HYPERDEATH-DRIVE (HDD), 2022-2024.
HDD is a multilayered body of work exploring ideas of failure through photography, sculpture and digital collage. Surrounding concepts of materiality, tactility and transformation run throughout Azab’s practice , focussing on relationships between the subconscious space, self and current ideologies. Through industrial image making processes such as e-com photography and post production, HDD distorts surfaces and boundaries between the screen, image and object, transforming materials and photographs into surreal and abstract composites of the everyday. Using consumerism as starting point, the ongoing body of work confronts issues of mass-production, globalisation and ideological shifts within contemporary landscapes.
Saturated through everyday life, powerful forces have commodified the self in an attempt to shape a brave new world, changing how ‘I’ is perceived through objects, images and information. Azab sources a constellation of objects and images from personal archives, downloaded images and everyday discoveries to construct layers and fragments of digital and physical material that appear and disappear. Throughout the work, Azab seeks to express and confront frictions between the ideal, fictional and real spaces within capitalist systems, reflecting upon deconstructive phycological effects of automated and mediated experiences of culture, knowledge and production. Revealing a processes of homogenisation and commodification of the subconscious and memory. Significantly, through ideas of magic, subversion and perspective, HDD forms a discussion around the exchange of knowledge and labour within contemporary social, political and cultural battlegrounds.