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ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:

Welcome to This Being Human. I’m your host Abdul-Rehman Malik. On this podcast, I talk to extraordinary people from all over the world whose life, ideas and art are shaped by Muslim culture.

 

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
I think the best art of whatever discipline or medium, it turns you sideways and you never see the world the same way again.

 

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:

There’s a term you’ll hear in this interview: the autophysiopsychic. It sounds fancy, but it’s a simple concept – and one that can describe so much of the art that we talk about on this show. According to the man who coined it, “this word means music from one’s physical, spiritual and mental self: i.e., music from the heart.” The man who came up with that word is the late Dr. Yusef Lateef, who was mostly known to the public as a genre-bending musician. You might call his output jazz, or blues, or R&B, or even world music, but listening to it feels like a spiritual experience.

I’ve been interested in Dr. Yusuf Lateef’s  work for a long time. Some of you will know his famous Love Theme from Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus. Others will revel in his multi-instrumental musical genius. Listening to Yusuf Lateef has  always transported me to places both familiar and cosmic. So I was intrigued when I saw that the artist Shezad Dawood was putting on an exhibition in conversation with the works of Yusef Lateef.

Shezad Dawood’s installation, on display at the Aga Khan Museum, is called Night in the Garden of Love – named after a novella by Lateef. It’s a multisensory exhibition that immerses visitors into a fantastical garden, through the use of virtual reality. Like Yusef Lateef, Shezad is not easily boxed in. His work spans painting, video, textiles, architecture and emerging technologies. Shezad joined me from London shortly before his exhibition opened.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
Shezad bhai, I want to begin, if I may, with the legend and the scholar that is Dr. Yusef Abdul Lateef. You know, your latest installation at the museum is called Night in the Garden of Love, which is a work that’s inspired and in conversation with the jazz legend Dr. Yusef Abdul Lateef. But Yusef Lateef is more than just a musician, is it? He was an artist, a science fiction writer, a composer, a scholar of education, and I would dare say even a spiritual guide to many. And I have to be honest, Shezad, he kind of reminds me of you.

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
(laughs) Oh, I feel, I feel very flattered with the comparison. I must. I must say.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
Because I believe in like in so many ways, your work defies, like, simple definitions and you work across disciplines. And there’s something very powerful about your approach, because it’s not only about the meeting of art and technology and ideas, but there’s this very conscious focus on the interior life and in the interior world. I’d like to think that in more ways than one, you and Dr. Yusef Lateef are kindred spirits. Are you kindred spirits?

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
Well, there’s a few points to come back on there, Abdul-Rehman. The first one, because if I don’t call you out on it, I’m going to be in big trouble with a number of people, is that Dr. Lateef hated the term jazz. And it’s an interesting one because obviously you go into any record shop and that’s where you find his music till today. But he found it past a certain point in his early development, very straitjacketing and reductive. You know, he felt that he was doing his thing and it was the interior life writ large. And it was, you know, maybe to make a comparison with how, you know, the Sufi scholar Henry Corbin writes about it. It’s like a theophanic outpouring, if you get my meaning.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
Absolutely.

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
And, I’m going to jump back to my childhood now because I was brought up in a very syncretic way, you know, with everything from Sufi stories to, you know, Hindu stories, Buddhist ideas. It was very, a very syncretic moment. But interestingly, and in a more playful way, my maternal uncle is actually called Yusef Lateef. Growing up, we knew you know, we knew Yusef Lateef’s music, but there was also a sort of a running joke in our family, like, no, not that Yusef Lateef, the other one. So there was this weird sense, you know, you know how things sometimes when you look back, are harbingers of things to come. And there was a sense that brother Yusuf Lateed, you know, the polymath, was part of our extended family, and yet you know I knew the music very well, I knew about some of the concepts he employed. Even as a young man, his methodology that he termed autophysiopsychic, so even that degree of the amount of thought and I guess spiritual intention that undergirds the work I knew about as a young man. But I didn’t know about the drawing practice. I didn’t know about the writing until much later. I never had the privilege to meet brother, Brother Lateef in his lifetime, but, you know, I do feel we’re kindred spirits. I’ve taken a very long time to answer your question, but I like to think that I’ve spent so much time with, you know, with his his legacy, his archive, his collaborators, his former students, his his widow and others that I would like, you know, And I suppose the attraction to the material was this polymathic spirit, but having that restless spiritual inquiry into into transformation. You know, maybe I don’t know if Brother Lateef would, would agree with this, but I see it as a kind of spiritual alchemy. How do we, how do we refine our inner journey so that it can be shared with others in a way that transforms our collective journey?

