Navine G. Dossos is a visual artist working between London and Athens. Her interests include Orientalism in the digital realm, geometry as information and decoration, image calibration, and Aniconism in contemporary culture. She has developed a form of geometric abstraction that merges the traditional Aniconism of Islamic art with the algorithmic nature of the interconnected world we live in. This is not the formal abstraction we understand from the western history of art, but something essentially informational, and committed to investigation and communication.
Dossos studied History of Art at Cambridge University, Arabic at Kuwait University, Islamic Art at the Prince’s School of Traditional Art in London, and holds an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design, London. From 2014-15 she was a participant at the Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands. She has exhibited and worked with The 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, The 12th Taipei Biennial; The Showroom, London; SALT, Istanbul; The Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Delfina Foundation, London; Benaki Museum of Islamic Art, Athens and A.M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah. She is a member of the Substantial Motion Research Network.
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Over six months in 2018, artist Navine G. Dossos held workshops with patients in the Grand Union and Great Western wards, the Allergy and Outpatients departments at the St Mary’s Hospital, as well as at The Showroom. Together, they made a series of collages looking at the relationship between colours, and thought about what colours they would like to see in the hospital’s walls, the ceilings, the doors, and the furniture. POLYCHROMY PLAYS was the resulting project: a functional colour palette generated from these discussions, collages, and paintings, which can be potentially used in the future. It was made by giving the patients agency in their environment, and allowing them to imagine ways to improve the spaces in which they found themselves for short, long, or intermittent stays. They, better than anyone else, know what it is like to spend time in these spaces and should be part of the dialogue about how to improve the way they feel during their treatment. Colour has an important role to play in this discussion.
In June 2019 Dossos' project There Is No Alternative opened at The Showroom. This performative, durational installation combined live painting, a research archive, and a series of workshops, talks, and events open to the public. The project, Dossos’ first in a UK public institution, featured her on-going research into the complex context of the UK government’s development of pre-crime and surveillance policies, questioning the politics of representation and the positioning of care that the strategies around those policies generate.
In April 2021 Dossos' project TINA – There Is No Alternative was first published. This publication, co-published by The Showroom and Chateau International, takes as a starting point Dossos’ ongoing research into the complex context of the UK government’s development of pre-crime and surveillance policies, in particular Prevent, questioning the politics of representation and the positioning of care that the strategies around those policies generate.
Website: khandossos.com