened through the amplifier as songs, field recordings and memories disappeared into each other.

The Biennale itself has also left a lasting impression on my practice. I’m very grateful to have seen work by some of my favourite artists in person, including Salman Toor, Wael Shawky, Eimear Walshe and Aravani Art Project. And also shoutout to Ristorante Royal Panjab in Mestre for serving up the best mutton biryani in Europe.