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
Tell me more about this project. Take us into it. I understand that it’s an immersive experience that that that the visitor will be fully involved in and in a fully sensory way in something that you and your collaborators have created. Give us a taste of it.

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
Well, I love collaboration. And this one, you know, I suppose it had eight years to kind of really go nuts in terms of the number of collaborations that it features. I mean, there’s a cast list and an ideal cast list. I mean, I got everyone I could possibly want to work with on this project, in this project. And, just to echo what you said about your encounter with the novella Night in the Garden of Love, I mean, that blew… It, it turned me sideways, is probably the most respectful thing I can say about my encounter with that work, and I mean that profoundly. It’s not a throwaway comment. I think the best art of whatever discipline or medium, it turns you sideways and you never see the world the same way again. And just for those who haven’t encountered it, I highly recommend reading it. Dr. Lateef wrote it in it was published in 1988, and it’s an eco sci-fi parable about and just to kind of crazy it, you know, there’s a figure called the Mutant, which is you’re never quite sure a mutant of what. But I did my own kind of riffing on that and thought about it as being maybe an interstitial, you know, human plant hybrid, and the book basically I mean, I’m going to not do it justice. But, you know, there’s a number of characters, but one of the main threads through it is this elderly couple who are led by the mutant from a sort of dystopian Detroit into the Garden of Love, which for me is everything I’d always encountered as a child in terms of the idea of the Sufi garden, how it reaches its highest expression in al-Andalus, in in different moments through history that are, whether it’s sort of Baghdad in the 11th, 12th century, these moments where Islamic culture is multicultural, tolerant, diverse, it’s kind of pushing the boundaries of arts and sciences, which other cultures do at moments. But it’s always these syncretic moments where, phoof, you have this uplifting of the human soul and spirit. and its alchemy that changes our landscape and pulls us out of the gutter and allows us to collaborate and work together. And humanist expansion takes place. You can tell I’m a bit of a wild optimist, despite, you know, the state of the world.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
God, God knows we need optimism today. I appreciate this optimism.

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
I think we have to cling to it and look at ways for it to have meaning, you know, to hold meaning and to hold hope and transformation. In the darkest moments, that’s what we have to fall back on. It’s the power of the human heart and spirit to come together and to transform through love. And I don’t mean that in a sort of throwaway, love with cute bunny rabbits. I mean, something much more profound, a kind of a spiritual love that allows a change in consciousness to take place.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
You are bringing Dr. Lateef’s vision alive and in a way forcing us to, to confront its not only audacity, but its possibility.

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
I would say I think there’s less of a desire to sort of impose. I kind of see it in a more freewheeling way that I’m inviting the audience to come for a walk. You know, to come for a walk in the garden. And what is the garden? You know, I’m making a garden without you know, and I’ll come on to where, where a trace of, of a real plant comes in later. But it’s like the best metaphysical kind of imagination. There’s not a single plant in there but there’s plants depicted. And what is this idea of the sign, the image and the mind? I want to take people, hold their hand and go for a walk and share possibility in the way that you might break bread or have tea together.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
I want to leap into it right now, Shezad. I want to, I want to, I want to go there. I want to go there with you. Shezad —

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
I feel like I’m not telling anybody anything about what they’re actually going to encounter, though, so maybe I should get to the point. And you know, I guess the first part of the process to realize this project was spending time to understand what was going on without claiming that I fully know what’s going on in Dr. Lateef’s drawings. They are a marvel. And, you know, it was only later in the process I understood that he would jump between composition and drawing. And they were kind of, they were parallel processes or perhaps not even as parallel as all that. There was, that was how his day flowed. And, you know, I spent a lot of time with, you know, with his drawings of plants and and and of graphic scores and and started painting large textile works in response. So that’s where the dialogue began.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
Right.

