Sahej Rahal's Azalabad salvages a drowned village
The open-world civilization built for ifa's ARE YOU FOR REAL is still playable on New Art City—the browser as exhibition hall.
Somewhere beneath the internet's folds, a rift opens onto a shoreline. That's the premise of Azalabad, Sahej Rahal's ever-evolving open world, which the ARE YOU FOR REAL account resurfaced in a reel this summer—and which you can still walk, right now, in a browser tab on New Art City. The name splices together two measures of infinity: azal, everything from the beginning of recorded time until now, and abad, from now until the end of eternity. On the shoreline between them stand colossal ruins salvaged from Inamgaon, a real Copper Age settlement in the Bhima valley believed to have drowned in a flood. In Rahal's telling the ruins are reliquaries, bearing "tales of ancient extinctions, secret histories, conspiratorial cults."
Commissioned for Phase 2 of ifa's ARE YOU FOR REAL, the long-running hybrid project on digital world-making, Azalabad premiered in the platform's third cluster, Rituals of Nascent Worlds, in December 2023—a grouping built around magical thinking as a generative system competing with the technical one. Rahal works across sculpture, film, performance, and AI programs, and the through-line is counter-mythology: fiction used to interrogate myth-making while smuggling the actual scientific record in through the side door. Hybrid beings, fragmented histories, no fixed protagonist. It plays less like a story you finish than a ruin you inhabit.
Two things worth holding onto. First, the infrastructure: Azalabad runs on New Art City, the browser-native exhibition engine—no download, no headset—and the caption never names the platform, which says something about how invisible these engines still are even as institutions lean on them. Second, Rahal is a returning subject at Killscreen—we covered Rahal's AI instruments and cooperative creatures, indeterminate beings crawling out of the cracks in civilization. Azalabad scales that practice up from creatures to a whole cosmology: a world that keeps growing whether or not anyone is watching.
