Shezad Dawood

Talk Summary

2022.03.05 (Sat.)

Shih-yu Hsu |
Shih-yu began her presentation with Shezad Dawood’s first exposure in Taiwan — Towards the Possible Film in the 2014 Taipei Biennale. She gave a short introduction to Shezad Dawood’s artistic background, oeuvre, and the complexities in Dawood’s multi-medium practices, covering VR, installation, tapestry, sculpture, and videos. Leviathan itself is also created in different media and continued growing with each exhibition. Then Shih-yu connected the spirit of Leviathan to the concept of deep time. She showed a cultish performance in the last stop of Dippy the dinosaur’s tour in the UK. The fossil was seen in the first episode of Leviathan. Afterward, She introduced the octopus’ evolution history, showing the possibility of different sensing and being existing long before human history. She spoke of her recent translation and reading group with Ren Yu Wu. They together translated Bodies of Water by Astrida Neimanis. Neimanis’ theoretic framework also responded to the line of thinking in Leviathan. By introducing the bag theory by Le Guin and the term “hypersea” by McMenamin and McMenamin in Chapter 3 in Bodies of Water, Shih-yu addressed the interdependence of the ocean and the human being. How could we cultivate another way of being on earth if we view ourselves as another branch of sea creature instead of land animal? Following materialist feminist thinking, what could we learn from the water, the ocean, and critters in the fluid? What is the possible becoming, making, and worlding on the level of ontology, epistemology, and ethics?

Bo-Yi Shen |
This talk focused on how Shezad Dawood’s film Leviathan is moving towards a planetary scale of hybrid fluid, and how the artist speculates the possibility of the future to enable us to reflect on the reality of today’s society.

He began with Thomas Hobbes’s illustration of Leviathan from a land-centered perspective, contrasting it with the unstable Ship of fools (akin to the present refugees adrift at sea) which is drifting at sea; then using J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship (1840) and Lucien CASTAING-TAYLOR & Véréna PARAVEL’s Leviathan (2012) to discuss fragmented perspectives and the fluidity of ambiguous abstractions; then complement with Allan Sekula & Noël Burch’s The Forgotten Space (2010) and Hito Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc. (2014) to discuss the issues concerning oceans and globalization, and the ever-diasporic mobility of people in it. The talk also unfolded Shezad Dawood’s Leviathan from Allan Sekula’s global scale and Hito Steyerl’s work extending the concept of “speculative” as well as the hybrid complexities of the assembled ready-made video “essay.” The contrast between “Blue Marbles” and “Heterogeneous Planets” is used to discuss the stains and fluidic appearance of planetary scales that cannot be data-determined.

Finally, Shezad Dawood’s interdisciplinary, cross-media, and multilingual weaving approach is discussed. At the same time, making a connection with the images of cross-species interweaving is a way to propose a “heterogeneous Leviathan” network linkage. This is no longer a stable subject that stabilizes human-centric (Country Leviathan), but rather open to the unpredictable otherness while questioning the taken-for-granted reality of the present. In the process of watching the film, the viewer is no longer a peaceful observer of “nature” (objectification of nature) but is also drawn into the work by a special atmosphere of image manipulation. We have never been on the outside of a crisis (climate change or racial discrimination); we are already in a crisis and also an opportunity for change.