Shezad Dawood, Night in the Garden of Love, 2023. VR environment, duration variable, produced by UBIK Productions, co-commissioned by WIELS, Brussels and Aga Khan Museum, Toronto. Courtesy of UBIK Productions

British artist Shezad Dawood is presenting his latest exhibition ‘Night in the Garden of Love’ at WIELS in Brussels this May. Commissioned by WIELS and the Aga Khan Museum, this exhibition marks Dawood’s largest presentation of new work since 2019 and his first solo exhibition in Belgium

Shezad Dawood is known for his experimentation across numerous different disciplines and exploration of different cultures. Inspired by the works of musician Yusef Lateef, ‘Night in the Garden of Love’ showcases a captivating blend of music, drawings, virtual reality experiences, painted textiles, algorithmic plants, costume-sculptures, and live choreography.

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He first came across Lateef’s music in his youth, and later became fascinated by his abstract drawings which often feature dreamlike landscapes and strange but beautiful life forms inspired by music pieces. Dawood’s latest exhibition, however, is based on Lateef’s novella, from which it takes its title.

Shezad Dawood, Night in the Garden of Love, 2023. Performance rehearsal, Choreographer and Dancer, Wan-Lun Yu. Costume by Ahluwalia. Image by Miranda Sharp. Courtesy of UBIK Productions

Lateef pioneered a methodology he called Autophysiopsychic music, which he defined as “music from one’s physical, mental and spiritual self”. Like Dawood, he integrated cultures and traditions from across the world into his artwork and experimented across many different mediums. The exhibition serves as a dialogue between Dawood’s practice and Lateef’s, and through it, Dawood aims to create a metaphysical and virtual space, leveraging technology to imagine new forms of togetherness while also addressing the climate crisis.

Installation view ‘Shezad Dawood, Night in the Garden of Love’, WIELS, Brussels, 2023 © We Document Art

On wide variety of mediums featured in the show, Dawood told LUX: “It took me almost 8 years to bring this project to fruition, and one of the key aspects for me was the set of correspondences and echoes between Lateef’s music, his drawings and his writing practices, which I began to see as one expansive score.

Installation view ‘Shezad Dawood, Night in the Garden of Love’, WIELS, Brussels, 2023 © We Document Art

This allowed me to build the show as an iterative score, where each element leads to the next and informs and amplifies it, like stars in a constellation.

Read more: Vik Muniz’s Mixed-Media Reflection on Perception and Materiality

When I paint I often think of colour in terms of a palette of sound and music, and then elements from my paintings informed the digital seedbanks, as I derived the base designs for each algorithmically generated plant from my paintings, that were in turn responding to Lateef’s original drawings, which also feature in the show.”

‘Night in the Garden of Love’ is running until Sunday 13th August at WEILS in Belgium

Nets 5 – Pumbley Cove (2019), Shezad Dawood, acrylic and wool on linen, 80 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Timothy Taylor, London.

British artist Shezad Dawood’s interdisciplinary practice explores themes around climate change, migration, the history of aesthetics and the nature of storytelling. Here, Nick Hackworth speaks to the artist about his new virtual reality environment, collaborating with scientists, and the social impact of art

LUX: Let’s start with your latest VR work, The Terrarium, the trailer of which is shown below. Can you tell us about the work? What would we see in the ‘real’ VR work?
Shezad Dawood: The Terrarium imagines what the Earth might look like in 300 years: with a drastically reduced land mass, and an even greater majority of the Earth underwater. You, the viewer, are one of a number of marine-human hybrid species.

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I worked with evolutionary geneticists and marine biologists to map out the species that might inhabit the Baltic sea at that point (bear in mind that the Baltic Sea is projected to extend into the English coast by then with Sweden and Denmark underwater). So the work is really about taking the audience into this possible future world, and giving them a great 3D experience of it.

A still from The Terrarium, 2020, virtual reality environment, duration variable. Courtesy of UBIK Productions.

In a reference to contemporary overfishing, you get caught by space pirates who transport you off-world where two possible fates await you, and you can activate either, based on your own choices.

The trailer hints at these narrative possibilities and gives you a glimmer of the expansive universe we’ve created in the full VR experience, where you can experience everything from close encounters with genetically-altered species to outer-space banquets!

