The artist Shezad Dawood is currently working on the multi-stage project Leviathan, which explores a near future for a world impacted by a cataclysmic solar event. The episodes of Leviathan are vignettes from different locations that unravel the oft-overlooked meeting point between marine life, mental health and migration. A few months ago, just as Shezad was preparing to come to Dakar for a residency with RAW Material Company, and to work on a Leviathanepisode in Senegal, covid-19 was making its own journey across the planet and the residency had to be postponed. Life began imitating art, with crisis unfolding into crisis and scenes from Leviathan seeming more and more like a possibility with every passing week. A line from episode 1 of Leviathan began to take on new meaning “Each prophecy for the end of the world was coming to pass”. In this conversation, we will talk about the different futures and mornings after imagined in the series, and how such a project, particularly with its multidisciplinary approach, may help us to prepare for what comes next.
Shezad Dawood is an interdisciplinary artist, who uses research and collaboration as a way of informing his work in film, installation, writing, publishing, VR and sculpture. His key concerns with marine ecology, non-aligned movement and the ethics of place recur across different projects including Leviathan: an ongoing multimedia project and public programme that launched at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and looks at the fault lines between climate change, migration and mental health.
As much open-source resource as artwork, the project is informed by an ever-growing number of activists and academics including marine biologists, oceanographers, and anthropologists. These researchers shape the narrative of the ten-episode film at the heart of the project, which imagines various speculative futures that may extend from the present moment. Dawood’s films and installations have been exhibited and won awards at multiple biennales and film festivals, and his work features in the permanent collections of LACMA, TATE, and the British Museum amongst others.
Leviathan website https://leviathan-cycle.com/information/
7min45: Professor Wendy Wheeler, Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Cultural Inquiry, London Metropolitan University, London, United Kingdom https://www.londonmet.ac.uk/profiles/staff/wendy-wheeler/
14min57: Professor Alassane Sarr, Institut Universitaire de Pêche et d’Aquaculture (IUPA) at Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal
30min06: Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler, 1993
35min28: Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, Thomas Hobbes, 1651
37min22: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault, 1975