Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi work collaboratively from their New York base and Karachi, employing imagery that draws heavily from global media, advertising, and the visual culture of South Asia.

'They Made History' is a series of circular lightboxes portraying iconic non-Western figures in social history: the faces of Geronimo, Zapata, Gandhi, Malcolm X, Genghis Khan, the Empress of China, the Mahdi of Sudan and the King of Siam - set against appropriately transcendent backgrounds of sunsets, cascading waterfalls, snow-capped mountains and infinite space - illuminate the world with rays of visionary light. Closer inspection, however, reveals a charade: it is the image of Denzel Washington - not the real Malcolm X - that glows before us; the King of Siam turns out to be Yul Brynner in 'The King and I'; that there's Ben Kingsley as Gandhi, Chuck Connors as Geronimo and John Wayne's Genghis Khan.



Popular iconography is again interrogated in 'Clash of Civilisations', a new series of large digital images that parody cinema billboards. The series takes its title from Samuel Huntington's controversial thesis of an irreconcilable and enduring conflict between the West and other civilisations, especially the world of Islam... The 'West and the Rest' (monumentally emblazoned on another of their billboard works) distinction has been reinforced in the wake of the events of September 11th, but it was already a deeply entrenched trope in popular American cinema. The Dadi's exploit this ideologically-charged imagery to highlight the absurdity of these simplistic assumptions. In the context of the potential bombing of Iraq, this work is highly pertinent and visually stunning.





Both of these bodies of works were shown at the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art International Exhibition 2002 from 14th September to 24th November 2002. Thanks to Bryan Biggs for the use of sections of his essay from the Biennial catalogue.

A slideshow of documentation of the exhibition in situ together with images of the poster works going up: