Shezad Dawood | A Proposal for Articulating Works and Places

Shezad Dawood presents Make it Big (Blow UP) production stills.
These photographs are the only documentation of his elaborately staged hoax remake of Antonioni's 'Blow Up' in Karachi, Pakistan. Adapting the grammar of 'Western' cinematic language, Dawood interrogates the fragility of storytelling resulting from displacement. The small intrusion of changing actors and location creates a new space for expression beyond the mixing of two disparate situations.


«A Proposal for Articulating Works and Places» (Une proposition pour l'articulation d'oeuvres et de lieux)
Exhibition from 20 November 2009 to 20 January 2010.
Opening in Marrakech on 19 November 2009

The Exhibition project proposes to work on articulating Works and Places. The exhibition takes place at Palais Bahia and several venues: the Theatre Royal, the ESAV-Marrakech as well as in public and private spaces throughout the City of Marrakech.

This first part of the Exhibition proposes to transform the Exhibition places into a place of immediate memory, of that which happens elsewhere, of the place of the work. The narratives of the artistic projects is about connecting the production spaces of artworks to the exhibition space. The exhibition also proposes situations where the works share space with the museum's collection, notably with archaeological and historical objects.

Artists will intervene in the sites and make works in the context of this place of conservation in order to render it a place for visual experimentation. The museum is also the place for an artwork's formalization, its expression.

Other artists will intervene in the city of Marrakech in ways visible or invisible, notably along certain routes in the Medina (Old City). Located in a real context, the artworks act through their presence just as the noises of the city and its trades already do.

The articulation of the Visual Arts program is based on two ideas related to place and the artwork: the idea of belonging to a place and the concept of documenting the artwork in the context from which it emerges. It is a question of exhibiting the work and reconnecting it to the narrative of its production.

The artwork takes the form of a place; its origin is not necessarily connected to its physical appearance. This project proposes to show works and to interrogate the points of correspondence between the contexts from which artworks emerge and their references.

These ephemeral works, their tones and their images, are documented by and accessible on R22 Radio. The Radio Apartment 22 studio will be installed in Marrakesh for the beginning of the exhibition program.
That the exhibited works are recent or tied to a particular context makes it clearly a question of looking at the artists' work and reflecting "On Articulating Works and Places."

A co-curated video program titled "Freedom?" extending the Exhibition is conceived by a college of international curators.
A half-day conference will be programmed during the opening days and will feature those artists and curators that contributed to the exhibition.