Shiraz Sadikeen is the 2024 Gasworks artist in residence, a three-month programme at the London gallery supported by the British Council, Emma Lewisham, the Jan Warburton Charitable Trust and the Office of Contemporary Art Aotearoa. Every year, the residency supports an artist to pursue practice-based research responding to the context of the city. We spoke to Sadikeen about how he’ll be using this opportunity, and his time at Gasworks so far.

You have proposed to use your time at Gasworks researching the relationship between the United Kingdom and Aotearoa New Zealand. With the shift to a global system of commerce and politics that has in some ways decentred the old imperial powers, why hone in on the relationship between motherland and colony? What about that relationship remains distinct or appears instructive to you?

My proposal was a simple response to the prompt in the residency application, which suggested a research project that had something to do with London as the geographical context for the residency.

I wasn’t that interested in London per se, and didn’t really foreground colonial history or the postcolonial relationship between the two countries so much as the common ideological framework of both countries’ Labour parties, and the prospects and problems of social democracy … Obviously, the imperial legacy of British colonialism continues to overdetermine this terrain and produces problems for the forms of liberalism that continue to play out here and in Aotearoa, so it’s a consideration for sure, which the work I’ve been making here addresses in its particular way. Over this period, I’ve been making stuff that deals with political economy, race and theology. The phrase ‘bread-and-butter issues’ has been a guiding thread.

You arrived in the UK in September, a short time after their national election and the racist riots that broke out in early August. Have these circumstances impacted the trajectory of your research at all?

Not really, maybe just bleakly confirmed the ‘contemporaneity’ of the themes that I’m working with. Artistically encouraging, politically dispiriting. Displacement is an important

strategy in your work, a way of thinking the political and social conditions of objects that, in their ‘proper’ places, might appear to be neutral.

This can be contentious, as in the case of your recent work Small Plate (2024), which used a cell-door lock from Mount Eden prison as an incense holder. Is ‘displacement’ ever a euphemism for extraction? How do you approach that proximity?

A basic thing that all artists do is move stuff around, de- and re-contextualise materials, and through this treatment transform them into artworks to be contemplated and interpreted as such. Maybe it would be interesting to connect the formal transformations given effect in works such as Small Plate to a psychoanalytic idea of displacement, which might give one a conceptual insight into the controversy surrounding that work … I take it that the term ‘extraction’ here refers to a particularly brutal form of exploitative appropriation that, as the artist, I personally benefit from, whether in the form of cash or clout. I won’t attempt any self-justification here, except to say that exploitation and social domination are basic features of our world and are necessarily congealed in the objects and commodities that populate it. Art objects are no exception. It’s important to think this through when selecting materials to be used, as it bears on the meaning of the work … I would also say that, for both artist and audience, art can sometimes be painful, and not obviously morally ennobling. There is an anti-aesthetic dimension to all my work. For those that are interested in thinking about the meaning of Small Plate in a broader context, I would say that it is conceptually continuous with my ‘Securicraft’ series, which I exhibited at Coastal Signs in 2021.

The idea behind displacement presumes that distance and disruption can effect a change in perspective—a presumption that arguably also underpins the concept of an artist’s residency. What has leaving Aotearoa to live in London brought into focus for your thinking about your country of residence?

Hmm, just some superficial things. I would say firstly that the quality of contemporary art here is not necessarily better than in New Zealand, it’s just that the economy is larger and there is more stuff on. That the public transport situation in New Zealand is so backward it’s almost funny. And that bustling, dense, multicultural cities are exciting and cool. We should want that!