Shaan Syed

I & I

September27 – November 22 2015

For Shaan Syed’s (b. 1975, lives and works in London) solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Winterthur, I & I, the artist presents a selection of new oil paintings, and for the first time, a large scale wall painting and sound installation.
Attraction and repulsion, direction, separation, energy, and entropy are fundamental and recurring components of Shaan Syed’s discourse. This is explored foremost on a formal level through Syed’s paintings. The substantive implications are however by no means accidental. Basic emotions such as longing, hatred, love, or happiness for Syed are each specific power constellations; they are relational dispositions of desire; approximations, rejections, attentions, and separations.
Syed’s first ever sound work, A is for Anarchy, is based on a list of words originally written down in his sketchbook; it contains words for an uncompleted children's book which, due to their complexity, defied easy representation. Using Google translate, the words were translated into German and subsequently read by a native English speaker. Alternately, the original English list was recited by a native German speaker.
The dynamics of translation and language are inherent to the exhibition’s title I & I, which indulges its own pictorial beauty. Reminiscent of slogans such as Me, Myself and I, for Syed it is also a reference to Imi Knoebel, who in the 1960s called himself Imi, just as his friend Rainer Giese did, and together they exhibited and became known under the pseudonym of Imi & Imi. The exhibition’s title thus not so much doubles the own ego, but points towards finding oneself in or creating a counterpart. On occasion of the exhibition at Kunsthalle, a comprehensive catalogue is published by Snoeck, Cologne. It offers a substantial overview of Shaan Syed’s work with an essay by curator Oliver Kielmayer.

Oliver Kielmayer