Visual Arts
Raheel Khan: Best Wishes
Overlapping histories of home and departure with all they contain, Best Wishes unpacks modern suburbia through a shifting lens of nostalgia, paranoia and melancholy, focusing on the ways that broader social and economic policies have profound effects on domestic space and cultural landscapes.
Taking the form of a sinking domestic property, Best Wishes presents a typical semi-detached house built in Britain during the post-war housing boom of the 1950s, and is modelled on the particular house in Nottingham that Khan grew up in, having moved there after the turn of the millennium.
16 May – 20 September 2025
Free
Bold Tendencies Floors 7–10 Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park London, SE15 4ST
Scaled to the dimensions of a childhood bedroom, Best Wishes juxtaposes our sentimental longing for adolescence with conflicting feelings of safety and fear, home and isolation so integral to suburban life. The structure, whilst static in nature, is set on a plunging foundation, suggesting not only the slow disappearance of youthful memories but a greater collapse in the principles of social support that underpinned the United Kingdom’s post-war welfare state consensus, ushering a gradual demise of social mobility across economic classes and the inability of contemporary generations to own their home.
Submerging into the rooftop like a stone into water, Best Wishes references the very notion that brought Khan’s parents and grandparents’ communities to the UK during the 1960s. Members of the Mirpuri diaspora from Kashmir, Pakistan – over 50,000 people were displaced and resettled in the United Kingdom following the construction of the 1966 Mangla Dam and subsequent flooding of old Mirpur city and surrounding areas, a wave of migration welcomed by the UK and its demands for foreign labour.
Echoing from inside, a soundscape by Khan, using minimalist synth, looping and glissando composition (a continuous ‘glide’ from one pitch to another), combines the paranoid bleeps and repetitive sirens with overtures of bittersweet melancholy. Taken together, Best Wishes can be seen as a collective farewell or parting goodbye, an exploration of heritage, society and the inertia of cultural progression; a ghost of what could have been, or what fell through the gaps.