‘Sahjan Kooner Commission at Light House - image by Dee Patel

ALIVE – Sahjan Kooner

In this podcast we talk to contemporary artist Sahjan Kooner about his practice and his Offsite 9 commissioned project ‘Frozen Archive for Moon/ish.exe’.

“One day when you are no more, what trace would you like to leave? What will you be known for? Even if only for one person, what will your trace be to the world?” Bobby Tiwana

Extracts from the podcast

“An artist is an entity really, which augments, or uses, or builds tools to augment how people see reality and social structures.”
“I’m really fascinated by doing that, by actually stretching peoples like visual and social ideas to kind of the nth degree more or less, I guess, kind of like what science fiction does a lot.”
“I work predominately with video and installation and I kind of explore how migration and technology and social tech social systems collapse into one another as people move. The stories of movements, the histories of movements but of future movements people are gonna take.”
“I was thinking of other forms of archive, I guess you call them, the social systems get brought over by somebody. The kinship systems that exist, the forms of longing that people have and the lineages that collapse as you move, so like I always say that it’s interesting that we never frame the way that we create relationships as a long-term form of archive making, like the systems we do to keep a relationship going for as long as possible, that in itself is kind of like archive of material.”
“When I use the word community, I think about people who come together and congregate together or gather together, usually resist something, to change something in a given moment. I think of people… and then I think about the invisible communities that take place. Like people who shape you as well, shape the people who surround, then I think about who you’re in a community with.”
“So, I’ll create these extraordinary, not just visual but social and historical and future links between like, an image from on the moon all the way through my family. You know then us using technologies of surveillance to go to the moon, it creates this tapestry of reading which elicit some type of, I guess hopefully in the viewer some type of thinking that there is something else or some other way of seeing something.”
“The capacity of love is the most amazing thing I’ve got in the world right now? Just realising you can expand your heart to house multiple people. I think that's one of the things that I carry a lot with me in that question about what I value most in the world. It’s just the capacity to love and just to change people through that, you know, as opposed to dismantle people through hatred.”
“I always think of film as building a skyscraper, or growing a tree or something, so it’s a very lateral activity making a film. Whereas a video is kind of like creating a fungal network, operating like a yeah like a flora which exist around, mushrooms around the tree.”

Download the transcript of the podcast here.

Alive Credits

Artist Sahjan Kooner
Presented and produced by Bobby Tiwana
Sound design, engineering and editing by Duncan Grimley
Commissioned by Creative Black Country
Funded by Arts Council England
Supported by Wolverhampton Arts & Culture and Paycare

9 Words Podcasts: Alive

Contact us on 0121 525 1127 or email info@creativeblackcountry.co.uk