View the trailer for ‘The Terrarium’ by Shezad Dawood:

LUX: What excites you about VR as a medium and what’s your ‘fantasy’ VR work?
Shezad Dawood: With VR you can do things that you simply can’t do in other media. I’ve always wanted to lead people into parallel universes, and make [those universes] as real and immersive as possible. Simply put, it offers a whole new way of telling stories, with the viewer at the centre, and a totally different level of agency.

From the point of view of a maker, it allows you a level of detail and spatial possibility that I’ve always strived for in my films. VR gives you the ability to go back in and add sound in the corner of a room, and then create an interactive moment at a high point of tension – the complex narrative possibilities are endless! And the ability to play with gravity, with reality itself is fascinating.

Read more: Arts patron Katrina Aleksa Ryemill on empowering women in the arts

My dream VR artwork is to really take the whole concept of an immersive experience further, and have a ‘real-world’ installation that is like a dreamscape, that prepares you like an antechamber to the VR itself, but one that is operatic in scale. And, of course, a VR experience that incorporates world-building and characters with a whole new level of detail, intensity and interaction. The holy grail of everyone working in VR right now is to pull off a truly meaningful way to have multiple players collaborate and work together in a VR experience.

Leviathan Cycle, Episode 6: Ding Ling & Senait (2020) HD video, 18’46”. Courtesy of the artist and UBIK Productions.

LUX: A lot of your recent work is informed by serious concerns about the damage that we humans are inflicting on marine ecologies across the planet. Can you tell us why this means so much to you? And what can art ‘do’ to make difference to these overwhelming problems?
Shezad Dawood: One of the biggest environmental car crashes we’re blindly walking towards is the destruction of marine ecosystems. Perhaps because a large percentage of these interconnected systems remain largely unseen by human eyes, we forget that roughly 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, and that the oceans hold about 96.5% of the Earth’s water. Never mind more critical intersections, such as the function of coral reefs as a semi-permeable membrane against tidal events and shoreline erosion.

Towards The Possible Film (2014) HD and Super 16mm transferred to HD, 20 mins
Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Delfina Foundation.

It is these delicate checks and balances that are both naturally occurring, and that can be aided by considered human research and interaction, that have really motivated me to keep researching in this space. And yes, art can totally play a role, in helping tell stories and give audiences an insight into some of these otherwise invisible narratives. I think the potential for research and collaboration between the arts and sciences is just in its infancy, and there is a way to think about creating new ways of telling that empower and inspire audiences without being patronising.

Read more: How luxury knitwear brand Aessai is supporting South American craftsmanship

I set up my own non-profit project Leviathan in 2017 to further develop a relationship with ideas of oceans and ecology. We stage public events at each physical exhibition venue the project is presented at, bringing scientists to arts audiences and vice versa. There’s a growing repertoire of accessible short texts and video lectures that are available for free streaming and download, that present cutting-edge research in digestible form. It’s been really exciting to have someone who attended a physical event in Seoul then follow up via a virtual talk that took place in Munich!

Nets 2 – Etheridge’s Point Trail (2019), Shezad Dawood, oil acrylic and wool on linen, 100 x 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Timothy Taylor, London.

LUX: Can you tell us about the paintings on show in your current, online exhibition, Nets at Timothy Taylor Gallery? And how about how your residency on Fogo Island informed the works?
Shezad Dawood: The Nets works at Timothy Taylor are about boundaries and thresholds — between land and sea, sea and sky, and also between figuration and abstraction. I see the works as invitations to viewers to pause, stop and understand the spiritual epiphany of being and how pattern imposes itself on the world and on us… a complex and complete ecology if you will.

The works were made during an incredible residency on Fogo Island, which is a beautiful rugged island off the coast of Newfoundland, deeply connected to the fortunes of the cod trade. Its home to the famous Fogo Island Inn an amazing, sustainable and community-run luxury hotel on the shore of the Atlantic. Through the residency I was privileged to meet and work with a number of skilled and generous craftspeople on the island including Lillian Dwyer, Sheila Payne and Margaret Freake who brought their local techniques of rug hooking, flocking and crochet to bear on these works. Both conceptually and materially the Nets works embody the spirit and unique geography of the island.

