When Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who criticized the Saudi government, was a columnist at the Washington Post, he settled in the Virginia suburb of McLean. Now, more than four years after his brutal murder – which sparked outrage around the world – at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, a large-scale public work reflecting his life and career is on display in the state where he resided.
Commissioned by the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) at Virginia Commonwealth University, the work, McLean (2023), by Navine G. Dossos, occupies a large part of the ICA’s paneled façade. It’s made of vinyl that showcases bold patterns and symbols arranged in a grid, evoking a zany comforter or tiled floor. The symbols, ranging from a video camera to a diamond ring, allude to aspects of Khashoggi’s life.
“A lot of how we think about this particular journalist is tied to the horrific circumstances of his death,” Dossos says, alluding to Khashoggi’s grisly ambush, strangulation and dismemberment by a team of murderers. “For me, the job was not just about that, it was also about reflecting on who he was as a person and the situation that made us more aware of the vulnerability of journalists.”
McLean was unveiled four months after a US judge dismissed the case against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who allegedly ordered Khashoggi’s murder. The journalist went to the Saudi consulate to obtain documents that would allow him to marry his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, and never reappeared. While Mohammed bin Salman has been implicated in a CIA report, the Saudi government has denied any connection to the murder.
Dossos, who is based in Greece, produces work inspired by Islamic art and geometric abstraction that often engages in the digital realm. For the facade of the ICA, she revived an earlier work she had begun to produce in 2018 in response to Khashoggi’s death. She was living in Istanbul when news of her disappearance surfaced.
“Systems of Violence”
“It tapped into some of the things I had been working on in Istanbul in terms of the visibility of violence and systems of violence in hidden spaces, whether domestic spaces or institutional spaces,” says Dossos.
She combed through the news for articles related to Khashoggi, creating a painting each day in response to the stories. The resulting work No such organization (2018-20), consists of 100 watercolors depicting symbols related to surveillance technology and key players in the case, arranged in a dynamic composition.
Navine G.Dossos, McLean, 2023, printed adhesive vinyl, variable. I CA
Commission. Photo by David Hale, courtesy of VCU Institute of Contemporary Art
ICA senior curator Sarah Rifky, who first met Dossos in 2011, said she wanted to find a way to ‘turn the whole building upside down’ when she arrived. at the ICA in 2021. The first facade work she helped curate was by Luis Camnitzer, and she wanted to follow up with “a work that both introduced a new artistic language to the city and was also linked to the politics of where we are,” she says. “Almost instantly when I contacted Navine, she offered to adapt the project No such organization which was commissioned by the Van Abbemuseum, and which focused on the murder and case of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The job was considered in a flash.
McLean, on view until January 2024, adapts this large-scale work, functioning almost like a monument. Dossos produced 100 gouache paintings measuring nearly one square meter each which were then translated into digital images and reproduced as UV-resistant vinyl. Motives are suggestive but not didactic, and encourage curiosity and progressive engagement in the journalist’s life in a way that is different from the appeal of a headline.
“We live in this media loop where as soon as something comes off the front page, it just disappears,” Dossos says. “We live in the drama, the horror and the terror, but we don’t necessarily hold that space, to see how it plays out in the real world. My work tries to reclaim that space – I want to create a space where we can deal with the subject, but not just repeat the violence.
- Navine G. Dossos: McLeanuntil January 7, 2024, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia