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
And then I was starting to learn more about the particular plants he was fascinated by and could check them with the particular plant species I’m fascinated by. And then it started to become a real dialogue. And then I was like, Oh, now I feel kind of comfortable and confident to think about how to bring some of the images in the book to life. So I started storyboarding a VR experience, which will be part of the exhibition. I just wanted it to be a journey that would work within that medium and was also my bringing of certain scenes to life, which could be distinct from how you saw them in your mind’s eye or any other reader, where they kind of took them. But there’s this beautiful experience where you start in black holes, which is where Dr. Lateef started the novella. And then you fall to earth in a dystopian Detroit and pass through a recycling complex and an encounter with a fly that somehow opens a portal to the Garden of Love. And that’s where it all de-materializes. And I was able to work with Wan-Lun Yu, who’s an amazing Brussels-based choreographer and dancer to be my mutant. And we spent a week working on the choreography of the mutant because the mutant dances through the novella, but there’s no instructions about what that dance looks like. For me, that’s also, it’s a mixture between a sort of humility with regard to the source material, but also an audacity, ie: going, This is audacious material. I have to be audacious in imagining it, even while keeping the humility of my respect for Dr. Lateef and checking in with various people to see if they think I’m, I’m on the right road. Whatever that may be.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
Was there a moment in this process as you’re contending with embracing, wrestling with Yusef Lateef’s work, that you started to have conversations with him even though he wasn’t there?

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
I’ve sort of resisted going there in interviews and how I’ve talked about it. But there’s definitely felt like moments where Brother Yusef was in the room. And I felt like the late comer to the party, you know, in terms of collaborating with so many people who’d known him so well for for decades, literally, when they were validating my what I was doing, my approach and they and so many of them said, you know, have thanked me, which for me was humbling, but you know why it took so long. Itt wasn’t just the book, you know, because if the book is this idea of the transformational potential of the garden as a space, as a meditative, you know, speculative, transformative pathway, let’s call it to not over egg it. But also Lateef’s drawings. There were all these drawings. I mean there’s ones which are interval drawings which are much more related as a sort of almost graphic score. They’re still departing from a standard Western classical score, a stave, you know, with its set parameters. I mean, he was going from interval drawings to cosmic grams with scalar interchanges as a suggested pathway through live performance. But he also did these amazing plant drawings. I’ve spent a lot more time going through the archive in the estate. And and then, you know, you’re like, what are these drawings and how do they work with the novel? And what is going on here? So if the novel is written in a musical meter, the drawings, even of plants, are also graphic scores. This was an amazing revelation to me. Basically, one of Lateef’s long, long term musical collaborators told me about one of the few times his drawings were shown in his lifetime, and he walked into the gallery, pulled out a wooden bamboo flute, and started performing a drawing of a tree.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
The image itself is remarkable. And the vision of an artist to see drawings, visual art and to process them in to sound is for me the alchemy.

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
To me, it’s so ahead of its time. I mean, you know, having spent all these years with it, I, you know, I would even go so far as to say this could this you know, this could radically overhaul our whole educational system. I mean, I’ve always been a champion of interdisciplinarity and thinking limited of the and how you know, I mean, I definitely, you know, for many years after finishing my studies, people go, oh, but you paint and you make films can’t you just pick one? And I remember, like, you know, earlier in my career, it was a difficult moment because it was quite a well reputed gallery and they wanted to work with me, but they were like, Could you just focus on the painting? And it was almost like my inner voice or my higher mind took over, because the young kind of kid trying to make a buck and keep keep doing what he did was wanting to take, Oh, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll sweep the floors, you know, just give me a show, but somehow this voice, a much more mature voice than my own, came out of me and just said, But that would be like asking me to go through life with one arm tied behind my back. I probably didn’t do myself any favors careerwise in a superficial sense, but I did myself… I did the only thing I could do for myself. And, you know, for me, I’m very touched that the idea of being multi-disciplinary or, you know, has become much more accepted. You know, some of the media I work with like textiles, it’s not just relegated to the sort of craft category. There’s an understanding of so many ways to kind of express yourself. but for me, it’s interweaving. When people say, oh, how can you work with something so traditional like textiles and then work in the digital? And I’m like, but a weaving loom as a computer, you know, it’s a binary encoding machine. Actually, no, it’s you who are missing the bigger picture here. These are stages and staggered moments of technological transformation that allow us new pathways to actually externalize the inner mind into the outer world.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
Was there a moment in your childhood, Shezad, that that either, you know, sparked the creative impulse or where you started having a sense of yourself as a… we’re all creators… but as a creator in the way that you have become a creator?

