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”.
