The Artist’s Process: Workshop with Navine G. Dossos

The ICA has commissioned artist Navine G. Dossos to create a public art work for its Belvidere facade. The new project titled McLean (2023) is based on the artist’s former work No Such Organization (2020), a series of one hundred paintings that represent the assassination of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoogi in 2018. Khashoogi was a resident of McLean, Virginia. Navine’s works are composed of icons and symbols. On the occasion of this workshop, Navine shares her archive of stencils with the public, and shares her process in a collaborative format. Participants will be invited to respond to recent articles through Navine’s visual archive, opening up her process of making work and how she thinks about the link between image and text.

For this workshop, children must be accompanied by an adult. This workshop will include some sensitive topics and images that may not be suitable for young audiences.

Navine G. Dossos is interested in Orientalism in the digital realm, geometry as information and decoration, image calibration, and Aniconism in contemporary culture. She has developed a form of geometric abstraction that merges the traditional Aniconism of Islamic art with the algorithmic nature of the interconnected world we live in. This is not the formal abstraction we understand from the western history of art, but something essentially informational, and committed to investigation and communication. Navine is a painter, and uses this medium and its history to ask fundamental questions about the ways in which we see, understand, and, crucially, represent the world around us. Her work suggests that contrary to the mediatic impulses of the present, we must not rely upon, nor constantly reproduce, the figurative language of television, online media, videos, and the endlessly circulating images which shape our shared imagination of reality. Navine studied History of Art at Cambridge University, Arabic at Kuwait University, Islamic Art at the Prince’s School of Traditional Art in London, and holds an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design, London.