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
Well, I was quite a strange kid. That probably doesn’t come as a surprise. But, you know, I knew it at seven years old, in the same way that people want to be an astronaut or something kind of wonderful like that. You know, family members often thought I was this very strange, stubborn kid, who would amount to nothing, you know, because it was you know, at that stage, it was like, you know, was as a child of an immigrant family, it was, you had to try and, you know, assimilate, you know, have an aspirational career that would help the community. And yet, I guess in some accident of fate, you know, I mentor a lot of younger artists and I think there are many ways to open doors and paths for others, you know, and I think perhaps it’s a nice thing that with generations, as you mention this it can shift.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
Mhm. Well that seven year old Shezad, when he realizes, I’m an artist, I’m a creator. How do you get to that point, Shezad, where you see yourself as creator first and the materials are almost secondary, it feels right. Yeah. Like I’m a visual artist. I’m like you said, and you had this audacity at a very young age, even to challenge the establishment and kind of say, No, I’m not going to be boxed in. This is who I am, this is how I operate, this is how this is how my creative flow works. And if there’s that kind of process, isn’t it, to get you to that point? I’m fascinated by that.

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
I guess, trying to think back, it’s trying to overcome your own insecurity. You know, that moment when your larger self or your higher mind speaks for you. And I think we’re always negotiating between our, you know, our meek voice and our higher mind. And that’s the right thing because somewhere in between those two poles, we find our natural balance. So it’s. It’s not that one is always wrong and one is always right. I think we really need to kind of move out of these binary categories that limit ourselves from kind of stretching our empathy, our possibility. So for me, it’s coming into being. And knowing that from a very young age that I will be this. I may not be it yet, but I will be this. And that’s the higher mind sort of drip feeding you a sense of trajectory, a sense of possibility. And then, I suppose, you know, not wanting to work with one medium, I think there’s some things that you can do or you can’t do. And it struck me as irrational. And that’s not to put down some very dear friends who focus on their medium and produce things that I couldn’t produce. And I’m in awe of what they do and that level of focus. But equally, I wouldn’t say it’s because I’m unfocused, but my focus works more in Constellation. Part of my time spent with something is to kind of absorb it, that osmosis to take place where I can slowly start to find what is the right and natural expression for what I’ve learned. And, you know, in this case, the dialog with Brother Yusef wasn’t wasn’t singular. There was something very of a piece with my creative outpouring that I found that what he was doing between the book, between the drawings, between the music. [gasps] It was so… It was so wonderfully rich and fulfilling for me to kind of learn and understand it better, because it’s in those spaces that I like to play and operate, cause I never believe in the form of things. So for me, it’s like, oh, the paintings, the paintings kind of help the audience understand. Hopefully take them, help them understand what’s going on in Brother Yousef’s drawings. because I’ve put in the time to try and understand those drawings and how they function, because they function in multiple directions. You know, just the fact that he can play one. But they’re also an esthetic illustrative representation of something, but they’re not. And that’s when something becomes interesting because it’s not just what it appears to be.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
I mean, it’s a challenging idea for an artist to tell us that the form is okay, but it’s not about the form. As you were saying that I’m immediately feeling the paradox of that statement, but also the truth of that statement. And I think because you play in this fascinating liminal space between the virtual, the technological and the natural and the organic, I think something fascinating is going on there. And of course, Night in the Garden of Love is not the first project that you’ve done that occupies this space. I’m thinking about the VR piece that I think was called The Terrarium. Wasn’t it, that you imagined a kind of a virtual world. And even viewing it, through my computer screen and trying to understand it, there was a really interesting tension between nature and technology and technology and fantasy and fantasy and nature. And those are all playing. It feels like you’re playing with all of those things. And yet to bring it back to what you just said, you’re kind of asking us to go elsewhere with it, I mean because there is a tension there, isn’t there?

