Navine G. Dossos: McLean

McLean is a public artwork by artist Navine G. Dossos commissioned for the ICA’s Belvidere facade. The new project titled McLean (2023) is an adaptation of the artist’s former work No Such Organization (2018-2020), a series of one hundred gouache paintings of icons and symbols. Each painting is in response to a new article that emerged following the disappearance and heinous murder, in October 2018, of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a resident of McLean, Virginia. The original paintings are a record that signifies each stage of the event and its surrounding investigation. Each painting is a perfect square meter, and uses symbols to visually represent newspaper articles. The gruesome event of Khashoggi’s killing was not caught on camera and lacked a visual narrative. Dossos devised symbols and icons that stand in for the different forms of technology, individuals, nation states, law enforcement agencies, and human rights organizations.
 
McLean is organized by ICA Senior Curator and Director of Programs Sarah Rifky.

About the artist

Navine G. Dossos (b. 1982, London) 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.

Dossos 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.

Dossos 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. In 2014/2015, she was a participant at the Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (NL). She has exhibited and worked with various institutions, including Showroom (London), IMMA (Dublin), Z33 (Hasselt), The 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, SALT (Istanbul), The Taipei Biennial, European Capital of Culture (Matera), The Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Witte de With (Rotterdam), The Delfina Foundation (London), The Museum of Islamic Art (Doha), Leighton House Museum (London), The Benaki Museum of Islamic Art (Athens) and the A.M. Qattan Foundation (Ramallah). She is a member of the Substantial Motion Research Network and is also part of the Aegina-based collective Vessel.