Press Release

Shezad Dawood
Journey to the End of the Night

Galleria Riccardo Crespi – Via Mellerio 1, Milan
19 September - 31 October 2008
Private view: 18 September, 6:30 pm

Performance: 16 September, 8 pm, Assab One – Via Assab 1, Milan


On 18 September the Galleria Riccardo Crespi will mark the beginning of its third year of activity by presenting Journey to the End of the Night, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Shezad Dawood.

Journey to the End of the Night is an exploration of the value of the writing and the script that is used to represent it, whose semantic and artistic significance links all languages and all cultures in a blend that is now an integral part of the global society.
Shezad Dawood is an artist who finds his inspiration in the melting pot of contemporary culture: he himself is Pakistani as well as Indian and European origin.

The exhibition includes a sequence of large format works on a black ground: a mixture of divinities and other figures drawn from Eastern as well as Western iconography, that are expression of Shezad’s effort to use his art to identify a morality shared by the three monotheistic religions.

Figures and messages taken from a thousand-year tradition can also be found in the series of paintings that make up Single Flower, Twin Flowers, Three Flowers, in which script and floral design are brought together on the texture of vintage fabrics.

The heart of the exhibition is Triple Negation Chandelier, a light installation composed by neon inscriptions used to ideally evoke that journey to the end of the night.
In this work the threefold repetition of a basic formula in Islamic culture, the shahada, is not simply graphic, but mixes with the symbology of the number three, found in all religions, and with the light that makes everything clear, bright, universal.

On 16 September, at Assab One exhibition space in Milan, the artist will present Waiting, a performance wich is intended to convey the sense of disorientation typical of the theatre of the absurd.
Shezad Dawood has created a minimalist scenic space in which a dress rehearsal of several passages from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is performed. The set is dominated by a fluorescent light reproducing the word inshallah (“God willing”), symbol of the fatalism that the artist wants to convey to the audience through a visual and linguistic game, fruit of an investigation of the use of the “word” and its cultural significance.

In Waiting language is made the protagonist through the participation of two children from the bilingual school in Milan named after the Arab writer Naguib Mahfouz, who play the parts of Vladimir and Estragon, the tramps in Beckett’s play. They recite dialogues of comprehension/incomprehension, essential to the performance’s atmosphere of suspense but at the same time capable of building a bridge between different cultures.

A catalogue will be published with essays by J.J. Charlesworth, Giovanni Curatola, Raffaella Guidobono and Andrea Lissoni.

Shezad Dawood was born in 1974 in London, where he still lives and works.

Among his more recent exhibitions:
2008: Feature, film project/touring exhibition, East Side Projects, Birmingham; Leeds Met Gallery; Castlefield Gallery, Manchester;Until the End of the World, Third Line, Dubai | 2007: If I Should Fall From Grace With God, Paradise Row, London; The End of Civilisation, Axel Lapp Projects, Berlin  | 2006: Shezad Dawood & Friends, Artists’ Studio, London | 2005: Paradise Row, organized by Chris Hammond, London.


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