‘Nets’ by Shezad Dawood runs until 12 December 2020 in Timothy Taylor Gallery’s online viewing room: timothytaylor.com/viewing-rooms/shezad-dawood-nets

Nick Hackworth is a writer and curator of Modern Forms, an art collection and curatorial platform founded by Hussam Otaibi, Managing Partner at Floreat Group. 

Ballet dancer, actor and entrepreneur Sergei Polunin. Image by Alex Kerkis

Tattooed, athletic and outspoken, ballet maestro Sergei Polunin has a way of keeping everyone on their toes. LUX talks to the dancer, actor and entrepreneur about his internet-breaking video for Hozier, working with Kenneth Branagh, and dancing in virtual reality

1. Can you describe your style of dancing?

It’s a combination of having trained in two different countries: Russia, with its classical training, precise technique and good clean positions, and England, where there is a lot of acting and expression in every movement.

2. Are you a rule-breaker?

I actually enjoy following the rules when it comes to ballet. When you’re training, you need to follow a very strict path, but in order to perform, you need to feel free. During performances, I try to discard the rules and translate what I feel for the audience.

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3. Your feelings about ballet institutions seem untraditional, though?

I’m trying to build an alternative system to compete with the old theatre system, which has been going since the 1800s, where ballet dancers are signed up and then are told exactly what to do for their whole career. They’re not allowed any representation or to negotiate for money or to choose their next project – like old Hollywood. I’m working with the government to offer dancers more money and freedom and to create some healthy competition.

4. What is the biggest misconception about male ballet dancers?

That they are silly or feminine. I was never bullied for dancing, though; I’ve always considered it a man’s job. Boxers learn dancing to improve their flexibility and to hide emotions. Just as a dancer never shows how hard they are working, a fighter hides where his next punch is coming from. Also, if you choose to study ballet, you’ll be surrounded by girls! That would never happen with football.

5. Did you expect Hozier’s ‘Take Me to Church’ video with your dance to go viral?

Not really, no. When they filmed the video, I had been thinking about quitting dancing for acting, so I wasn’t in the best shape at the time. I’m happy that so many people appreciated it but I still see lots of technical mistakes!

Here and above: Sergei Polunin photographed by Morgan Norman

6. How do you connect with the audience when you are dancing in an arena?

Performing for that many people gives me more energy. I could actually dance larger, perform bigger! It’s important to show that ballet can work for big stadium audiences, too.

7. What great traditional ballet roles are left for you to perform?

So many amazing dancers have already performed these roles, I don’t think I could add anything. I want to create new things instead.

Read more: Van Cleef & Arpels CEO Nicolas Bos on the poetry of jewellery

8. Are there any stories begging to be made into a ballet?

Many! You can turn anything into a ballet. Imagine a Marvel or DC comic and dancing as the Joker or the Penguin.

9. How about a ballet about the Kardashians?

Absolutely! Dance has no boundaries. You can dance as a chess piece, a planet, a myth, a god.

10. What do you think is the future of dance?

Virtual reality and 3D technology are the perfect mediums for dance. Once a dance is done, how can the performance be saved forever? I think virtual reality is the answer.

11. You’ve acted in films directed by Kenneth Branagh and Ralph Fiennes. Did they give you any acting advice?

They didn’t have too many corrections on set. I think as an actor you transfer your personal energy into the role. Some actors just make you want to look at them, like Mickey Rourke or Marlon Brando on screen – I don’t care what they’re doing or saying, I just look at them.

12. Can you imagine a life without dancing?

Dance is my centre and my core. I always come back to it. It comes easily to me, but I don’t spend time thinking about it. I pursue other things like acting and I’m building a foundation to bring together financing, resources and people to develop and fund creative projects. I want to support different kinds of talents – choreographers, lighting designers, costume designers, painters, film directors, playwrights.

Discover more: poluninink.com

This interview was originally published in the Summer 2020 Issue. 

‘Double Curtain 1’ (2017). Victoria Fu.

