Dictums 10:120

Overview

Wael Shawky began Dictums 10:120, a multipart project that involves the composition and performance of a qawwali song, during the Witness Programme, an artists’ residency at Sharjah Biennial 10. Comprised of fragments from curatorial talks translated into Urdu, the song turns this centuries-old tradition of devotional Sufi music into a contemporary art experiment. Taking Sharjah as a starting point, the project examines the relationship between art organisations and their local communities Throughout a series of workshops, members of Sharjah Art Foundation’s production and technical team, most of whom are Pakistani, took apart the Biennial’s rhetoric in order to construct a song. The various forms of literal and theoretical translations to which the texts were subjected produced an analytical process that tests the authority of the language used to communicate the Biennial’s raison d’être. During the opening week of, Sharjah Biennial 11, two renowned qawwals, along with thirty additional men .performed the song in an alleyway outside the exhibition halls Intrigued by the possibility of role reversal, Shawky challenges the boundaries and expectations imposed by hierarchies that exist within the institution and society at large. By inserting the religious musical tradition of qawwali into a contemporary art framework, he playfully questions the legitimising power of the institution by comparing the oblique and mystified language of contemporary art with mystic poetry.