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Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.

Echographies of the Invisible
Moonis Ahmad

Echographies of the Invisible is a 10 minute video journey of an unstable digital world constructed with an algorithm called The Game of Life by John Conway. The Game of Life is a cellular automaton which consists of a grid of cells that can be either alive or dead. The rules are simple: a live cell with too few or too many neighbours dies, while a dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes alive. This simple set of rules can lead to complex and unpredictable patterns, that poignantly addresses the undecidability that lies at the base of Mathematics.

In this work, The Game of Life is used as the fundamental logic by which the digital world shifts, morphs, grows and de-grows into uncertain futures, thus constantly challenging its experience over time. The digital world is comprised of point clouds as well as photogrammetry scans of existing landscapes and ecologies. In addition to these imprints, the game incorporates spoken text and sound in the form of stories, myths, and mythologies related to the scanned places. The world, without naming these places, the work brings together complex histories and diverse experiences of time, suggesting an inter-referentiality between the occupied territories.

This world, its uncertain futures and the embedded sounds, audio stories and narratives addresses the lives of the dead and the deceased in the context of occupied and colonised territories. The work also explores memory as a possibility of speculating the experience of unlived lives, as well as conjuring alternative considerations of time by employing rocks rather than clocks as measures of time.

Moonis Ahmad (b.1992) born in Kashmir is an artist whose practice transverses various media such as installation, sculpture, computer programming, sound and video. His work conjures the afterlives of the dead and the deceased as a means to speculate the emergence of counter-worlds that challenge established states of power at the margins. These lives, which refuse to die, emerge as specters in his work, challenging the chronological understanding of time and the territorialization of colonised space. Through such phantoms, Moonis speculates alternate ideas of time and being, intersecting various marginalities and temporalities to explore the beseiged human condition that is inherently at an outbreak and yet, in a constant state of invisibility and exception.

He completed his doctoral research at The University of Melbourne in 2022.

He has shown his work at solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally such as “Okkoota”, Arts House, Melbourne, Australia 2023; “Anarchic Archive: Spectres of Inconsistency” 2021 at The Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery, Melbourne, Australia 2021; “Atlas Holding the Heavens” at Vadhera Contemporary, New Delhi, India 2019; India Art Fair, Notes on Tending, FICA, 2022; “Beyond Boundaries”, at Auckland Art Fair in New Zealand, 2018.

He has participated in various residential programmes such as his three-month Residency at Stadtgalerie & HSLU, in Switzerland organized by Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council. He is one of the co-authors of an upcoming publication by Raqs Media Collective called “Hungry for time” published by Spector Books 2022. He is a recipient of Arts House, Makeshift Publics Programme 2022-23 in Melbourne Australia and has also won Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art’s Emerging Artist Award, 2017-18. He was a recipient of the Australian Graduate Research and Training Programme scholarship.

Currently, he is a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude and is based between Stuttgart, Kashmir and Melbourne.

Editorial : Akil Ahamat
Digital: Sam Soh

Echographies of the Invisible