Silk examples

Kamil Dossar’s artistic output—films, paintings, and collages—builds chains of association often employing pop cultural references, animation, and avatars to ponder systemic images of migration, state craft, and outcast, invisible identities.Dossar’s current exhibition developed from the Fahrenheit – artist’s first comprehensive institutional project at O-Overgaden, where he examined mechanisms through which otherness emerges. This specific type of otherness, tied to his family history, comes from a collision between Western cultural codes and images of post-war Iraq. Dossar, by employing different strategies of image transformation, reveals how ostensibly neutral systems—from the musical canon to visual clichés—can operate as instruments of projection and exclusion. 

What I find interesting is to exercise the suspension between noise and representation. What is familiarized, and what slips out of recognition? Is it purely sensorial, or do we perceive through a pre-conditioned gaze? And if so, what underlying machinations define the way we perceive form? 

The collages in the exhibition function as a visual matrices where the form is simultaneously constructed and destabilized. Dossar employs strategies akin to pointillism, though he treats them not as historical idioms but as a tool for image creation. Those compositions introduce a quasi-computational dimension. As a result, the works remain in a state of controlled yet uncertain mode, oscillating between a defined representation and a visual noise. The recurring motif is the hand—multiplied and subjected to processes of fragmentation—acquiring an almost iconographic status. 

Drawing hands has almost become a meta: the creator, the floating hands of omnipotency, manipulation, trickery. There are many associations to be made about hands, and also the way in which they are drawn. Somehow, this recursive subject mirrors my video work, with AI and music and so on.

Fahrenheit (2026) is a short film addressing Dossar’s own orientalist gaze toward post-war Iraq. Observing his late father, a political refugee from Iraq, studying Bach, in an attempt to find solace in Europe, became the point of departure for reflecting on the consequences of alienation and processes of othering within a modern world.  Through a custom-designed script based on deepfake AI technology, human figures are transformed into reptile-like creatures. The Otherassumes the form of a generic rendering of a monster. The monstrosity appears to be the result of estrangement in the world regulated by cultural hierarchies. The Western universalism of Bach’s music and images of post-war Iraq become two worlds set on a collision course: a reptile performing the Goldberg Variations for a post-war Iraq inhabited by reptiles.