Exhibition Opening: Akil Ahamat, 'Extinguishing Hope'

Extinguishing Hope
Akil Ahamat

13 February — 19 May 2025
UTS Gallery
Exhibition opening: Thursday 13 February, 6 — 8pm
Preview, in conversation with Akil from 5pm

UTS Gallery invites you to celebrate the opening of Extinguishing Hope by Akil Ahamat, curated by Sebastian Henry-Jones.

The debut solo presentation of Ahamat’s practice, Extinguishing Hope draws from big and small screen cinematic languages to produce a non-narrative atmosphere Ahamat describes as ‘slow cinema for short attention spans.’ The exhibition features a multi-screen and immersive installation that explores the aesthetics and psychosocial affects of ever-unfolding disaster.

Built in a gaming engine, Extinguishing Hope uses darkness as a motif to represent our age of hyper-rationality, producing an excess of truth that is impossible to make sense of. A key text for the exhibition is the canonical Javanese poem Kidung Rumeksa Ing Wengi (Song guarding in the night), attributed to Sunan Kalijaga, one of the nine saints of Javanese Islam. This prayer describes threats both earthly and spiritual and has journeyed from Java to Sri Lanka along with the exile of Malay peoples—Ahamat’s extended diasporic community—as an incantation for protection against the dangers of life in exile.

Central to the work is Ahamat’s fraught, fictional, and interspecies relationship with a snail—a recurring character in their works which embodies broader ideas of truth, navigation, and escape. Writer Melissa  Ratliff considers the snail as "the artist's maybe alter-ego: an avatar, carbon-based kin, night dweller, hero of defensive adaptations."

Drawing from Islamic theology, philosophy and the poetry of language and speech, at the core of Extinguishing Hope is the question: how do we find our way in the dark?

'Extinguishing Hope' is a West Space Commission, supported by Creative Australia and presented in partnership with UTS Gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication designed by Alex Tanazefti.

Image: Akil Ahamat, Extinguishing Hope, 2024, (moving image still). Courtesy the artist. © Akil Ahamat 2024.