Withthe growing interest towards contemporary art from Asia, it is astonishing to see how, within that specific field, our horizon and scope has grown immensely. While in the late 1980s, contemporary art from Asia almost exclusively meant contemporary art from China, we now equally follow China, Japan, Thailand, India, Pakistan, or Iran. In recent years, our attention has also turned towards artists with a more diverse background. One of them is Shezad Dawood, born to Indian and Pakistani parents and who grew up in London. A tremendously diverse artist, Shezad Dawood (b. 1974) works in diverse media ranging from photography, painting, installation, performance, sculpture, to video and film. His knowledge of the Eastern and Western worlds allow him to complete more challenging projects with references to various cultures. As an insider to some of these cultures, Shezad Dawood has a legitimacy and a relevance that many other artists lack when touching upon sensitive issues related to politicsor colonialism for example. In this interview, he further discusses some ofthese topics with the Asian Art Newspaper.
AsianArt Newspaper: You graduated in photography. As a student, what drew youtowards that medium?
Shezad Dawood: A couple of things. On avery practical level, I trained as a young child in various photography studios in order to make extra money on my weekends and my school holidays. In addition, I have always been fascinated by an idea of the image in circulation,almost a kind of an expanded idea of what photography can mean. You link photography to ideas of perception. If I refer to Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, it changes our wholeunderstanding of an image and its ability to be reproduced, appropriated, and its meaning to shift between different cultural registers.
AAN: In recent years, the technical possibilities of the medium of photography have increased dramatically. Were you also drawn towards that aspect of photography, allowing to generate computer based images presenting a whole new universe?
SD: I guess I am a bit wary of things like Photoshop or certain other digital technologies, which make you very awareof their employment. Perhaps what interests me more is a slightly more old-fashioned idea of the lens – our eye being a lens. Our perception of the world is based on a sort of prism that connects to our brain or cerebrum. Therefore, everything we see is actually done through the medium of our own conscious mind. It is always this idea of subjectivity that no image is really exempt from some form of context or agenda.
AAN: After your studies, when did the shifttowards film take place?
SD: Interestingly, it actually happenedby way of painting, although I was taking photography classes at the Royal College. I am referring to an early body of work that I called ‘Film PosterPainting’, where I was taking classical Western film posters and re-imagining them with a post-colonial shift. I am giving film posters like Taxi Driver or Passage to India a whole different kind ofmeaning, but perhaps that relates to that idea I was describing a moment agoabout shifting the agenda or the beginning of something. With that body of work, the whole idea of film as a structure of seeing the world started to cometo the full. I became very interested in this idea of cinema being this kind of mirror, maybe a more reduced mirror to reality that almost reconstructs these fictions, these narratives in order to reflect ourselves, and gain a better understanding of the world in which we operate, and maybe the systems of structures that lay behind it. The whole idea of production around film started to intrigue me, this whole constructed artifice that in a larger sense then goes on in the artist’s studio.
AAN: Did you initially start with videos and short films?
SD: In the beginning, I actually started with very short videos – almost what I might term ‘guerilla type’ video work. In those videos, I was not interested in a high production value or longer narrative, but rather in the gap between performance and video where I got towork with different collaborators, some of them who were friends, artists, orwriters. We then just staged something impromptu using a video camera on atripod turning or somebody filming or even if it was just me and another protagonist acting and performing. There is one video called Sonof a Beach, which was made in Bali not too long after the bombings looking for the link between globalisation and terrorism. It also referred to Camus’s book L’étranger, but relocated to the beach in Bali to bring it up to date. A friend was playing the figure from L’étranger, and I was playing the Algerian on the beach, and we actually just swapped the camera between us. It was very much this idea of the reciprocal gaze. There were quitea number of experimental short video works that led up to the last film.
AAN: Do you find your films are easy to read– even for people with no knowledge about your work?
SD: For most of my pieces, I try to have them work on multiple layers. By turns, they are very accessible, and by turns, they have very obscure back stories. I like creating a field where people havedifferent points of entry.
AAN: Where does painting fit in at thispoint in your career,?
SD: Quite unusually, my practice is morea stream of consciousness: for me, one text flows very much into another, and by text I mean a painting, a film, or a sculptural installation. There is aseries of interlinking ideas that are always connected for me. With this last film, there was a number of small gothic paintings echoing everything from old Flemish masters to the photographs of Edward Curtis in my own ad-hoc way. However, that formed an imaginary storyboard to the film. Maybe coming to it as an artist, I paint both, and kind of imagine a film before it happens. Then, I would paint the backdrops as well, and for me it goes full circle. It is nice,as I have employed different styles for both points in the chain.
AAN: How would you define, or describeyourself, as an artist?
SD: Strangely, I really enjoy collaborations giving me the ability to invite other people. I think that is what led me to work more and more with long performed films. I like working with set designers as an extension of an installation practice, but I also work with actors and other artists as a preformative dialogue, and then with the film crew. I like working as a director because then you are not operating in isolation. It becomes a very open, but dynamic process to opening up ideas on the go.
AAN: As you like collaborating with people from different backgrounds, how do you go about selecting your cast?
