Leviathan

Leviathan, a solo exhibition by Shezad Dawood, explores the intersection between migration, mental health, and climate change. With paintings, textiles, video and sculpture, this thought-provoking exhibition offers an opportunity to reflect on the pressing global challenges of our time, all within the breathtaking setting of Salisbury Cathedral.

Central to the exhibition is are a series of powerfully affecting textile paintings from the Labanof Cycle, 2017, which depict objects lost at sea by migrants attempting to make the Lampedusa crossing between North Africa and southern Italy. These objects form part of the much larger archive of the Labanof (Laboratory of Anthropological Forensics) at the University of Milan, a unit of forensic pathologists who archive these objects in order to help families track missing relatives. As such, each textile documents both a life and a journey, and the loss that accompanies both. The combination of the imagery and the Fortuny fabric on which they are painted reveals the fault lines and some of the contradictions at the heart of our contemporary ecosystem.

In the South Nave Aisle, AnthropoPangaea (Hapalochlaena lunulata), 2022, a large textile work, depicts a map of the world that draws the viewer back in geological time to a point when there was a supercontinent, Pangaea, surrounded by a global ocean, Panthalassa. It was inspired by Richard Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion maps, a flat map which shows our planet as one island in one ocean. The term 'AnthropoPangaea (Hapalochlaena lunulata)' was invented by the artist: it references the Anthropocene (the period of geological time in which human activity has had a significant impact on the planet), the modernist Brazilian poet and critic Oswald de Andrade's manifesto of cultural cannibalism and the supercontinent Pangaea which once encompassed all the landmasses on Earth. Hand painted by Dawood, with rug- hooking and tufting crafted by artisans from Fogo Island, Newfoundland, Canada, Lillian Dwyer and Sheila Paine, whom Dawood met while in residence at Fogo Islands Arts in 2019. Dawood hand-painted elements such ass the striking, highly venomous blue-ringed octopus which delves into geological time to imagine a joined-up world made of hybrid landscapes help in a tentacular embrace.