a vanishing point

2024

Performance, Digital

Artist/s: Akil Ahamat, Kalanjay Dhir

‘A Vanishing Point’ was the first collaboration between Akil Ahamat and Kalanjay Dhir. The artwork follows Ash, a recently cremated person, and its unseen friend, Wind.

‘A Vanishing Point’ was staged in the games engine, Unreal Engine 5. Using advanced particle simulation and high resolution environment rendering overlayed with simplistic two-dimensional animation, the work plays with histories of representation, image-making and belief.

The work takes its name from a technique used by Renaissance painters to represent three-dimensional reality within two-dimensions where parallel lines seem to disappear or meet at a horizon. In this narrative, the vanishing point also refers to Ash’s regrets about their life and the parallel lines of faith and culture that dictated the path of its life and its friends.

Drawing on existing prose from contemporary ballads, mediaeval poetry and folk music, Ash reflects on love lost and interfaith friendships from its human life. As Ash looks to the horizon of the afterlife and Wind breathes life into the scene once more, Ash laments, “Do we go to different after-lifes?”