Renowned digital artist Brendan Dawes debuts riveting new series Persian Dreams for Art Dubai 2023.
Presented by Gazelli Art House for the fair's New Media section (Booth X7), this new body of work sees Dawes combine facets of artistic expression, ranging visual, linguistic, audio, and dance. The display comprises four screens of metamorphosing imagery: a fusion of AI, motion-captured choreography and algorithmically generated forms.
Inspired by The Book of Kings, or Shahnameh, these contextually charged artworks suggest temporal linkages; a renewed, digitised interpretation of an age-old Epic Poem. Written by native poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE, the Shahnameh is the national epic of Iran and recounts a Persian golden age via some 50,000 'distichs' or couplets. This work attests a preservation of mythologies and histories that herelend Dawes' work an arcane and scholarly agency.
Persian Dreams: Heroes, Persian Dreams: Dynasties, and Persian Dreams: Creation, are stirred, respectively, by the Heroic, Historic, and Mythical Ages of the Shahnameh. Visuals choreographed to the movements of Charlotte Edmonds, are displayed over three uniform screens. Meanwhile a fourth, larger screen Persian Dreams: Monument draws from the whole. Scored by Artist duo Madota, experimental soundscapes incorporate elements of zoorkhaneh – traditional athletic – rituals. In each work, Shahnameh's verses and visuals are manifest in fortuitous oscillations between figuration and abstraction.
Madota have described Persian Dreams Dynasties, Heroes, Creation, and Monument,respectively, as a 'deep sense of history and the passage of time', 'a voyage alongsidethe mighty heroes within the myths and legends that embody Iran's golden past', 'rooted in simplicity and airiness', and like a 'lucid dream'.
'I've always felt the promise offered by new technology and especially AI is the ability to see things in a new way, beyond our own imaginings. Yet these technologies don't sit alone: they are built on past experiences together with universal themes which run through each and every one of us. With Persian Dreams, I've embraced these new tools yet fused them with the stories of the Shahnameh, an epic poem thousands of years old, to create a lens we might use to see how stories told a millennia ago still resonate today, even in a contemporary context.'
— Brendan Dawes