Navine G. Khan-Dossos. No Such Organisation

About

NOME is pleased to present Navine G. Khan-Dossos’s second solo show at the gallery, which coincides with the opening of our new space on Potsdamer Straße.

No Such Organisation (2018–2020) is a series of one hundred paintings that represent the fallout from the assassination of Saudi-Arabian dissident, columnist, and news editor Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. In Navine G. Khan-Dossos’s characteristically vibrant, aniconistic painting style, the cycle of works, twenty of which are on display, chronicles the repercussions of the event sequentially, through the journalistic and juridical investigations it triggered. The artist perceived the case and its connected themes of cyberweapons, spyware, and the contemporary stakes of journalism, as a kaleidoscope of tumbling details. And yet, the case remains without a central visual figure, as Khashoggi’s body was never recovered. Into this absence of images, the series deploys symbolic elements to stand in for players in the story – nation states, agencies and technologies – which shift into new alignments with each iteration, resisting final judgement.

Similarly relying upon a combination of structure, form and colour to express complex narratives – and also organised by a 3×3 grid – Silent Latitude (2019) is a collaboratively made quilt by many women in different places. The work began with a series of watercolour designs produced in Athens with the Greek Transgender Support Association (GTSA), which were then reworked and fabricated by the women of MIA-H, a Belgian textile workshop. The title Silent Latitude refers to the poetry of Hadewijch, a thirteenth-century Flemish lay nun, in lineage with the textile production of Beguine communities, as well as to the apparent divide between the European North and South, the two sites of production of the work. The quilt is co-owned by the artist and the GTSA, with any proceeds equally divided in recognition of the shared labour. In both series, the individual squares may stand alone, and also interact to form larger configurations of pattern and signification.