System of Magical Defence -Sejal Parekh
System of Magical Defence (2025)
Durational moving-image work (polytypic; presented for LOOP as a triptych) with single-channel sound, text, teleprompter and die-cut labels.
Emerging from the juncture of a mythological battle formation and a sonic memory, the work binds the choreography of the Chakravyuh from the epic Mahabharata, to the rotary labour of a domestic grinding stone. Rotation operates as both structure and metaphor, a discipline that organises bodies into service while loosening the boundaries of agency. The installation privileges listening as a mode of knowing: sound, text and moving image act as co-equal materials, drawing viewers into a perceptual field where meditation and dissonance co-exist.
Relentlessness sets the tempo. Repetition becomes a pulse that sustains even as it exhausts, registering endurance across physical and psychic registers. Within this cadence, states of euphoria surface, brief, destabilising lifts that complicate any simple opposition between nurture and force.
The piece turns on rituals of labour we lovingly endure, repeat and surrender to rituals constructed for us before we left the womb. We resist and yield to them in equal measure. Like Abhimanyu, we know we will enter and, somewhere deep inside, lose ourselves. The illusion of choice: participation reveals itself as predetermined, even as we shout into the ether, bearing witness to violence we cannot arrest while remaining enmeshed in systems that demand our complicity.
Staged as a triptych for LOOP, System of Magical Defence sets a relentless pulse in which euphoria and fatigue briefly coincide. The stone’s promise of nourishment remains inseparable from its abrasion; the pattern’s beauty from its brutality. In our contemporary moment, we feel this grinding tension, witnessing genocide through screens while life goes on. Our daily routines continue as worlds collapse beyond our reach.
Sejal Parekh (UK, 1979) is a multi-disciplinary artist and works between Barcelona and London. Sejal received her BA from Winchester School of Art in 2002, and her MA in from the Royal College Art in 2025.
Her work has been presented at Somerset House, Museu Tàpies, MACBA, The Stone Space Gallery, London. Recent group shows include We The In-Between at VHC Gallery, Pune, India, Ad Interim at Hope93, London, Restricted Code at PS, London, What Does Home Sound Like? at Hangar Gallery, London, The Archive by Procreate Project at Gallery Ovada and MoMA Oxford and Fluckpunct at Tangent Projects, Barcelona. Sejal has been commissioned to make site-specific work by La Roca Village, Spain and for Art Meets Apolo, with Galería Senda and her work is included in the Soho House Collection.
www.sejalparekh.art
@holasejal