SD: I was always interested in this idea of performance, and very interested in what it means to perform, in what isgood or bad acting. In terms of artifice or non-artifice, I am interested indifferent layers or structures. Like with the previous film Feature, I was very interested to have non-professional actors, but rather than just open amateur, I went out six months in pre-production in order to find my local ‘interest group’, people who were not professional actors, but who may have some expertise in a particular field. We found a group of local Western re-enactors, who formed one section of the cast, and some role-playing gamers. In addition, there were a few well-known artists, one or two professional actors with everybody bringing their specialisation to the table.
As for my next film, it will be a whole feature film. Therefore, it is going to be a little while before we see that come to fruition. For that particular project, I am planning to work with more actors. Also, I am mixing film actors and theatre actors as well as non-professionals. It is going to be shot in the desert outside Marrakesh. It revolves around avery conceptual group, around the whole nature of cinema itself.
AAN: Regarding some of your later films, there seems to be a recurring reference to the American West. What so fascinates you to keep you going back to it?
SD: I think it has as much to do with iconography if anything else. The American West or the expansion of thefrontier as a political metaphor related to a later idea of American expansionism and foreign policy. What was interesting to me was the tumbleweed series, which references the American desert, but also contains the Arabic script in neon, and I believe it is often this kind of idea of resolution of opposites that perhaps are not opposites. For example, in the last film, you have figures such as Krishna from Hindu mythology and a Nordic Valkyrie from Scandinavian mythology creeping in. I like this idea of ‘leakage’ from one set of iconography into another, where you realise perhaps that there are many secret entities that are not oppositions. It makes me free up a more rigid mode of thinking about culture.
AAN: As you use denominations and words fromthe Qur’an in your work, have you ever encountered difficulties with orthodox Muslims, who disagree with your references to the Qu’ran?
SD: No. I try to be very, very respectful with all the iconography that I employ because it all resonates forme, too; otherwise I would not be using it. It all has a relation, and I have apersonal relation to much of it, which puts me in an unusually unique position.The only thing that came close to a problem was with the chandelier piece in Venice: the Italian lighting designers I was working with were obviously notable to read or speak Arabic. When they did the original designs for the piece, they missed out on one of the letters, changing the meaning. That image went into circulation by accident, but we managed to stop it very quickly. It was just an unfortunate mistake, but this is inevitable when you are trying to connect different cultural spaces. Misunderstandings will happen, and this incident helped broaden my realm of tolerance and understanding. Of course, oneis going to run into misunderstandings, but that is actually the space one should be working in. I believe it is pivotal to engage in dialogue and open upspaces to see what possibilities it might bring, and to see where iconography comes together. Actually, people have responded really well to the tumbleweed works. On an international level, I was pleasantly surprised how people really understood this idea of trying to resolve iconography. That has been a nice confirmation along the way.
AAN: In terms of artistic influences, whator who would you mention as relevant in your trajectory?
SD: Again, it is very wide ranging. Ittends to shift according to what I happen to be researching at any given point. Recently, I have been referring to 17th- and 18th-century Persian miniatures. I have also been taken by Chris Marker’s films, as well as those by one of my favourite artists of all time – Nasreen Mohamedi. I love to draw links. Forexample, I was recently re-reading Orhan Pamuks’ novel My Name is Red, because I am about to do something in Istanbul, andthat really fitted with my research into 17th- and 18th-century Persian century miniatures. It all maps out across film, literature, and other visual arts disciplines.
AAN: Considering your background with Indianand Pakistani parents, are you interested in further exploring the heritage of these countries?
SD: I try not to prioritise one thing over another. It tend to just allow myself the freedom to go where my research takes me at any given point. For example, I was travelling between Dubai, Syria, andLebanon, working on some new photographic work. I like the fact that my background helps me map out and consider wider and different points of intersection and conjunction in my work. I do not know where it will lead. The scope and the spectrum in which I am invited to work are quite wonderful.
AAN: In Venice, you were featured in an exhibition entitled East-West Divan: Contemporary Art from Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. How do you feel about the recent broad interest towards this art?
SD: I think it is because the world isshifting and changing in ways one could not have foreseen 10 or 20 years ago. Powers and cultures seem to be radically shifting.
AAN: You have mentioned during ourconversation the idea of bringing different cultures together. Some fear that may lead to a loss of culture while others believe it is a source of greater diversity. What are your thoughts?
SD: I guess it is a source of greater understanding. This whole fear of loss of culture feeds into an outmoded racist and nationalist rhetoric, which is unproductive and unconstructive, but very easily fits into populist and fear driven political agendas. That goes for ‘the axis of evil’ presented by the previous Bush administration as much asvarious riots and hysterias in different parts of the world involving different ethnic or social groups. I am a great believer in opening up spaces through dialogue, and seeing points of connections between cultures. What is it we are so frightened of? Comparative religions, comparative social processes are simply about seeing what other people are doing, and how it all relates.
AAN: In theory, I completely agree with you, but in practical terms, do you not you think it will remain a Utopia?
SD: I guess it will remain a Utopia until people start to look at practical pathways to it. The problem is that it is always presented as a sort of hypothetic and imaginary space. However, if you start to look at more practical ways, in very small steps one can start tomove towards spaces of dialogue. Obviously, it takes time, you have got so many different pockets and oppositions on the globe right now, some of which have very traumatic histories behind them. It is not going to happen overnight. If you do not start to look at the small steps that might be taken politically and socially, then you are just deferring.
OLIVIA SAND
