Sahjan Kooner Wants A More Iconic Future

Concerned with elaborate worldbuilding, ‘dankEconogy1_ALIENVillage’ is a complex sci-fi installation developed by Sahjan Kooner during their residency at Eastside Projects. In the gallery, Kooner reimagines their ancestral land in northern India as a nomadic common, containing knowledge of the migrations that have occurred there, where visitors encounter both the villagers and the economic and environmental forces to which they are subject.

Kooner has demarcated zones with internal metal walls that lead gallery-goers through an interwoven timeline of events. In the film The Villagers (all works 2023), a group of children in orange spacesuits gathers against a green-screen backdrop, considering whether they will ‘return to Earth’ again. They don’t seem keen, appearing instead immersed in interplanetary travel, conjuring giant pizzas and dealing with a scientist who has just fired a rocket into the sun. There is irrepressible joy in the hive mind created by these children: we learn they want to be bakers, live in Paris, develop vaccines and pay their bills.

HONEY + Chatbot, a videogame project created with Sophie Chapman, explores the agency and desires of two playable characters. HONEY and her best friend are intent on disrupting our reality to, as they say, make ‘a more iconic future’. HONEY has a presence beyond the gallery; you can chat with her on the website. In the video, they hustle their radical vision into actualization through coding and fielding demands for additional finance. They receive constant messages from corporate funders, whose cycles of notifications cascade from one existential crisis to another.



If HONEY + Chatbot prompts gnawing feelings of workplace fatigue, I can lie back and seek respite in the aquatic cryogenic gaming pod of psyopGirl&bureaucrat. GAME. Navigating the dead spaces of unoccupied offices, car parks and shopping malls, I encounter a dialogue, written by Gary Zhexi Zhang and Kooner, between psyopGirl (aka e-army influencer Lugan) and a nameless former revolutionary-turned-bureaucrat. The spaces in the game are like the installation’s air vents: I wonder what else is crawling around in there.

Nearby, Steatite Ampules – replications of forms created for Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise (1979–ongoing) – are mounted on chairs caked in red clay. In Scott’s films, the vessels were intended to accelerate the evolution of new lifeforms in the event of extinction. In Ampule Chamber, Kooner has embedded them with Punjabi script and mounted video screens between the top and bottom sections. Their presence in the installation echoes HONEY’s activities as a contaminant, who morphs and adapts to meme-market her image into wider circulation by advertising perfumes, headphones and cleaning products.



The final area of the exhibition addresses ideas around ancestral land and the environmental impact of human presence there. Pinned to a wall are letters, produced during workshops organized ahead of the show, recalling participants’ homes and villages. On a monitor, the video finalbeginningAFTERAFTERAFTER merges images of rocks and red earth with archival photographs, inviting us to imagine the migration of pixels from Punjab to Mars. Kooner asked their mother to imagine leaving Earth to become a resident of Mars; they built an ampule from red clay together as they discussed her migration.

I leave among archival images on which fungal species have spored. QR codes on the walls link to Kooner’s website, which contains further contextual information. The route through the structure offers an opportunity to loop back to The Villagers or to carry a cluster of links and pixels out of the gallery. These digital sediments lead to further absorption with a work that is epic in its vision and restless in execution. 

Sahjan Kooner ‘dankEconogy1_ALIENVillage’ is on view at Eastside Projects, Birmingham, until 16 December

_{Main image: Sahjan Kooner with Gary Zhexi Zhang, psyopGirl&bureaucrat.GAME., 2023. Courtesy: the artist and Eastside Projects, Birmingham; photograph: Stuart Whipps}