Shezad Dawood: Towards the Possible Film

 Still from Towards the Possible Film (2014)

By his own admission, Shezad Dawood has a habit of naming shows after his films. On reflection, the reason for this becomes self-apparent in his wider practice. Dawood feels that studio work is an intrinsic part of the reflective process of film-making. His diverse studio practice, which also includes, painting, sculpture, digital animation and neon works, happens alongside his films. Long production schedules provide an important gestation period for his work – a time the artist describes as “whilst the film is cooking”. Even after works are finished, there is still the process of responding to different exhibition contexts. The dialogue between 'finished' pieces is as much a part of the conceptual process as his research. For Dawood, “the work takes place between the work”. Whilst the film is the sun around which the planets turn, the other works speak with equal clarity about their shared multi-dimensional worlds. Paintings made on canvases of vintage fabrics produced by nomadic Pakistani women in the 1970s (prior to the military coup of '79), are evolving hybrids. These textiles can be viewed in a similar way to art cinema – as experimental media. They once operated as open and destabilising forms of cultural production that sat outside of the dogmatic religious and ideological structures that finally put an end to them. They are culture as, what Bhabha (1994) terms, 'empirical knowledge'. The neon works are both modern and mystical – a balancing act between formal and spiritual meditation. A digital animation of the head of novelist and scientific philosopher Robert Anton Wilson, uses photos taken at different angles and ages to produce a multi-dimensional “quantum portrait”. The exhibition also includes another film, A Mystery Play (2010), to make comparisons between three types of magic – stage, screen and the occult. Here, Dawood continues to explore his interest in Buster Keaton and silent film. He does this via Keaton's links to Houdini, together with the twin histories of Vaudeville and the Occult in the city of Winnipeg – a city whose masonic architecture becomes a metaphor for the loss of progress and the embeddedness of power structures.

The film at the epicentre of Dawood's (re)collected body of work, Towards the Possible Film (2014), opens with a series of powerful images – the pyramid and winking eye of canary wharf, a jaguar, a Mayan pyramid – totems of power, mastery and sacrifice. As the jaguar passes across the screen, it seems to connect two seemingly very different kinds of power, the mystical and the mystifying; magic both ancient and modern. From Spanish colonised Central America we travel to the Moroccan coast with its similar legacy of occupation. We then see a close-up of a blue-skinned astronaut uttering a Marcusian commentary in Berber dialect. The subtitles read: “The  old sense  of  alienation  is  no longer possible. When  individuals identify  with a lifestyle  imposed  on  them, and  through  it  experience gratification and satisfaction,  their alienation  is  subsumed  by  their own alienated existence”.

Beyond setting the scene, description is useless in communicating the sheer complexity of the film's references: pre-Islamic animist cultures in Morocco, the animistic landscape as witness, the triad of ancient religions in Mexico, India and north African connected via Phoenician trade routes and centred on myths originating from visitations by alien astronauts. Dawood problematises postcolonial narratives in the face of the complexities of globalisation – the accelerated violence of neoliberal global capitalism, paradoxically both atomising and uniting us. Persecutor becomes persecuted and coloniser becomes colonised. Obtuse allegorical references act as both pinpricks of ethical reflection and dystopian omens. A piece of lemon rind in seaweed connotes the carrion-eating low-impact lifestyles of those who choose decent from capitalism. How do we reconcile the smallest actions with their incomprehensible global consequences? Pre-Islamic natives stomp their feet, perhaps asking the landscape for answers. They face the sea, waiting for it to speak, like the sentient oceanic planet in Solaris. What emerges are two blue-skinned visitors from another world who see this world as overlaying multi-dimensional fragments. An act of extreme violence perpetrated by a 'native' to one of the alien colonists / tourists / gods, becomes a question – like that of Meursault spoken through his killing of an Arab in Camus' novel. Where is the subject in subjectivity? God is everywhere and nowhere, the greater forces hold us in their gravitational pull.

Ultimately however, it is pointless to endlessly dissect Dawood's post-human parafield because to theorise is to close-down, and for him, art is like “shattering the bedrock of culture” to reveal new layers, new openings. Dawood's practice is an empirical process of opening out – of making “successive openings” in the binary landscape, through which, in Barthes' terms, we can 'outplay the paradigm'; to reveal 'obtuse meaning', or even 'post-meaning' (Barthes, 2002). After all, as the artist suggests, “we are all just objects thinking we're subjects”.

Punch and Judy Show (edge of representation) at LUNG, Bournemouth - 01/10/2014

 

Photographs by Joseph Johnston

Punch and Judy Show (edge of representation) is a new time-based installation piece I completed for the Bournemouth Emerging Arts Fringe as part of this years Arts by the Sea Festival. The work, which was shown at LUNG gallery on the 1^st October, explores the conflict between systems of ordering and control, which Henri Lefebvre describes as ‘representations of space’, and visual representations of Bournemouth as ‘representational spaces’. 'Representations of space' are described as the maps, plans and strategies of urban planners and social engineers for controlling the way spaces are used and the people who use them, while ‘representational spaces’ are partly imagined, exist in the realm of the symbolic, and can represent of our hopes, dreams and identities. The work also seeks to embody the paradox of commercialised leisure: that however hard we try to escape the constraints of society and self, and predictability of everyday life, our attempts will always be thwarted by the organising systems and taken-for-granted typifications, which structure that which Zygmunt Bauman terms our 'life-world'; leaving us feeling disappointed and trapped. Moreover, the sense of subjective freedom we attain through everyday escape attempts, encompassing our ability to re-imagine and transform our surroundings, are also under threat from the tendancy to make our visual and discursive representations fall in line with a concensus or that which sociologist Erving Goffman refers to as ‘paramount reality'.

The piece is centred on two automated 35mm slide carousel projectors, set slightly out of synch to suggest a clash or conflict of ideologies. One carousel contains images of systems of ordering and control – diversionary entertainments, maps, signs and information boards, CCTV cameras and penalty warnings – and on the other houses visual representations of Bournemouth as a heterotopia of touristic possibilities – moments of heightened aestheticisation and improvised narratives in the visual vernacular of Continental tourist travel. The first set of images (utilitarian), are taken using Fuji film and have a slightly cold, detached feel, and the second (romantic) are shot in Kodak to give them a nostalgic glow. The de-synchonisation of the carousels leads to a new set of image combinations after each full rotation. This lends the work the element of chance as the sequence works its way through all potential variables of image juxtaposition. This is a direct reference to the carnivaleque strategy of chance as means of eliminating the sense of boredom, pre-determination and fate experienced in everyday life. The use of outmoded analog equipment with its mechanical action, together with these chance juxtapositions, also suggest both the fragility of life and the vulnerability of the meaning in the autobiographical images we store in the image magazines in our minds (our own machines of representation). These meanings are also enriched by the use of screens made from razor shells: the discarded husks of lives once lived. The work is backed by a specially commissioned soundtrack, made in collaboration with Bournemouth hauntological music duo Language Timothy! This uses stereophonic sound design to produce a sense of location: both inducing feelings of disorientation and augmenting the dualistic visual onslaught with a immersive sound-scape to overwhelm the senses. The soundtrack is comprised of field recordings from a local amusement arcade, together with a range of samples, including a 1950s instrumental version of Stranger in Paradise; a title which is perhaps the best metaphor for the tourist paradox.