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jad dahshan

@jad.dddddddd

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artist, writer, researcher
"In Filth It Will Be Found" at Jacaranda Images till Nov 9
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Portrait In Retrograde, 2026 by @jad.dddddddd

Forms of Divination, 2026
One week left to see "In Filth It Will Be Found" at @jacaranda.images

One of the most shocking scenes in the 1973 classic horror film, The Exorcist, was far from supernatural. It depicted the protagonist receiving a cerebral angiography, a medical imaging technique used to visualize blood vessels in the brain; before the fact of her possession was accepted, her mother believed her strange behaviour to be neurological in nature. Below it is a drawing of coffee grounds I saw on Dec 3, 2025. And in the border of this drawing: the classic roses and lillies pattern often appearing on the back of Rider-Waite Smith Tarot decks.

This drawing is probably my favorite in the show, and a rare instance of something turning out better than I had imagined.

It's kind of the sister to Drink Deep, you'll notice parallels in the borders; I tried mirroring classic Tarot motifs with traditional Circassian ones, and the arrangements of the motifs are inversions of the other. by @jad.dddddddd

Drink Deep / برك الملح 2026

The preoccupation with hellmouths throughout this body of work has maybe most obviously been abou an interest in portals and contemporary visions of apocalypse as well as entryways into the unconscious. But just as much, it's also been about hunger, as is obvious in Inanna's Descent, which features an X-ray of teeth, as well as consumption.

This image of face-y teeth has gestated with me for a while as I developed the rest of the show. A large part of it had to do with the cannibalistic pleasure of self-mythology: the more I developed the imagery of In Filth; the more I repeated symbols and cemented certain characters and archetypes; the more I expanded its underworld, the more my practice felt like an ouroboros swallowing itself. And as I proceeded with tarot spreads, writing exercises, and mining old journals, the more the show felt like a devouring of self. And then, simultaneously, being online only compounded these spiralling thoughts around consumption and identity: the way we talk about 'consuming media' and how people signal identity by what they consume -are you a Sylvia Plath girl or a Joan Didion girl? And the way its all atomized into datasets and statistics about swiping habits, likes and shares, how much you linger on a post, to render digital personas as fodder to be consumed by the corporations running it all. Which is its own hellmouth I guess. Something about the instruments of consumption becoming markers of identity, or a beast made of the I.

The eels felt like a sort of allegory for when consumption takes hold of the body, twists and contorts it; these cut-throat eels dive into brine lakes in search of prey to eat, but if they stay too long they go into toxic shock and lose control of their bodies. I don't often work through allegory but it felt right. And it kind of calls to my earlier work that started all this, which was all about dissociation from the body and the loss of control. by @jad.dddddddd

Generations, المريخ في برج العقرب 2026
In Filth It Will Be Found is running at @jacaranda.images till November 9 by @jad.dddddddd

Variation On A Hellmouth No. 2 (Mulch For Harpies), 2026
At @jacaranda.images till November 9 by @jad.dddddddd

Mulch For Harpies (detail), 2026
There is a terrible, pulpy horror film from 1977 called "Death Bed: The Bed That Eats." Although it fails in everything it attempts, it offers an interesting perversion of all that a bed represents in relation to the body and the soul by turning it violent. For more on that unity, look into Canto 13 of Dante's Inferno and the punishment for violence against self. The bed has returned over and over in my drawings,,, by @jad.dddddddd

"You're afraid to dive into the plasma pool, aren't you? You're afraid to be destroyed and recreated, aren't you?" (2026)
As central as Venus/Inanna is to In Filth, so too is Saturn. In traditional astrology, Saturn rules black animals like flies, as well as creatures that burrow into the ground.
The title of this drawing is a quote from David Cronenberg's iconic 1986 film, The Fly, a staple in the body horror genre. The protagonist, a scientist, invents a teleportation machine, but in testing it on himself, accidentally fuses himself with a fly that had flown into his telepod at the last minute, transforming into a monstrous hybrid.
Slides 4-10 illustrate an evolving figure that keeps surfacing in my drawings, a kind of shell/vessel/body/egg that constantly mutates. My Fly drawing is a kind of reckoning with the recurrence of this composition: a kind of supune creature submitting to or reaching towards something larger than itself. So the Fly drawing kind of takes that repeated scene and takes it to an obvious extreme, maybe to resolve or settle it.
In the drawing Saturn's Loom, two small flies appear in the border (slide 3), juxtaposing the geologic timescale at the center of the work with a much shorter lifespan. In Inanna's Descent (slide 2), the Lapis Lazuli flies hark to a detail in the myth itself, a part of Inanna's power which she myst relinquish on the path downwards.
But Saturn doesn't only show up in the flies of In Filth. The planet of structure, discipline, time, and craft acts as a guiding force evident in all the minute details in every border. More on that later. by @jad.dddddddd

