eller - Århus Kunstbygning

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Dawood over a decade, use photographs and charge a set price, like any shop or craft in the
street. The wildlife paintings of The Great Outdoors I, II & III, (Oil on Canvas 2008), ‘fit’ the
scenarios of the Western perhaps, by romanticising landscape, to stretch the horizon to point
toward shamanist ritual, and the sacral, in depictions of animals, but are fabricated by workers
with whom he builds specific and sophisticated long-term relations.
A cat appears in a new work, The Hidden City, (Slide projection and video loop, 2010). This
work was conceived during a visit to Moscow. A notion of contamination, in the Eastern Bloc
of the 1960s generated by the Cold War, is allegorised, linking ZIL, the Soviet-era car plant in
Moscow with 11th Century Medina in Marrakech. A cat moves as ‘go-between’ in time. Spe-
cifically, this is Behemoth, the black cat from Mikhail Bulgakov’s complex novel The Master &
Margarita, published in 1966-67 twenty-six years after the author’s death.
A video shows the ‘Solaris’ cafe in downtown Marrakech, connoting the alien zone of
consciousness in Solaris, the science fiction novel, originally written by the Polish author Stan-
islaw Lem, in 1961, and made into a film by Andrei Tarkovsky. As a collective allegorical work,
it elaborates a similar concept to William Burroughs’ Interzone - a kind of liminal free port,
where different cultures and histories interweave to ‘cut-up’ between objective experience and
subjective consciousness. The novel by Stanisław Lem concerns the ultimate inadequacy of
communication between human and non-human species. In Dawood’s reconfigured scenario,
these polarities are dispensed with references to the hallucinatory effects of literature that void
a subject’s sense of terrestrial geographies. The affective zone produced directs violence to
symbolic language, to navigate transgression, and occultism, within a critique of both socie-
ties.
In The Wasteland, 2008, thirty-three ram skulls are marked with Om symbols after the famous
‘Purple Om’ acid tabs, distributed in London during the ‘Summer of Love’ in 1989. The strength
of the trip caused widespread psychosis. Dawood alerts attention to initiation’s power to col-
lapse meaning. It remains highly ambiguous what these skulls ‘mean’, but they mark out a field
of desire, collected together as if a shrine for an unknown purpose or ritual.
The Wasteland is the title of T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem cycle, whose infamous opening verse
speaks of “The Burial of the Dead”:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain
Dawood adjusts Eliot’s conceit by suggesting that the acid, Purple Om, might break the re-
petitive cycle of birth and death by the ingesting of a chemical into the body - a revival of the
liberation movements of the 1960s. Shamanism / psychosis is offered as an escape route from
eternal re-runs. A one-way ticket.
The Wasteland, ram skulls and acrylic paint, installation view, 2008
Another project tested the elevation of skill as an ideal in painting by determining a set time
period to complete a series of scenic images, like a war artist on the battlefield, before photog-
raphy, where skill in drawing has been a necessity. Dawood worked from a memory of the film
Battle of Algiers 1 , thereby confuting ideas of the photographic and the drawn in one process,
which seek a plane of temporal reference between the two processes. This differs also in the
notion of post-photographic practice where the real is completely erased.
The Battle of Algiers reconstructs events that occurred in the capital city of French Algeria
between November 1954 and December 1960, during the Algerian War of Independence. The
narrative begins with the organization of revolutionary cells in the Casbah. Then civil war be-
tween native Algerians and European settlers (‘pied-noirs’) in which the sides exchange acts of
increasing violence, lead to the introduction of French army paratroopers to hunt the National
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