Oxford Study

Shezad Dawood: Piercing Brightness at MODERN ART OXFORD

Actually, I'm not much into his work.  I think both of the images and sounds in his films are too complicated, sometimes I can't concentrate on the images and can't read the inner meaning behind the film work because of the multi-dimentional sounds.  Another reason I don't like his work is that the way of dealing the images and sounds in his films is too high-tech, which gives me so many information that I can't understand clearly and immediately.  But it is not denied that he is a great artist.

Shezad Dawood works across various media and much of his practice involves collaboration, frequently working with other artists to create unique networks around a given project or site. These networks map across different geographic locations and communities and are particularly concerned with acts of translation and restaging.

Filming of Piercing Brightness, commissioned by In Certain Places, began in early July with Dawood as director and writer. The premise is that aliens landed in Preston centuries ago with the mission to learn the ways of human civilisation from its inhabitants. Shifting shape to blend in, the aliens - with the passage of time, eras and, we might imagine, the advent of social networking - slowly forgot their mission over the course of several lifetimes.

Pitt Rivers Museum

The Pitt Rivers Museum is an example of a visual archive that seems to apply intuition and analysis in the way it's displayed and perceived by the visitor. It shows several layers of hierarchies of categorization reflected through labels, numbers and captions and organization in space. Some layers are immediately visible, others need to be activated by opening drawers one after the other in sequence of time. 

I'm interested in the specimen of warms and the alive bees.  When I first saw them, I felt very nauseated, but later I found some relationship between the warms, bees and my project.  The twisted figures of the warm and the crowded environment of bees  drew my attention， which like the brush and the depressed atmosphere of Bacon's oil paintings that inspired me to do the photography project.