Why Depend on Space and Time

Why Depend on Space and Time comprises of two film works and a related body of large neon and small textile works. The exhibition is conceptualised as a series of quantum configurations, that is to say a series of obliquely connected points, each of which manifest a related but unique coming-together of concept and matter, form and colour. Different lines of connection can be traced between these points: one path is aesthetic, linking the geometric patterns and colours that occur in the short film 7669 to the reconfiguration and reappearance of those forms in the series of drawings on textile fragments, to the complex neon works, that themselves play on the 1980’s high-point of urban, neon alchemy. All of which, in turn, map the contours of digitally-rendered 3-D modeling – in the digital animation I’m so in, I see Ravel – revealing the continuum between the analogue use of pattern and the digital artifact that runs behind the exhibition. Another narratively driven path reveals the works’ common engagement with the themes of dream and trance-like states and their relation to the proposed existence of an underlying world of hidden knowledge, a longstanding line of enquiry of Dawood’s that touches on the Platonic, Gnostic and Sufi traditions.