Ghasan Saaid : Revealing and Concealing

25 May to 28 June 2020

Cognitive Dissonance . paint and mixed media on alupanel and perspex .
123cm x 90cm

Memory is a complicated process, shaped by remembering and forgetting, inscription and eradication, existence and absence.
In his recent exhibition at the Cumberland City Council’s Peacock gallery in Sydney artist Ghasan Saaid states that:

“We create our own past from fragments of reality in a process that
combines the intentional aspects of remembering and forgetting with
the unpredicted and unconscious. I aim to make artworks to evince
a preoccupation with the phenomena of making the familiar strange
and metaphorical, whilst demonstrating the procedure that forms our
inner scenery”.

Ghasan Saaid’s artistic practice encompasses cross media art making, digital imaging, and art photography.
He was born in Sudan and trained at the College of Fine and Applied Arts, Sudan University of Science and Technology. In June 2008 Saaid finished a Masters Degree in photo media at Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University. He currently working in the area of photography, painting, filmmaking and installation. He has had more than 70 solo and group exhibitions mainly in Sydney, Melbourne, Norway and Hong Kong.

Saaid’s work invites us to reflect on healing as a resistance act. The work Cognitive Dissonance is influenced by x-rays of a heads, representing the chaos of information gushing through the brain. Psychologist Leon Festinger suggests a theory of cognitive dissonance centred on how people try to reach internal consistency. He argues that people have an inner need to ensure that their beliefs and behaviours are consistent. Cognitive dissonance is the mental conflict that results from holding two conflicting beliefs. Sometimes people attempt to ease this conflict by avoiding new information. But information allows us to expand our knowledge beyond the range of our senses.

Foucault’s work can be seen to address this space, introducing the term power-knowledge. He explains that power and knowledge are inherently related, knowledge is always an exercise of power and power always a

function of knowledge. However, more recently ‘information’ has become a central term. Especially with the growing use of the Internet , information is increasingly seen as the means to generate knowledge and power relations. But Foucault emphasises that where there is power, there is resistance.
In other words resistance is people’s response against abuses of power and oppression.
Resistance is a theme that occurs throughout this exhibition. It is more obvious in the piece titled Resistance where a chandelier embedded in concrete at an odd angle continues to glare.

Ahmed Adam