eller - Århus Kunstbygning

4
RESTLESS SERPENTS
(INVERTED)
The virtue of transcendentalism does not lie in rendering realism illusory, but in ren-
dering it astonishing. i.e. apparently unthinkable, yet true, and hence eminently prob-
lematic.
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude
Shezad Dawood offers up a transitional or rehearsal space for ideas, less as an oracular mes-
sage to be decoded than as a continuous creation of scenes and stories that puts in question
the fixity of historical and ethnographic truths. Certain literary and cinematic techniques of
narration are employed by the artist to announce a synaesthetic field of objects, where sensory
experience is transported from one to another of the senses. From curating, too, Dawood has
learned how objects themselves are constantly in flux, to be re-contextualised; and from phi-
losophy and theology, how sensibility is breached by matter’s residual traces to become more,
to overcome itself, to evolve. He finds the thing already in the world as a resource for making
new things, and in the process, for leaving traces.
A high degree of potential change might occur in the process of constructing a field of
narrations that encompass their many ancestral trajectories. Ideology is either to be cemented,
specified in the appearance of selected objects and sequence of images, or broken down in
functional obsolescence as trash; or both, having, in a retrospective view, occurred together at
some indeterminate point in time.
Pop art is all surface, no depth, yet its organisation is far from random. When Shezad Da-
wood considers painting, it is through the lens of Pop, and its Modernist correlations, from an
interest in maintaining a type of working method at the level of non-interference. Pop refines
work’s ordinary subject matter by subtracting an aesthetic economy of means.
PETER LEWIS
Copyists, trading at a low end of markets, are not set up to provide hierarchy its cultural
status, or to provide an art appropriate to surplus value. In Karachi, painters employed by
The Wasteland, ram skulls and acrylic paint, installation detail, 2008
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