Shezad Dawood’s New Dream Machine Project centres a three-metre high rotating and flickering light sculpture. Dawood’s sculpture is an homage that re-creates artist and writer Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine. Driving the mechanism is a perforated cylinder emitting pulses of light at the precise frequency of the brain’s alpha waves, said to induce altered states of consciousness.

Gysin conceived the Dreamachine around 1960 after years of living in Tangier, influenced by the Beat Generation’s experiments in altering consciousness to produce art and poetry. To Dawood, the machine is both a formal proposition and a portal: a threshold object inducing states between waking and sleep, meditation and vision. It traces a network of cultural encounters across time and geography: the Sufi cosmological traditions that underpin Gysin’s Dreamachine, the Beat Generation’s entanglement with Moroccan art, music and mysticism, and the enduring resonance of those intersections. The project meditates on derivation, transcendence and what it means to inherit, restage and transform what came before.

Originally commissioned for the Abraaj Capital Art Prize in 2011, Dawood’s sculpture is part of the Art Jameel Collection. It was prototyped by local craftsmen in Fes, Morocco, and precision engineered in Slough, England. In this exhibition, the sculpture is presented alongside two Recyclages: smaller prototypes assembled by Dawood in Morocco, their cylinders hand-cut from tin cans and mounted on turntables sourced from local markets—objects of pure bricolage that began as working tests and became independent works. Presented in the lobby space are archival images and research materials, mapping the project’s history and tracing its first presentation in 2011 at the Cinémathèque de Tanger.