Tales of Brave Ulysses (2026)
The 1967 song by the psychedelic rock band Cream, which gives its title to this drawing, was played in episode 17, season 5, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; the titular character's mentor listens to the song as he ponders over the tragedy shaking his pupil and the insurmountable odds she must face. Like Odysseus, she finds herself caught between her own Scylla and Charybdis. For Dante, Ulysses, like Arachne, another important figure in the exhibition, was an archetypal example of the transgressive edge of desire and ambition.
"In Filth It Will Be Found" will run at @jacaranda.images till Nov 9 by @jad.dddddddd

Inanna's Descent / الجوع (2026)
Although this is the second-to-last drawing I finished just before the show opened, I consider it a gateway into the rest of the works featured.
In the titular myth, the queen of heaven Inanna hears a call rise from below, and decides to journey downwards to meet her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld, who is mourning the loss of her husband. At each of the seven gates, represented by the seven loops of the spiral in the drawing, she is bidden by the guards to take off one of her adornments, the sources of her power, including things like fly-shaped lapis lazuli beads, a measuring rod, and a wig. By the time she reaches the bottom, she is completely naked and vulnerable, and the judges of the underworld fix the eye of death on her and hang her body on a hook. Above ground, Inanna's divine attendant Ninshubur goes in seek of help, and the god of magic and crafts, Enki, creates two beings from the dirt beneath his fingertips; they sneak like flies through the gates of hell. At the bottom they find Ereshkigal wailing in pain, and they wail with her. Her suffering mirrored, mollified, she offers them a gift, and they ask for the body of Inanna, which they revive with the food and drink of life. Together they retrieve the items of her power and abscond through the gates.
As I've mentioned, this myth corresponds to the retrograde motion of Venus, which is happening right now. The Venus Cazimi, her meeting with the Sun, this past weekend, was the moment in the myth when Inanna is reborn. And although Venus retrogrades are fairly common, happening every 18 months, what makes this one special is that it is occurring in Scorpio, sign of the depths, and makes a 90 degree angle with Pluto, ruler of the nether realm and planet of the death and rebirth Inanna undergoes. So themes of the underworld and the subterranean are compounded in this transit.
Inanna's descent taps into the vein in the show's title, which comes from Jung and the alchemical side of his work: the descent into the muck, the filth, and alchemizing it, integrating shadow into self. More in the comments. by @jad.dddddddd

Evening Star (2026), on display at @jacaranda.images till Nov 9.
This past weekend, retrograding Venus went into the burning heart of the sun and vanished from our skies; you might have spotted her hovering over the horizon around sunset the past few weeks, but her time as the evening star is over for a while. Around mid-November, she will reappear at dawn as a morning star. In the myth of Inanna's descent into the underworld, that evening star phase corresponds to the moment just before the queen of heaven's subterranean journey, when she hears a call rising from beneath.
On slide 5: Alchemy by Agnes Pelton, from around 1937. Her and other theosophical painters exerted an influence over my work, particularly with their idea of thought-forms, which I explored at Darat Al Funun over the summer, resulting in the project on slide 6. They claimed that, through meditation, they had ascertained what they believed to be the objective visual forms of various emotions and sensations. At the Darat, I tried working strictly with their dictionary of shapes and feelings. With my broader work, such as Evening Star, I more so lean towards an elemental, atmospheric form of abstraction, similar to Pelton's. And in recycling images over and over I find a language beginning to deveop.
On slide 7 and onwards, I found pictures of some old drawings from 2020, and noticed that the egg shape had unconsciously filtered through to my current work six years later. Eggs, bolts of lightning, flashes of light, rolling clouds, archways, and hot magma: they all seem to recur. That first drawing from 2020, of the egg with the eye, I remember coming to me in a dream.
With In Filth, I tried to work with equal parts mysterious intuitions and deliberate, meticulously planned-out compositions. The resulting body of work is therefore dense with a collection of symbols I'm sure will speak more to me with time, beyond what I intended or thought I intended. by @jad.dddddddd

"In Filth It Will Be Found"
First Solo Exhibition by @jad.dddddddd

Will be running @jacaranda.images until November 9, 2026

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يستمر المعرض في @jacaranda.images حتى ٩ تشرين الثاني ٢٠٢٦
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What started out as a doodle in a small, pocket-sized sketchbook in 2024, and later became a mural the size of several hundred pocket-sized sketchbooks at the beginning of 2026 with @outofframe.amman and @dalalmitwally , now finds itself finally settled in this A3 drawing at @jacaranda.images . Somewhere along the way, i heard @samah.hijawi speak about Saturn in terms of stones: cold, hard, and heavy. At another stage, @nahlatabbaa lent me a book about the numbers and the sacred, and I learnt more about magic squares and how they corresponded to planets. These and other occurences beyond my knowledge led to this final image solidifying like hot magma into rock. I adapted the motif from one I used in a drawing I had done in 2022 or 2023, pictured in the last slide, featuring a volcano -this same drawing is the one I would crochet into a tapestry later on, and although I used a crochet hook instead of loom weights like the ones in this drawing, there is some parallel there, both crafts watched over by Saturn. The Arabic title for this drawing points to Saturn in Aries, where it currently sits uncomfortably, but i find the lava imagery to be the most optimistic way of looking at this transit, imagining the slow metamorphosis of the earth's burning blood into solid, stable stone. by @jad.dddddddd