Shezad Dawood

The child of a Pakistani mother, an Indian father, and an Irish stepmother, Shezad Dawood produces works in film, painting, and sculpture that engage with cultural interplay and the production of history. Using visual models from contemporary British and American aesthetics, including science fiction and the occult, Dawood engages the performative traditions of avant-garde theater, art-house cinema, and amateur filmmaking. His multimedia works enact the interpolation of juxtaposed cultural elements, making simultaneous reference to, for example, avant-garde filmmaker Brion Gysin and contemporary Moroccan hip hop, all the while charting surprising connections between these seemingly disparate sources. His sculptures place language in conversation with grand ideologies and their symbolic climates, as in his series of works composed of neon signs in the shape of the ninety-nine names of Allah. Submerged in balls of tumbleweed, a symbol of American westward expansion, they place two globalizing ideologies (both of which sprang from the desert) in a physical and aesthetic exchange. 

Dawood was born in 1974 in London, where he studied at the Royal College of Art. He completed his PhD in Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University in 2003. Dawood has recently been included in exhibitions at the Madeira Film Festival, New York’s Independent Curators International, Sandnes, Norway’s KINOKINO, and New York’s Art in General. In 2011, he received the Abraaj Capital Art Prize, the major art prize for the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Dawood lives and works in London.