Shezad Dawood

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.

***Residency with Shezad Dawood unfortunately had to be done online due to Covid 19, nevertheless the RAW team actively participated in the research of the artist and his Leviathan project.