eller - Århus Kunstbygning

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its previous implications with personal identity and sameness over time. In Dawood’s work, it
refers to new ways of marking the world’s surface and being marked by it in unexpected ways.
Did someone say play?
Though the Aarhus Art Building’s running theme of Modifications draws directly from the
‘overpainting’ work of Asger Jorn, Dawood takes the first-level understanding of overpainting
and modification further, into the crevices and slippages inside the worldviews associated with
linear histories, narratives and mythic structures. In less explicit ways, such as in The Hidden
City (2010) for example, a Marrakesh cafe meets Tarkovsky’s Solaris but made possible only
through an invisible, trans-geographical portal through which Behemoth the cat (or its mon-
strous, Dawoodian-made double) can travel. The character of Behemoth is taken from a novel
by Mikhail Bulgakov, but is also allegedly the name of the Bible’s largest and most powerful
beast. The Hidden City thus presents us with what looks like a speeded-up, looped video (span-
ning 24 hours, but lasting an hour) of a Marrakesh cafe named Solaris, in addition to a slide
projection of images showing Behemoth implanted both in the 11 th century illuminated city
(medina) of Marrakesh and in Moscow’s Soviet era car plant ZIL, materialising a process of
teleportation. Eras, references, characters, cities, are once more conflated, and this once again,
hopes to achieve a destabilizing, deterritorializing effect.
Sister Kali’s Soul Temple (2005) brings the avatar goddess Kali (Indiana Jones: Temple
of Doom version) into a gallery space with Peter Lewis’s nod and winks (through overpainted
posters) to the surrealist avant-garde, the imagery associated with the Baader-Meinhof, and
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s narrative structure, where they all proceed to listen to Dawood and Lewis
mixing soul vinyls. The gallery space is turned into a disco, blurring lines between passive
spectatorship and participation, exhibition and live performance. The presence of a model
of Kali and the surrealist avant-garde, alongside a soundtrack referencing a certain history of
black musics from Sun Ra to Aretha Franklin, means that, without a map you will get lost in
this ever-receding land.
The Wasteland (2008), a more gloomy sculpture-installation, pays homage to T.S. Eliot
while referring to the Om-patterned, purple LSD tabs of the 80s which Dawood has stamped
on a set of goat skulls, arranged on a wall as if they were coming out of it, directly at us. This
confounds the already confounded new age insignia with Ajna Chakra and ideals of liberation.
Liberation as the ideal of the frontier as well, which cynically disintegrates in Dawood signal-
ling the inevitable death of the herd through the collection of skin-less heads.
Through assemblage, sculpture-installations, found objects, and in/on film, Dawood ap-
pears like a child playfully but intently making pattern formations in the clouds. A gaze that
wishes, through picking out ancient and contemporary tropes, to map the world anew.
• Ghalya Saadawi is an independent writer, editor and researcher. Some of her articles have ap-
peared in Bidoun, Canvas, The Daily Star and the online art magazines Nowiswere and Frieze.
com. She is co-editor of Untitled Tracks: On Alternative Music in Beirut (2010). Saadawi is cur-
rently a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College in London where she is researching questions of
witness, testimony and fiction in contemporary artistic production in Lebanon and beyond.
1 Hakim Bey: T.A.Z: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, Brook-
lyn NY: Autonomedia, 1985, 1991, 2003.
2 Frederic Jackson Turner: The Frontier in American History, Mineola: Dover Publications, 1996.
3 Eugene W. Holland: Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis, London &
New York: Routledge 1999, 2001, p. 71.
4 Randy Kennedy: “Writers Who Like to Borrow” (oprindelig fra The New York Times, optrykt i The
Observer, søndag d. 14 marts, 2010), p. 8.
5 Fredric Jameson: The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998, London & New
York: Verso 1998, pp. 63-64.
6 Ibid, p. 64.
7 Gilles Deleuze: Pure Immanence: Essay on A Life, New York: Zone Books 2005, p. 11.