Said Dokins

Biography

Said Dokins (Mexico, 1983) Lives and works in Mexico City. He studied in the School of Arts and Design (ENAP) in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and did some courses of Philosophy and Art Theory. He has also studied traditional calligraphy with well-known national and international calligraphers and Japanese calligraphy. Since the 90s he started doing graffiti and street interventions.

Said Dokins explores formally, symbolically and philosophically the potentiality of words and letters. In his work, they become gestures, traces that overlap creating patterns, textures, narratives; marks that carve sites, drawing boundaries, producing meaning. In that sense, for Dokinscalligraphy and graffiti are a way to understand our relations with language, an action that stresses time, space and memory, a political enunciation.

These reflexions become evident in Apparitions (2011), an installation that explores with the tension between memory and concealment, regarding to the victims of political “disappearance” (clandestine and unclarified abductions) in Mexico. This piece, exhibited for the first time in The House ofIndomitable Memory, has been honored with the Iberoamerican Award to Contemporary Artistic Creation Cortes de Cádiz, “Juan Luis Vasallo” 2015.

Dokins has won international attention for his monumental murals in the public space. One of the latest is Chalchihuite (2017), a calligraphic intervention done for the Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art, MUCA, the biggest mural in Munich, with over 1200 square meters. His mural interventions often address social and political issues, like The Order Crumbles (2016), a graffiti bomb painted in Mexicali, at the border between Mexico and United States or American WomenFighter (2016), a mural for Coachella Walls Festival, where he included the names of women and collectives from the Americas that have fought for their civil rights.
He is best known for his unique calligraphic style, which combines elements from Western and Asian Calligraphic Traditions, with pre-phonetic writing references, Mesoamerican Pre-Hispanic symbolic inheritance and Graffiti writing. However, his artistic practice involves several disciplines and media such as calligraphy, graffiti, installation, performance and video art, among others.

It’s worth to mention his concern about light that has lead him to experiment with various technologies and media, including Virtual Reality, through Tilt Brush a tool he explored in the Google Cultural Institute in Paris. Another recent example is his project Heliographies of Memory(2015-2017), which examines the different levels in which inscriptions operate through light calligraphy actions performed in symbolically charged places, capturing the action of writing with long exposure photography: invisible inscriptions of light resignifying the space they cross.

Dokins cultural practice involves artistic creation, interventions in the public space, research, curatorship and cultural management. As a curator, he has developed diverse projects linked related to urban art and contemporary art practices that address social and political issues. Stand out VisibleInvisibilization. Approaches to the Subject of Violence (2013-2014), and UrbanInterstices, International Exhibition of Urban Arts, (2011), a paradigmatic show that depicted a cartography of urban artistic practices in Latin America.

He is a member of recognized international associations like Calligraphy Masters and Calligraffiti.His work has been published in noted books and magazines, like Re_form, OSTRALE Biennale of Dresden Catalogue, The Art of Writing your Name, The Art of Rebellion, third and fourth volumes, or Letter Arts Review, a renowned calligraphy publication. It has been exhibited nationally and internationally, in countries as Spain, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, United Kingdom, France, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, Peru and others.

Source: saiddokins.com