Historically, the snail has played two contradictory allegorical roles. In the European medieval tradition, snails were a metaphor for torpid indifference, or acedia, one of the eight deadly sins, so that they were easily targeted by their predators. In the Classical view espoused by the Greek poet Hesiod, by contrast, the snail’s presence on crops marked the coming of spring and the bounty of the harvest. The Sri Lankan Malay artist and filmmaker Akil Ahamat reprises the snail and situates it somewhere between torpor and new beginnings in Extinguishing Hope, which is the second and final of West Space’s 2024 Commissions.

The exhibition comprises two short videos that, although on separate screens, are difficult to separate. After watching each side loop over and over and over and over, it becomes difficult to discern the differences between the two. The image on the screen reads at first glance as either a near post-human dystopia drawn from sci-fi, or a scene out of Skyrim. Or, perhaps more familiarly, somewhere near Heidelberg (a prime spot for raves at 4am on a Sunday). The videos place us outside: there’s a visual of babbling water surrounded by slate-ish rocks and a shallow bedrock.

At the centre of the screen is a small fire fuelled by cheap timber pallets, like the ones you find tossed aside in a loading dock (think Bunnings). As for the time of day, it appears to be somewhere near dawn or dusk, with that cool not-quite-pitch-black-light filling the frame. Dark but not Vantablack. Ahamat’s profile takes up a large chunk of the scene, and to the side of their face is an anthropomorphic snail, small in stature, spotlit and perched atop a rock. It’s not quite an uncanny valley moment (the snail speaks no English), but nonetheless the snail understands Ahamat and Ahamat understands the snail.

This isn’t the first time a snail has appeared in Ahamat’s work. Their interspecies relationship has been slowly building since 2019. Dawn of a day too dark to call tomorrow (2021) sees the pair in close contact and conversation and is Extinguishing Hope’s prequel. And there’s Falling to Forever (2020), an online animated video game where the player takes on the snail’s POV—a work that also comprised a sculpture and an audio installation. When asked in the current exhibition’s artist talk about the origins of the snail, Ahamat replied simply that they met on the “the outskirts of a rave.”

Within the work at West Space, the artist recites breathy ASMR-like platitudes to the unnamed snail: “I’ve known so many days that look like this” and “something to celebrate, I guess?” Their conversation zig-zags between aphorisms shared at kick-ons and the earnest words I imagine you’d only share when you know the world is nearing its end. This dialogue is distorted and entwined with a soundscape; it’s polyphonic. This soundscape isn’t necessarily synced with the videos or the conversation between Ahamat and their snail friend. It’s not clear as to where the sound ends and where it begins. It’s hard to hear exactly what Ahamat whispers to the snail. Only the snail’s voice is dubbed in the yellow sans serif font that foreign films use, and all concentration is redirected into reading instead of listening. It takes a few cycles to catch what Ahamat is actually saying, and even then it’s easy to miss.

The sound itself—an often invisible entity—is made visible, and therefore tangible. While most exhibitions squirrel away their cords to provide a seamless install (think of the multinational mega gallery David Zwirner and their pristine galleries, complete with no visible power points), they’re a mainstay for Extinguishing Hope. Rows of power cords line the ceiling, gesturing to an origin for the sound. There’s one parabolic speaker per screen and the gallery has little sound bleed, aside from when you’re standing near or under the speaker. These cords also fuel the two LG OLED screens that sit on the floor and are about the size of a TV you’d find mounted on a wall in someone’s home: not so large it’s ostentatious, but just large enough to posture.

I feel the need to note, tangentially, that videos generally tend to flop at West Space. Let us not forget Anaiwan Gedyura woman Gabi Brigg’s three-channel cinematic work ARKAN & IRBELA (2024) from earlier in the year, where Brigg’s three-channel video was projected onto sheets of ply to cover West Space’s windows. Unfortunately, the ply didn’t quite block the windows. Light bled from the top and bottom of the ply, negating the quality of the very work it supported. Other video work at West Space has met a similar fate, and through no fault of the artists. The gallery’s four large windows are an omnipresent vessel for light that is perfect for painting but not so perfect for video. Ahamat, however, through the TVs, has found an antidote to this enduring—c. 2021, when West Space relocated into Collingwood Yards—problem.

Now back to the work. Self-described as “slow cinema for short attention spans,” Ahamat’s work is exactly that. Running for only about one or two minutes in length, the work deploys all the tropes of slow cinema well: the single contemplative take, the refusal of narrative, and atmosphere as the stand-in for weighty dialogue (but not the seven or so hour run time). Time is important here. The videos never quite fall into sync with their soundscape, nor do they build some kind of teleology. Rather time is stuck in a loop, constantly repeating and inescapable.

Extinguishing Hope was made with very little, on the simple yet high-level game engine software, Unreal Engine. The open-source software is a tool ultimately used for world building by hobbyists and game developers alike. Games such as Fortnite (2017), Hogwarts Legacy (2023), and Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020) were all built using the platform. Video-game graphics seep into Extinguishing Hope’s visual identity, although it’s no simulation. There’s a hollow dissonance between the work’s slow cinema tropes and its gamer visuals. On the surface, the two modes’ use of narrative and temporality are worlds apart. And, of course, the basic assumption is that one is highbrow (slow cinema) and the other is low (video games). Yet, in Ahamat’s world, they converge. Take, for example, how atmosphere stands in for any kind of realised narrative across a single take, akin to a drawn-out zone in the likes of World of Warcraft (2004).

In the catalogue accompanying the commission, Ahamat’s dense research is detailed across three essays. Their references include everything from Charli XCX’s COVID album How I’m Feeling Now (2020) to Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s Omnicide: Mania, Fatality and the Future-in-Delerium (2019)—which I suppose both err toward an end, if not the end. Small hints are given as to the artist’s interest in information overload and misinformation too. Alternative facts and infinite content taking control of our mediascape—on both the left and the right—are now well storied.

Extinguishing Hope hasn’t been plucked and handed to us by an algorithm. It would be too easy to say Extinguishing Hope’s short runtime levels it as a work to feed TikTok- fuelled brain rot, with its quick looped footage and ASMR inflected sounds. Neither is it helpful to point to work like this as some kind of homeopathic antidote to the slowing of the Flynn Effect (the argument that with time, intellect also rises). Short video formats like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and the like are—to make a crude generalisation—a small window into a much bigger world, one where reality and so-called truth are distorted and confused. There’s only so much information that can be ascertained from a single scene: are the snail and Ahamat even friends? Or is it all for show?