Horror in the Modernist Block

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Dawood’s richly layered artworks imagine alternative pasts and futures, drawing on history, philosophy, ecology, and architecture. Much of his work has centred on the geopolitics and legacy of modernism in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh following Partition in 1947. His project Encroachments (2020) explores the “illegal” structures established on and around private and state properties in Pakistan; a form of “shadow” architecture; that counters the linearity of state- and capitalist-driven architecture.

The Directorate (2019) is a tapestry which depicts a view of the vacant pool adjoining the former US Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, designed by Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander. Neutra and Alexander’s modernist design was originally intended to serve as the site of the US Embassy but was downgraded to a consulate in 1966 after the country’s capital was moved to Islamabad in 1961. In Dawood’s tapestry, the empty pool serves as a reminder of this fate, and how such architecture was used during the Cold War to project an image of the United States as dynamic and modern. A veil of red and yellow particles recalling specks of blood partially obscures the view. Their arrangement mirrors the coloured patterns of the black terrazzo flooring of the consulate, which is represented in the fabric wallpaper behind Dawood’s tapestry. Enhancing the eerie atmosphere of the image is a line of iridescent green, which slices through the picture plane.

Dawood’s research on the history of the consulate has uncovered several interesting facts and stories. It is believed to have housed a CIA supercomputer; a fact ostensibly proven by gouges in the terrazzo flooring, which were left after its removal. It was also allegedly built around the burial plot of a Sufi saint, a shrine to whom exists as a makeshift wooden construction just outside the consulate’s perimeter. (text by Melanie Pocock, IKON Gallery)