Dictums 10:120

Overview

Dictums 10:120 is a multi-part project that involves the composition and performance of a qawwali song. 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.

Wael Shawky began the project during the Witness Programme, an artists’ residency at Sharjah Biennial 10. 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 – from the spoken to the textual to the lyrical, from English to Urdu, from artspeak to absurd fragment – produced an analytical process that tests the authority of the language used to communicate the Biennial’s raison d’être.

In a move that highlights the historic exchange of labour and culture between the Gulf region and South Asia, Shawky travelled to Karachi, in Pakistan, to record the song with renowned qawwals Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad. During the opening week of Sharjah Biennial 11, the two qawwals, along with 30 additional men, perform the song in an alleyway outside the exhibition halls; a trace of their presence remains as an audio track that plays in the space throughout the duration of the Biennial.

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.


2013

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 11

Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation