Join us on Wednesday 16th April for Songbird, a collaboration between Raheel Khan, Mehmil Nadeem, and Harmeet Rahal.
In this Art/Work Association event, the artists will present a live performance emerging from their ongoing research into the dissonant mechanics of migration, oral histories, and songs of resistance.
Exploring how traces of displacement weave through time – embedded in songs, secrets, protest, and prayer – this session draws from the border-defying music of the Panjab region, inherited childhood melodies, and the submerged histories of Mirpur within the Midlands.
Part performance and part listening room, the event is an experiment in collaborative, shapeshifting research. Much like a call-and-response jam session, the artists’ practices will interweave, with each contribution building upon the last to create a dynamic dialogue.
To book, please register here or email info@artworkassociation.org
Harmeet Singh Rahal (b.1996) is an artist from Mumbai, India, now living and working in London. His recent work explores the poetics of resistance, piracy, and cyclical histories. He works between mediums- making films, installations, publications, drawings, and music. He did his MFA at Goldsmiths in 2023 and received the Almacantar Award for his degree show.
He has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Selected shows include Bloomberg New Contemporaries at Camden Art Centre and Grundy Art Gallery, Contraband Zindabad at Flatland Projects, CIRCA Prize screenings in London, Berlin, and Milan, Peoples’ Freedom 75 at Bhupesh Gupta Bhavan, and the Selected 14 Tour across UK venues.
In 2024, he was awarded The British Council Venice Biennale Fellowship. He is currently part of the FLAMIN Fellowship Programme facilitated by Film London, along with being a recipient of The Elephant Trust grant.
Raheel Khan is an artist and composer exploring the interstices of sound, text, installation, and performance. Originally a student of Economics, he has moved towards an artistic practice that observes the tensions between belief systems, social phenomena, and policy, through a compositional framework he describes as machine noise, devotional loops, and acoustic pressure.
Khan was awarded a dual scholarship to start his MFA at Goldsmiths in 2022 and received a studio residency and bursary award for his degree show in 2024. In 2025, he will present a new institutional commission for Nottingham Contemporary, as well as his first international solo show at Petrine, Paris.
Recent presentations of his work include Nottingham Contemporary (2025); Lisson Gallery and Bomb Factory Art Foundation (2024); Palmer Gallery (2024); Longsight Community Art Space (2024); Deptford X (2023); Ovada Gallery (2023); Manchester Art Gallery (2022); Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (2022); and FACT, Liverpool (2021).
Mehmil Nadeem (b.1996) is a Pakistani artist currently based in London.
Her practice revolves around questioning the archive of memory and constructing identity in various ways in the wake of globalisation. She explores cross-cultural heritages and the creation of hybrid identity through the lens of being local to her hometown, Multan, and also from a transnational perspective.
Mehmil graduated with an MFA at Goldsmiths in 2023 and a BFA from BNU, Lahore, in 2019. Recent presentations of her work include Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022 at South London Gallery, Ferens & Humber Street Art Gallery, Dust and Shapes at Pushkin House, Whose Histories at Museum of the Home, ABG Emerging at Alice Black Gallery, and Dreamscapes at AMP.She has been an Artist in Residence at Tasweer Ghar in Lahore and was also selected for the Bridget Riley Artist’s Development Programme.