RESIDE | Raheel Khan

NAE’s RESIDE programme invites artists and creative groups to take up residency at NAE where they can collaborate and connect with our wider community to generate inspiring ideas, develop new initiatives and nurture their practice. RESIDE specifically supports the development of artists and creative communities with a socially engaged focus within their practice, working with any medium, from the Global Ethnic Majority.

Raheel is a Sound Artist and Musician working in Manchester and Nottingham, UK. His work explores notions of heritage, society and the inertia of cultural progression.

An economics graduate, Raheel moved towards an artistic practice combining sound/field recordings, fragmented synthetic textures and piano compositions, inspired by personal memories and experiences as well as collective consciousness.

Mileage, a project that premiered in November 2020 on BBC 6 Music, weaves together a fly-on-the-wall piece from the cars based at Goodwins Olympic, the local taxi firm in South Manchester. Mileage pieces together, in an audio narrative, a bricolage of taxi-journey stories from collective exchanges, conversations, and situations. By championing the voices of unsung heroes, this audio montage successfully blurs the boundaries between the giver and receiver of hospitality, in post-Brexit, and post-COVID-19 Britain. The taxi, for Raheel, became a tangible space where the notion of home was palpable, a space void of judgement.

Raheel is currently a creative fellow with Manchester International Festival, and an awardee of the GMAH consortium commissioning project ‘Originate’. His previous projects have been with Tyneside Cinema, MIF, HOME and Royal Exchange Theatre as well as live performances/DJ sets at Glastonbury, BBC Maida Vale, Band on the Wall and Soup Kitchen. His productions have seen releases with Leeds-based record label, ‘Reel Long Overdub’ and Manchester-based record label ‘Banana Hill’ as well as radio broadcasts on BBC Radio 1 and BBC Asian network.

An artist in residence with Counterpoints Arts, as part of ‘To love, care, breathe… as acts of justice’ commissioning project, Raheel’s work destabilises oversimplified narratives driven from media, popular culture and hyper-commercialisation. His work bridges the public and private spheres, creating an intimate archive of abstract social commentary, using personal anecdotes and lived experiences.