Exhibition Beyond the City of Time at the Rudolfinum Gallery: Stories of Chimeras in the Cracks of Reality

Biologist and theorist Donna Haraway in her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016, Czech translation 2025) speaks about the creative power of stories: „It is not indifferent what stories shape worlds, what worlds are shaped by stories.“ There is a close, bidirectional connection between stories and the (worlds) that conditions their mutual existence. The stories we tell ourselves and that are meant to help us explain reality, give it meaning, actively mold the fabric of the world and along with it our imagination. 

Significant roles in Rahal’s work are played by new technologies along with artificial intelligence, although the artist himself also enjoys working with the medium of traditional painting.

Indian artist Sahej Rahal approaches these stories in his artistic practice, creating cracks in their fabric and playfully altering the mythological substratum of reality. His solo exhibition Beyond the City of Time curated by Eva Drexler and Edith Lázár at the Rudolfinum Gallery (until May 10) transforms the space of the institution into an interactive playground, through which we move in imaginary accompaniment of obscure beings and mythological hybrids, fluttering on the border between media and worlds. 

The exhibition landscape winds into a circle without a preferred direction. The unifying motif becomes the phenomenon of illusion representing a specific relationship to the world, which arises from collectively shared, story-based constellations that determine our perception of reality. Its diverse facets (fables, spells, delusions) then frame the individual exhibition halls. Due to modern thinking, which emphasizes the rational component of existence and the effort to uncover, visualize, and shed light on all that is mysterious, we have become accustomed to interpret illusion in a binary opposition to the real as falsehood, deception—somehow distorted interpretations of the world that rational approaches must neatly straighten out. 

Rahal deconstructs modernist logic and perceives illusion as the foundation of reality. But his work does not end there. The artist exposes, modifies, mixes, cuts into pieces, and then glues them together into different counter-mythological figures. However, for him, counter-mythology does not mean an attempt to eradicate myth but to transform the existing mythological foundation. 

Thinking with Illusion

The series of images *The Book of Missing Pages* (2018–present) follows the tradition of Islamic illuminated manuscripts and confronts viewers with hybrids whose bodies escape clear classification (often assemblages of different religions and currents). It is a mythopoetic work building chaos. 

The interactive AI simulation *Anhad* (Unscalable, 2023) responds to sounds in its environment through an unstable entity that shatters, tears, and turns, reacting with a delay. It thus moves away from the overused generative artificial intelligence drawing from datasets and operates through sensory impulses. Individual limbs become receptive here. One Indian myth describes the cosmic body Manu, which establishes a strictly hierarchical social stratification (castes). The head occupies a sovereign position, while other parts of the body gradually lose importance and become subordinate. The agency of limbs in Anhad deconstructs this vertical ontology and our need to strictly situate intelligence within the realm of the brain. The video is complemented by a sound track—an Indian song derived from the Indian tradition of raga (a musical composition through which we can tune into the primordial, cosmic song). 

The interactive component is further expanded by the video game *Test of Distributed Mind* (2024), where we manipulate a tripod creature with several controllers. The game speculates about collective intelligence, which flows across individual actors (visitors are encouraged to play in at least pairs). Tactility also dominates another installation—*Atithi* (2025), where we communicate with a swarm of tentacles on the screen through conductive plates that must be stroked with both hands. Unlike the modernist obsession with sight, the artist emphasizes touch as the primary sense for understanding the world. The inadequacy of the duality of virtual and real is also demonstrated by sculptures *Pedestrians* (2013–present)—“asphalt-like” giants migrating from screens into the gallery space.

Rahal’s work does not simply represent illusion but produces it. He thinks with it and through it. Intentionally, he seeks to distort our perception and escape control. The curatorial duo thus places itself in a difficult position. How to convey chaos to the audience? How to exhibit and classify works that disrupt these tendencies through their content? One of the chosen strategies was working with wall text, which was minimized. 

Given the interactive, sensorimotor nature of most of the exhibits, where the viewer slowly tunes into the work through bodily engagement, the absence of long texts seems appropriate to me. I must also mention another formal aspect of the textual accompaniment, which is a certain poetic quality of the message. Unlike typical curatorial texts, which aim to didactically describe the exhibition and individual works, here we encounter more “twisted” fragments of stories. If viewed strictly from an educational perspective, they might seem somewhat complex and unclear to visitors. Explaining them simply is not their strength. However, they fit into the mosaic assembled by the artist, which does not illustrate but creates its own stories in the cracks of reality, inviting us into them. 

Rahal’s work constructs colorful worlds that open up before us. The architecture of the exhibition and the overall handling of space, however, seem to have partly resigned from building their own complex world or have deliberately suppressed this ability. Subtle wooden structures, unobtrusive textiles, and bare walls create a very modest impression. Instead of phenomenologically anchoring the viewer in the environment through bodily perception, they recede into the background, shifting this ability and emphasis to immersive scenes into which we can enter undisturbed. 

This submissiveness of the gallery environment is not absolute; in one short segment, the architecture takes on a more dominant role, morphing into a kind of tunnel that engulfs us, disorients us, and culminates in a gateway. The “endless” staircase near Anhad, which is complemented by a diagram on the floor representing a key to the exhibition, also slightly distracts our attention. The monumental projection screen, however, dominates the exhibition space. The chosen material (wood) further visually contrasts with the new media interface and the aesthetics of the video game and AI simulation, just as the strictly geometric structure (order) creates tension with the organic swarm and hybrid entities (chaos). 

Crumpled Reality

Significant roles in Rahal’s work are played by new technologies along with artificial intelligence, although the artist himself also enjoys working with the medium of traditional painting. New technologies are often subject to computational thinking, a framework based on which the world can only be thought of through phenomena and mechanisms that are computationally processable. This leads to gnawing away at the complexity of reality into measurable, scalable, predictable, and clearly definable units under our control. 

The artist disrupts these tendencies. Artificial intelligence and the landscape in which it operates displace both humans and classificatory aspects. Although beings respond to our inputs, control over them cannot be claimed (unpredictability of output, delayed reactions). Control presupposes mastery, which Rahal clearly does not allow us (with the exception of *Test of Distributed Mind*, where control is problematized by collective play).

Instead of control, there is a certain more-than-human dialogue carried by touches, tremors, and sound. In these negotiated worlds, space is created for a different kind of intelligence that escapes human experience and the attempt to model artificial intelligence to mirror our conceptions. Its creation does not detect or generate (in the sense of a visual slip), measure, or classify but subversively unlocks doors to other forms of being and relationality. 

If Western thinking has long tried to straighten out the world and smooth its surface to eliminate shadows and folds, Sahej Rahal, on the contrary, crumples reality. The result is gaps, hidden places where a jumble of strange creatures and alternative stories ferment.

The author is an art theorist.