Piercing Brightness as an Exploration of the An-archic Imaginary (in conversation with Mark Bartlett)

Over the summer of 2011, Shezad Dawood went into production on his first feature film: Piercing Brightness, in Preston, Lancashire, in the North-West of England, after two years of research in the city, and in wider networks and archives suggested by this initial research. Interested in any case in the interplay between existing and self-created archives, for the artist the project became a way to explore the hybrid and allegorical potential of overlapping different film and video formats and different sets of meanings. As an additional layer, and based on Dawood’s interest in how artist’s film was and might be read between cinema and gallery, Dawood also made two additional ‘cuts’ of Piercing Brightness: Trailer, a 15-minute version for gallery installation (that plays with the semantics of cinema, yet altering and transferring them to the gallery), and a special 40-minute version, only to be performed with a live score by Acid Mothers Temple, or Alexander Tucker’s Decompressed Orchestra (playing with Dawood’s interest in both expanded cinema and improvised music). These approaches are further interrogated and discussed in the following dialogue between Dawood, and academic and art/film historian Mark Bartlett, who became a regular interlocutor of Dawood’s in the lead-up to and over the course of the production. Their ongoing conversation looks at the concept of an an-archive, in relation to Foucault’s citation of Borges: ‘alter-taxonomy’ in relation to the overarching schemata of Piercing Brightness, presented here as a series of image grids.