Shezad Dawood’s “Skin of Dreams” Looks Forward as Well as Back

A red carpet welcomed visitors to Cultural Foundation Abu Dhabi on the afternoon I arrived; it was not, as it turned out, anything to do with the art, but connected with a university graduation ceremony the building was preparing to host. The posters of mortarboard-clad graduates were, inadvertently, the perfect introduction to Shezad Dawood’s “Skin of Dreams.” Cultural Foundation is not a white cube. Completed in 1981 under the founding mandate of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan to foster cultural consciousness in the newly unified state, it was conceived as a place where life happens: a children’s library, art workshops, music studios and rehearsal spaces coexist beneath its soaring triple-height concrete ceilings, inlaid with Islamic geometric star patterns and punctuated by mashrabiya brass doors. Upstairs, a diverse group of adults worked on art projects in the workshops. The more I spent time with Dawood’s exhibition, the more certain I became that this civic quality—what Cultural Foundation’s Head of Exhibitions, Paz Monge, calls “a collage of experiences”—is precisely what makes “Skin of Dreams” so resonant in its setting.

“I personally love the fact that various users of the building will encounter the exhibition as they move through and across it,” Dawood told Observer, “like an open system.” Curated by Jessica Cerasi, the show spans more than 16 years of work across painting, sculpture, digital media, ceramics and virtual reality. Its title is borrowed from a phrase used to describe the cinema screen: that porous, luminous boundary between imagination and reality. Having visited the city many times, I feel this phrase suits Abu Dhabi. The U.A.E. capital is in the midst of a historic cultural expansion—the Zayed National Museum and Natural History Museum have recently opened on Saadiyat Island, which is also home to the Louvre Abu Dhabi and new teamLab Phenomena, while the long-awaited Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is expected to open its doors before the year is out.

Dawood is alert to Abu Dhabi’s cultural ambitions; as he put it to Observer, “the U.A.E. understands the need for cultural ambition” while “equally fostering its own grass-roots local scene which is key to this interplay between the local and global.” Set against the recent shadow of regional conflict, which delayed the exhibition’s opening by a month and a half and forced Dawood and his team to install the show remotely—”à la COVID,” as Monge put it—the exhibition echoed its context: something being made, determinedly, perhaps even stubbornly, and with purpose.

Dawood has spoken of wanting the exhibition to feel like “a two-person show”—between himself and the building; the architecture is an active participant. Tall false walls, one reaching the full triple height of the building, create new sightlines and elevations. Brightly colored partitions and podiums punctuate the gallery, their hues and shapes—reminiscent of building blocks or Tetris pieces—lending a playful quality to the space. The show spills across two floors—works installed on the upper level demand to be seen on their own terms, while the balcony offers unexpected vantage points onto pieces below, revealing angles and details invisible from the ground. There is no fixed route, no single “correct” spot from which to view a work.

The dialogue between Dawood’s work and its host is most eloquent in specific pairings. When Louis met Ahmed (2023), an oil and acrylic painting on linen that references Louis Kahn’s celebrated Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, is positioned so that its painted arches read as a continuation of the covered portico visible through the gallery’s large glass windows—architecture bleeding into art bleeding into architecture. Equally considered is the placement of Flow My Tears The Policeman Said II (2011), hung near the top of the triple-height false wall: its Islamic star patterns, drawn from the narrative twists of Philip K. Dick’s 1974 novel, enter into direct conversation with the star-patterned ceramic inlay in the building’s balconies and the ceiling and floor lights below.

Painting sits at the heart of the retrospective in a way that Dawood says Cerasi insisted upon. The show features what he calls his “openers”—works that have provided artistic breakthroughs—including Through Pierced Flesh and Skin of Dreams (2014), five suspended panels on loan from Guggenheim Abu Dhabi that visitors can walk beneath and between, and The Wanderer (2015), developed during a residency at Sadler’s Wells exploring bodies in motion. Many of Dawood’s canvases use Pakistani ralli textiles—hand-stitched domestic quilts from the 1970s—as their ground, their visible mending and patched surfaces becoming part of the image: a patchwork of memories. You see this clearly in the gallery, where paintings are suspended so that you can walk around (and under) them and see the fastenings on the reverse. The architectural explorations are equally arresting; works from the Integrations series, including acrylic paintings Kenzo Rides Again (2023) and Anselm Chapel, Tokyo (2016), pay tribute to modernist buildings of the Global South.

But it is not only about painted works. Preparing the retrospective was, Dawood said, “like a couple of years of therapy”—going back over 16 years of work, pulling older pieces into relation with recent ones. He was often told as a student to stick to one medium; looking back, he said, “I can see what a coherent universe it is, and that the different media reinforce and enrich each other.” This diversity is true too of his architectural reflections. Biosphere (1980) (2023), a ceramic reconstruction of the former Intercontinental Hotel in Sharjah, engages directly with the built history of the U.A.E.—a meditation on the architecture thrown up during decades of rapid transformation, and what gets lost, or preserved only in replica, when a place remakes itself at speed.

Then there is the garden. In an inner gallery, Night in the Garden of Love (Digital Seedbanks) (2023) presents seven algorithmically generated plants that grow in real time, responding to an experimental soundtrack developed with students of the late musician Yusef Lateef. Dawood grew up with jazz, and the piece has a melodic, unhurried quality. A ceramic sculpture, Xyloflor, diffuses a custom scent—notes drawn from each of the seven plants and then blended into a single fragrance, apparently still available from a concept store in Brussels.

The most ambitious and personal element of the show is the world premiere of Episodes 9 and 10 of Leviathan Cycle, a 10-part film series Dawood began at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and completes here, in Abu Dhabi, in a co-commission with the Seoul Museum of Art. Each episode offers a snapshot of how climate change and scientific development may have reshaped life on Earth. Episode 9, set at an unnamed research institute in South Korea, examines the ethical implications of using genetic engineering and A.I. to preserve biodiversity—drawing on Dawood’s research into the JEROS jellyfish elimination program at KAIST and work on marine fauna at Pusan University. Episode 10, co-commissioned by Cultural Foundation, returns to Karachi—Dawood’s childhood home—and imagines a post-technological world in which the boundary between human and marine life begins to dissolve. A woman narrates the story of Moriro and the crocodile; in the voiceover, she becomes one. “The world has ended, again,” we hear. “As it continues to do in any number of ways.” The cycle closes here, in a city built on the Gulf: a sea that Dawood describes as a crossroads between South Asia, East Asia and Africa, the very trade routes that run through so many of his textile histories. His grandfather lived in the Gulf for years; Dawood spent time here as a child. “There seemed to be something predestined,” he explained, “about doing my first mid-career retrospective at Cultural Foundation.”

That concept of return—to spaces, to histories, to what persists and what doesn’t—runs through another of the show’s most affecting works. The immersive VR environment Encroachments (2019) takes visitors through cultural spaces in Pakistan that no longer exist. Among them is the Ferozsons bookshop in Lahore—beloved, Dawood told Observer, because having survived fires and floods from the colonial period until 2017, its floor had become a patchwork of replacement sections laid down across different eras. “I think there is a whole different emotional effect to bringing audiences into the physicality of a space,” he said. “One of the most useful haptic functions of VR is in archiving the feeling of spaces that are no longer.” Seeing the piece in Abu Dhabi, a city that has transformed almost beyond recognition in living memory, gives it a particular charge.

A mid-career retrospective typically looks backward. “Skin of Dreams” also looks forward—past the cinema screen, into whatever comes next. In a city that is, right now, consciously imagining itself into a new cultural future, it feels like the right show in exactly the right place.

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