Coastal Signs is pleased to present Ends, a solo exhibition of new work by Shiraz Sadikeen.

Ends is an acerbic, bleak, but not unfunny rumination on time, death, and shit, the project of history, and what happens to the products of history (art, people, everything) when they are past their use-by.

The exhibition comprises new painting and sculpture made from dislocated and manipulated images, objects, and documents. Cardboard boxes, cockroach traps, clocks, are presented in proximity to a re-made Dubuffet painting, medical supplies, labour time-sheets, an anti-communist pamphlet, and an extract from a Statistics New Zealand life table that charts the population’s mortality.

Sadikeen again employs simple techniques to abstract work from source; to solve the riddle of Ends, the artist invites the viewer to attend to a work’s form, to how things look. Wrist watches are taken apart and put back together with coins, keys, and grubby wax. Images are cropped and reversed, to cypher the message and double as a mirror for the viewer to find themselves in. The prevailing tone of the exhibition is brown - the incidental result of a mass of waste boiled down and glued back together, the dank brown of recycled cardboard and MDF.

Shiraz Sadikeen (b. 1989) completed a BA (International Relations) at Victoria University Wellington in 2013, and a BFA and an MFA art Elam School of Fine Arts in 2018 and 2020 respectively. Recent exhibitions include: Securicraft, Coastal Signs, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (2021); Uncomfortable Silence, Christchurch Art Gallery (2020); Geist, Neo Gracie (2019); and Trust (with Rea Burton) Furniture Gallery (2019).