HALOS

• Sahej Rahal, Atithi, 2025

Atithi by Sahej Rahal is an immersive and interactive installation that explores a form of non-human cognition centered on sensory interaction and touch. The word “atithi” means “visitor” in Hindi, but it also refers to a being outside of linear time, unbound by fixed beginnings or endings. In the work, AI-driven tentacles wander through the ruins of an abandoned temple. Each tentacle is a creature that acts as both body and brain, a hybrid of mind and flesh, forming a quasi-sentient collective entity. Visitors can interact with them by touching conductive plates: each tactile gesture triggers a movement-based response from the AI tentacles, creating a nonverbal, haptic dialogue. Every touch performed becomes an utterance to which the creatures respond by swirling, swaying, and scattering in an extra-linguistic conversation across the porous boundaries of myth, machine, mind, and memory.

• Emilia Tapprest, Interspecies Interfaces (Part II) – Shape of Language, 2025

In a time when artificial intelligence is increasingly applied to “decode” animal communication, Interspecies Interfaces (Part II) – Shape of Language by Emilia Tapprest interrogates the dominant framing of interspecies understanding as a matter of verbal translation. The film investigates how ambient technologies—interfaces that communicate through continuous, nonverbal sensory feedback—might open up alternative ways to do and communicate research on more-than-human minds. It follows two scientists hoping to reconstruct the cognitive landscape of seven lab-born bats through a translation engine that maps their neural activity into real-time sensory representations. But the modeling process reveals its own instability: the more data the scientists integrate, the more implicated they become in the bats’ extended mind. The scientists find themselves navigating an emergent cognitive field where agency is diffused, and distinctions between human, bat, and machine intelligence begin to dissolve, giving way to a fluid field of experience. Presented within an immersive audiovisual installation, the film draws from real neural recordings of social animals like bats and rats, translating brain activity into visual, sonic, and haptic textures that form an evolving ambient environment.

HALOS continues the itinerary of From Solar to Nocturnal, advancing its inquiry into “other suns” to question a solar-centric hierarchy of perception. Just as transitioning to solar and alternative energy sources requires new ways of thinking and designing, reimagining cultural and technological approaches to perceiving the more-than-human world demands a shift in human consciousness. HALOS immerses visitors in a world where artificial intelligence serves as a medium to rethink our bond with the living and the non-human. The exhibition delves into non-verbal intelligences whose cognition unfolds through touch, movement, and atmospheres. Through machinic memory, sensory contact, and interspecies interfaces, HALOS creates spaces where the boundaries between human, animal, and technology dissolve, making room for new forms of shared perception and interconnected existence.

• The Solar Biennale 2

From the spring equinox to the autumn equinox of 2025, mudac will host the second Solar Biennale with the exhibition Soleil·s which will take place in the Plateforme 10 arts district and on the EPFL campus. Launched in 2022 in the Netherlands by designers Pauline van Dongen and Marjan van Aubel, the Solar Biennale provides a platform for reflection on the challenges of solar energy. For this second edition, mudac will broaden the theme by bringing together designers, curators, activists, and researchers to explore expanded perspectives on how to approach ecological transition. 

-> www.mudac.ch

• Sahej Rahal

Sahej Rahal is primarily a storyteller. He weaves together fact and fiction to create mythological worlds that unfold within the present and take the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, and AI-simulation programs in which indeterminate beings emerge from the cracks between the real and the imagined. Rahal’s participation in group and solo exhibitions includes Manifesta 2022, the 2021 Gwangju Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, the Kochi Biennale, the Vancouver Biennale, the MACRO Museum Rome, Kadist SF, ACCA Melbourne, and CCA Glasgow. He has received the Cove Park/Henry Moore Fellowship, the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, and the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation Installation Art Grant, and won the Forbes India Art Award for best debut show for Forerunner at Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai. Most recently he has been awarded the Digital Earth Fellowship and the Junge Akademie Human Machine Fellowship.

• Emilia Tapprest

Emilia Tapprest (NVISIBLE.STUDIO) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and design researcher based in Amsterdam. Her collaborative work explores ways in which systems, interfaces, and more-than-human actors interact with postindustrial subjects in affective and preconscious ways. Tapprest is tutor at the geo-design MA at Design Academy Eindhoven and previous resident of the Institute for Advanced study at UvA (2023–24), Ruper AiR (2023), Stimuleringsfonds’ Talent Development program (2021–22), and the Jan van Eyck Academy (2021). Her projects have been presented at platforms such as VISIO European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images, Bologna Art City, Vdrome, MU Hybrid Art House, Kunstverein Schattendorf, and the National Space Centre Ireland.

• Enter the Hyper-Scientific

Initiated by the EPFL College of Humanities (CDH), amplified by EPFL Pavilions, and in partnership with the City of Lausanne, the EPFL-CDH Artist-in-Residence (AiR) Program “Enter the Hyper-Scientific” fosters transdisciplinary encounters and collaborations between artists and EPFL’s scientific community. The program invites international artists, for three-month residencies to realize innovative and visionary projects at the intersection of art, science, advanced technologies, and the humanities. 

• Dates

05.06.2025
Opening Sahej Rahal and Emilia Tapprest
6 pm at EPFL Pavilions – Pavilion A
Dates of the exhibition: 06.06–29.06.2025