Description
TINA – There Is No Alternative is a new publication that builds upon the eponymous exhibition that took place at The Showroom between 5 June–17 July 2019; the first solo commission in the UK by artist Navine G. Khan-Dossos. This major trans-disciplinary commission took shape as a performative, durational installation combining live painting, a research archive and a series of workshops, talks, and events open to the public, supported by Goethe-Institut, London.
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The exhibition and publication take as a starting point Khan-Dossos’s ongoing research into the complex context of the UK government’s development of pre-crime and surveillance policies, in particular Prevent (a pre-crime prevention initiative that forms part of the United Kingdom’s counter-terrorism strategy), questioning the politics of representation and the positioning of care that those policies generate. At the core of the project is the act of questioning what an alternative to Prevent could look like, both visually and sociologically. Working with philosophical principles of image and space-building from the tradition of aniconism within Islamic art – where it becomes possible to represent the un-representable through analogies with geometry – Khan-Dossos’ hand-painted and collaboratively produced murals explore ideas of authenticity, appropriation, positionality and the possibility of generating new visual languages in the context of transgressive political and conceptual frameworks. Amid the socio-political aftermath almost two decades after the US declaration of the War on Terror, the resurgence of right-wing nationalisms worldwide and current attacks on the freedom of assembly and protest, There Is No Alternative explores the limits of a politics of fear, its visual representation, and current systems of representational democracy.
Texts in the book include new essays by Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Rob Faure Walker and Lily Hall alongside contributing writers who have engaged in written dialogues: Sadia Habib, Hassan Vawda, Rachel Coldicutt, Tarek Younis, Shezana Hafiz & Azfar Shafi from advocacy organisation CAGE, and William Skeaping from Extinction Rebellion. A text by Alexander Massouras, revised from his exhibition review of There Is No Alternative for Art Monthly in 2019, is also included.
Navine G. Khan-Dossos
Co-published with The Showroom
First edition, 2021
Edition of 300
297 x 210mm
126 pages
Soft cover with contrast wraparound and PVC sleeve; contrast stitching
ISBN: 978-1-8380450-0-5
Designed by Mark Hurrell
Printed by NPN Drukkers
Production costs: £12.26 per unit
