Join us for a tour led by Sarah Brown, Curator (programme) of two complementary exhibitions at Leeds Art Gallery.
Shezad Dawood, an artist with a strong presence on the international scene, studied in Leeds from 2004-2008 and is now based in London.
For Towards the Possible Film (2014), Dawood presents a new film installation, textile paintings and neon work alongside selected works from the Leeds Collection which interrogate and inspire a meeting point between modernism and mysticism. Many of Dawood’s questions and investigations are rooted in his own cultural heritage, life experience, and a deep desire to encourage communication between different cultures, people, and even the past and future. Towards the Possible Film was shot at Legzira beach in Sidi Ifni, Morocco. In a landscape that could well be an alien planet, otherworldly figures appear as if to threaten the peace. Dawood found a deep source of inspiration in the region’s history and the many wars fought in the 1950s and 1960s between Spain, Morocco and the independent Saharan tribes.
Elín Jakobsdóttir is an Icelandic artist based in Glasgow and Berlin. Her work combines drawings, films and sculptural objects which consider the everyday world through the lens of the subconscious. Jakobsdóttir presents Eyes Cast, a new film, alongside plumpe Denken Modalities, a new series of paper cut-outs and drawings.
This German expression ‘plumpe Denken’ is taken from the German playwright Bertolt Brecht who stated a preference for working with plump or clumsy thoughts as opposed to rigorously honed thoughts. The drawings are concerned with the territory of the mind and body, bringing together objects from the everyday environment, body parts and organs, abstract shapes suggestive of mechanical and metabolic processes and lines that trace pathways of thought, humour and poetic ambiguity.
Eyes Cast is filmed in Super 8 on location in Leeds Art Gallery. It is a silent visual poem that traces a path through the building focusing on two bronze portraits by Jacob Epstein asking questions about the durability of the artwork, highlighting our own mortality and shifts between factual document and reverie.
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Free to Contemporary Art Society Members. To reserve a place, please contact Moira Innes on moira@contemporaryartsociety.org or 07946 604109