Visual Art Exhibition .
Freedom? .
Special Projects
Shezad Dawood (b. 1974, lives and work in London) works across media, in film, photography, and installation. Dawood’s pieces consistently play with popular culture references that deceptively appear light. The multiplicity of these references—drawn from film, music, even plastic toys—is used to confuse notions of collective identity, traditional histories, and belief systems. His work has been included in the 53rd Venice Biennale and the Tate Triennial at Tate Britain (London), and his public works include poster projects installed simultaneously in Karachi, Pakistan, and Mumbai, India.
[عربي] [English]
Shezad Dawood’s "Make it Big (Blow UP)" represents the documentation of his elaborately-staged, hoax remake of Antonioni’s Blow Up in Karachi, Pakistan. Blow Up, an Italian movie about London, is translated once again into a London-based artist’s project about Karachi, playing with notions of site and site-specificity. Adapting the grammar of “Western” cinematic language, Dawood explores the fragility of storytelling that results from this displacement. The small intrusion of changing actors and locations creates a new space for expression that extends beyond the mixing of two disparate situations.