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
I think, you know, it’s trying to sort of draw attention to maybe the sort of larger tensions that are part of the human condition. Because I mean, for me, like just to choose one as a sort of example that’s maybe helpful for listeners. Where does science and science fiction elide? And people go, Oh, well, one’s way over here and one’s over here. But, I can just sort of go, What about Asimov’s Laws of Robotics? I’m sorry, but our imaginary is the source of discovery. You know, I love reading Hawking and Penrose on black holes because it reads to me like poetry. It’s like Vedic poetry of the beginning and the end. It’s like a hymn. Nothing is ever just what it appears to be. If we see with our eyes open and clear, everything gives onto a vista of the next field, and particularly this thing between nature, you know, nature and fantasy. I think we need to understand that a painting… why is it some paintings have historical longevity? It’s not because they fulfill a archival function, i.e. they are a marker of what that landscape looked like in 1820. It’s because they show us what that landscape may look like in a transformational vector. And it’s also why, when I work with VR and other digital media, you know, I find it sort of rather funny because you have a lot of people working in those technologies trying to recreate the real. And I’m like, No, somebody already did that. And much better. I can just go out into the park by my house and narrow my focus to a patch of grass this big. And there is life and there is geometry and there is color and tone and beauty, and the whole universe is in that microcosm. So why would I try and reproduce that? But what can I do that perhaps describes something about the inner life? What can I do that bridges that gap between the inner life and the outer life? About transformation, about potential. You know, with the Terrarium, it was to imagine. And it was quite beautiful cause I got to work with these amazing scientists, from evolutionary geneticists to marine biologists to paleoclimatologists, to think about the Baltic Sea in 300 years. So there is a degree of science fact that went into that piece, but it also goes into space opera. And for me, it’s like, what is that curve? Where does it accelerate from fact into fiction? And is that transition as clear as we might like to believe?

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIKShezad, I wonder if you could tell me about a joy or a meanness that recently came to you as an unexpected visitor.

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
Well… my father is very seriously ill at the moment. And that’s been taking up a lot of my thought, my attention and my energy and he’s basically going to have to go through a number of months of physiotherapy to learn how to speak again. Before he went into the hospital, we had lunch just on Sunday and he was overjoyed because he’d found an app that he’d trained with 150 phrases to speak in his voice so that he would still be able to talk to his grandchildren. But that’s not the end of it, because he then shared with me that he’d managed to also teach it to swear in Urdu.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
(laughs) Love it. I love it.

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
And I didn’t anticipate that in such a difficult moment for both of us, we would suddenly be cackling with laughter. It was such a joyous moment. And, you know, it’s been a very interesting time because I’ve been so focused on that in a way. I’m also kind of heartbroken by what’s happening in the world. But it’s, you know, the personal to the larger picture. Sometimes we struggle to hold multiple things and then somehow the very fact that my old dad had hacked the A.I. to swear in his voice in Urdu was hilarious. And I hadn’t I hadn’t laughed that much in a while.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK
Shezad Dawood, this has been this has been an honor and a privilege, and this conversation has been so heartening at at a time of of heartbreak. And I and I owe you a great debt and a thanks for that.

SHEZAD DAWOOD:
No, thank you. It’s been such a pleasure talking to you, Abdul Rehman. And, you know, I’m you know, and I apologize that we roamed all over the place, but I think that sound I think that’s probably, you know, your house style anyway.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:

 

Thank you for listening to This Being Human. Shezad’s work Night in the Garden of Love is currently on display at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, where it will remain until May 2024. We’ll include links in the show notes to see samples of this project and others.

 

This Being Human is produced by Antica Productions in partnership with TVO. Our Senior Producer is Kevin Sexton. Our associate producer is Emily Morantz. Our executive producer is Laura Regehr. Stuart Coxe is the president of Antica Productions.

 

Mixing and sound design by Phil Wilson. Original music by Boombox Sound.

 

Shaghayegh Tajvidi is TVO’s Managing Editor of Digital Video and Podcasts. Laurie Few is the executive for digital at TVO.

 

This Being Human is generously supported by the Aga Khan Museum. Through the arts, the Aga Khan Museum sparks wonder, curiosity, and understanding of Muslim cultures and their connection with other cultures. For more information about the museum go to www.agakhanmuseum.org

 

The Museum wishes to thank The Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation for their generous support of This Being Human.