California-based artist Victoria Fu, the official artist of 2019’s Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge at Frieze Los Angeles, is at the forefront of exploring the realm between the digital and the analog, as she explains to Anna Wallace-Thompson

DEUTSCHE BANK WEALTH MANAGEMENT x LUX

Victoria Fu

Hazy circles of red, blue and aqua overlap, a Venn diagram of mingling new colors emerging from textured surfaces. Elsewhere, scratches like the snags on celluloid skip across the faded screen of a computer desktop. They exist amongst a procession of lights and shadows, but – like the most famous shadows of all, on Plato’s cave wall – which are real, and which are not?

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It’s a good question, and one that Californian artist Victoria Fu finds immensely intriguing. In an ever more digitized world, Fu is interested in the space between the real and the virtual, the analog and the digital. This duality leads to lush, textured works and installations comprising layers of shapes and forms, blurring the boundaries between what is physically there and what is digitally inserted (or even projected) onto a surface.

‘Medium Square 4’ (2018). Victoria Fu.

Born in Santa Monica, and a Stanford and CalArts alumna (she is also the co-founder of The Moving Index, an online database of all things video art), Fu’s artistic practice explores how we navigate time and the body within this evolving area. “When I began working with moving image installations (film and video), I found myself migrating into the digital and virtual world, away from the materiality of film and its processes,” she explains. “I started to feel what can only be described as a sort of existential loss of the ‘real’ – whatever ‘real’ is. The loss of a connection, of situating my body in time and space. I addressed this loss through combining both analog and digital elements in a variety of installation formats and configurations.” With works such as Double Curtain 1 (2017), part of her solo show ‘Télévoix’ at New York’s Simon Preston Gallery in 2017, for example, she literally divided the room to create a double-sided installation that played with contrasts such as dark/light and physical/virtual, and showed her fascination with what the normally unseen rear of an image might be like. Meanwhile, in ‘Velvet Peel’, her solo show at LA gallery Honor Fraser in 2015, her interest in how we interact with our world was evident in Pinch-Zoom (2015), a large, Las Vegas-style neon sign in which fingers pinch in and out, as when manipulating the touchscreen of a smartphone.

Read more: Switzerland’s spectacular new ski region

LUX: You probe what lies behind an image. Can a digital image really have a ‘back’? Can you turn it over?
Victoria Fu: While working on Belle Captive 1 (2013) for the Whitney Biennial, I was making installations with faux walls. You could see a projected image on the ‘face’ of the wall, but if you went around the back, it was the unfinished raw wood frame of the structure, revealing the image as nothing more than an empty façade. I started thinking about how an image is, for lack of a better word, so ‘flat’ and one-directional. It begged the question: what’s on the other side? How would one conceive of an image ‘in the round’, or sculpturally, in installation?

‘Belle Captive I’ (2013). Victoria Fu

LUX: How are you exploring this other side?
Victoria Fu: Part of what appeals to me is the unknown, and the spookiness of it as well. What is the dimension of a pixel – does it have space? What is behind it? Let’s flip it over! So much of what we see on TV, in films and advertisements, is all done in post-production. There are all these layers of things that don’t really have a root in the ‘real’ world. In most films, you can sort of imagine what the air smells like in a room between a figure and the background, you have that sense of dimension and place. But with enough computer-generated elements, there are so many disparate layers all spliced together to form a coherent image reality. There’s no texture. There’s no ‘smell’. I’m fascinated by that glassy emptiness.

LUX: Wait, what do you mean ‘the smell’ of an image?
Victoria Fu: How do we make sense of our relationship to images through our bodily senses? How does the act of touching the screen and the new haptic dimension of images influence how we understand where we are in the world, and to some degree who we are? There’s an ontological element to these acts, how we make sense of our being – obviously we use our eyes in this image-saturated world, but now we’re ‘touching’ images too. It makes sense then that we might try to make use of our sense of smell. What does an image smell like? Textures in certain images can conjure up an abstracted sense of smell. With some digital images there’s a void, like when you have a cold and you can’t taste or smell anything. It’s that absence that I find so interesting, as a texture in itself.

‘Scoop’ (2015). Victoria Fu.

