Raheel Khan

Raheel Khan is an artist and musician exploring the interstices of sound, text, installation and performance. Originally an economist, Khan has moved towards an artistic practice that observes the effects of transnationalism, cultural infrastructures & vacant policy, often finding language through subject and material. His current research explores the cyclical nature of time and promise through a compositional framework he describes as machine, devotion and the acoustic.

"Raheel Khan didn’t see or hear but, as a boy, he felt new forms of agency and insurgency through the customised sound-system of his older brother’s car. The expression of one’s post millenium presence in the English midlands is what he felt, and what first existed as bass thumping through his body and the machinery of the car, later became his project of exploring black and brown bodies existing within music, local policy and economies.

Behind the wall of the two subwoofers he’s built and installed, Khan introduces a backdrop of Muslim prayer mats sourced from charity shops across East London. Embodying various histories of prayer, devotion and communal gathering, Khan extracts what is audible from recordings of the same area, pushing the remainder of rhythmic bass through the stacked subwoofers, adapting the histories of the prayer mat into the acoustic but also the physical. He asks, where does the mystical reside; between the everyday practice in areas of diasporic worship and the spaces that are fashioned for it, and the memories that reside in and are felt deep inside the body. As machines fade in and out of our environment, Khan seeks out the new acoustic, of making new worlds and imagining new futures."

Excerpt from Between Hands and Metal, an essay by Shahed Saleem