DARCH is the collaborative practice of Umulkhayr Mohamed and Radha Patel formed in March 2023, and a culmination of 6 years of work individually.
2025 Biennial Year Find out more
As artists of colour, they wanted to take this as an opportunity to self-direct their creative practice and develop work they know is important, such as to support people to work through ancestral grief related to colonialism, displacement, capitalism / being poor, familial trauma and the environment.
DARCH is grounded in finding creative ways to articulate care-centred practices for people of colour, with a politic grounded in solidarity and liberation. DARCH overlaps shared elements of their practices, namely rituals, shrine building, animism and ancestral honouring, and relationships to land through sound work, conversations and storytelling.
This edition
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DARCH (Umulkhayr Mohamed and Radha Patel), Grief Rage Ritual Film, 2024. Film Still. Courtesy of artists. -
DARCH (Umulkhayr Mohamed and Radha Patel), Grief Rage Ritual Film, 2024. Film Still. Courtesy of artists. -
Radha Patel, Finding Aarti, 2021. Film Still. Courtesy of the artist. -
Aisha Ajnabi (Umulkhayr Mohamed, the Ancestors), Police line weavings_I just want to love you (in my own language). 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
‘Heaven in the Ground’
This soundwork consists of an audio story which is a speculative fiction piece that follows the artist’s, Radha and Umulkhayr after they have died and have been buried in the ground separately. As their bodies decompose – returning their spirits to the soil, they seek to find each other and it is the bacteria and insects they meet in the soil who offer to guide them back to each other, at the meeting place of spirits, the Bedrock. And as they guide Radha and Umulkhayr along this journey they talk about life and death, human supremacy, deconstructing faith traditions and weaving together a new/old story of the afterlife that gives us (humans and the more-than-human) another chance to find the sacredness and solidarity that the soil holds.
The soundscape that is underscoring the story and is played in the gallery, collages together samples from songs connected to the artists cultural and religious upbringings, sound archives, and original composed elements that make audible the liveness of the Earth, its underground inhabitants and its utopian qualities.