LUX: There’s a lot of this duality in your work – the landscape that exists between the ‘there’ and the ‘not there’.
Victoria Fu: I identify with a generation that grew up in an analog world but is perfectly fluent and comfortable in the digital. I’m interested in mixing things together in a way that one can’t extract what part is digital and what is analog, and in showing how these things are inextricably connected to each other as images.

Read more: Meet the new creative entrepreneurs

LUX: How so?
Victoria Fu: Double Curtain 1 from ‘Télévoix’ is a single film frame that contains the glitches and by-products of hand-processing film. The shapes on the curtain are scratches on film emulsion, and the particular way in which the different color layers of emulsion flake off. I then took this film image to somebody in Hollywood who works with 3D post-production, and they extruded 3D shapes out of the 2D ones, almost like creating a topological map of a landscape, and printed it on the back of the curtain. The double-sided curtain expresses these dual worlds – it’s the same world, it’s one curtain, yet that reality can be expressed in more than one way (depending on which side you’re standing). There is a video projection on the wall behind the curtain that imagines what kind of shadows that 3D-extruded shape would cast. This is the game of telephone, where each translation distorts the next iteration of the original – hence the name of the exhibit, ‘Télévoix’.

LUX: How important to you is the viewer’s body in the space itself?
Victoria Fu: Very – it’s one of my primary interests. A work can be viewed as documentation, as a video file, and still engage somebody, but it really is a different experience in person. I think a lot about how we spectate, how we situate ourselves in time and space in relationship to the moving image, and how that is changing. When you view one of my moving-image works there are moments when you can get quite comfortable and immersed in the narrative, and then there are moments where you are yanked into another space – and sometimes it’s the very gallery space you’re sitting in. This back and forth is what I find interesting, where you never quite sit comfortably.

‘Small Pinch-Zoom (white)’ (2015). Victoria Fu.

LUX: Have you thought about working in virtual reality?
Victoria Fu: I’m curious about VR but I draw the line at interactivity and an actual touchscreen. I enjoy the buffer between spectator and image, and that’s kind of where I live. VR still emphasizes a kind of cinematic looking in a way that might be in keeping with my interests.

LUX: Speaking of the moving image, the Frieze LA venue is Paramount Studios, a real film lot. Does that relate to your work in any way?
Victoria Fu: With Frieze opening in LA there’s a very conscious coming together of Hollywood and the art world, and I think there are a lot of commonalities between the two that I embrace, as it’s very relevant to the content of my work. The language and tools of film production are central subjects for me. I think the context of Hollywood will help underline how I am thinking through the processes and tools of how we create a visual reality through the moving image, and how we are changing as spectators, from viewers to users in a melding of the two.

Victoria Fu has been invited to create a site-based installation in the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge at the Paramount Theater, Los Angeles, presented in collaboration with Deutsche Bank’s Art, Culture & Sports division. Deutsche Bank has been supporting cutting-edge artists globally for more than 35 years – building a substantial collection of works on paper, recognizing young artists with awards and commissions and organizing numerous exhibitions and museum partnerships. For more information visit: art.db.com

This article was first published in the Winter 2019 issue

Installation view of Past Skin. Image courtesy of MoMA PS1. Photo by Studio LHOOQ.

Look around you. How many screens do you see? How many of us are living in the virtual realm? Our world is being continually altered, shaped and scripted by technology and our bodies along with it. Social media allows us to curate our identity whilst virtual reality gives us the opportunity to step into another’s body and experience a different perspective. It sounds terrifyingly futuristic, but it’s increasingly the reality of our day to day lives. Using science historian and cyber-feminist Donna Haraway’s provocation “Why should our body end at the skin?”‘, as a stimulus, Past Skin at MoMa PS1 invites six contemporary artists – Cui Jie, Jordan Kasey, Hannah Levy, Abigail Lucien, Jillian Mayer, MSHR, and Madelon Vriesendorp – to explore modern constructions of the body using their chosen mediums. Limbs are detached and refashioned into perverse and sometimes grotesque sculptures, alongside sound and video performances and paintings. It’s an appalling glimpse into how dehumanised our society has become and forces us to seriously consider not only the future effects of technology, but our future as humans.

Millie Walton

Past Skin runs until 10th September 2017 at MoMa PS1, Queens, New York