Having worked on three publication projects with artist Shezad Dawood – Feature: Reconstruction (Book Works, 2008), Piercing Brightness (Modern Art Oxford, 2012) and Black Sun (Ridinghouse, 2013) – we have on and off been in conversation about working together again, but things never coalesced into something concrete, until recently. Shezad had been working with curator Jessica Cerasi on an exhibition that would go live at the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi in April this year. He contacted me late February to see whether I’d be interested in getting involved. A lot was already in place, including a series of texts – one by Jessica, another by Nicolas Bourriaud, who had included him in the Tate Triennial he curated in 2009, and one by Minah Lee, curator at SeMA in Seoul, to which an iteration of the show would travel later in the year, as well as a conversation between Shezad and Zoé Whitly, while Reem Fadda would contribute the foreword.
The invitation included me considering the essays and their overlaps and differences and identifying potential gaps, but there was another element to it: the ask was whether I’d be interested to come on board as consulting editor, to work with everyone involved – including Shezad’s fastidious studio manager, Karolina Svobodova, and Fraser Muggeridge studio’s Libby Higgins, who would do the design, in collaboration with Shezad himself – to ensure that Shezad’s sensibility would remain legible while navigating a complex network of expectations and demands from various parties, among which also publishers Skira. Like previous books we’d worked on, Skin of Dreams was conceived of as convergence of genres, in this case a catalogue-cum-artist book, the impact of which not necessarily be appreciated by everyone in equal measure.
In the end I did do all the copy-editing, working closely with the authors, and also responded to the image sections that Shezad and Libby cooked up. Collaborating with Shezad and Karolina I suggested a combination of a list of works, commission contexts, collection attributions and image credits, which turned into quite a task, particularly for Karolina, but which does various jobs while avoiding endless repetitions. The new label of ‘consulting editor’ – suggested to separate my role from Karolina’s and Jessica’s – has given me food for though. I’ve come to realise that a lot of my work has in recent years shifted towards capacities that do have affinity with consulting. As a matter of fact, I have been working on four entirely different projects in which consulting is a core element of what I offer, alongside still doing some, if not all, of the nitty gritty editing legwork. Even though the word feels quite corporate, when thinking about how one credits and acknowledges collaborative scenarios while still appreciating different roles and capacities, I do think it offers potential.
