Navine G. Dossos*, b.1982 (she/her)
I am a visual artist living and working on the island of Aegina. I have lived in Greece for almost ten years, with five years spent in Athens and five years now on Aegina. My work is primarily as a mural painter, but in recent years I have expanded into other areas of applied craft such as sewing and ceramics. The work I make is often created through community workshops and I am interested in ways that artworks can be disseminated for free to the public, or benefit the public realm in a meaningful way.
I have a background and training in Islamic Art, but over the past decade my work has transitioned from a preoccupation with what it means to live in the age of The War on Terror, towards a profound engagement with ecology and how art can be in service of addressing our relationship to the natural world. I am also working more and more as part of the artist collective Vessel, that I co-founded with my partner James Bridle in 2020.
*What’s In A Name?
Navine G. Khan-Dossos is an exact anagram of Vanessa Hodgkinson – my legal name. It arrived fully formed by another person’s playful mind, scribbled on a napkin in biro in a Korean restaurant in London almost a decade ago, as part of a discussion with this fellow artist about identity, and the names with which we are born, and the names we might choose for ourselves as adults. As soon as I saw this name written out, I felt intuitively in that moment that I should take it on, for all its obvious complexity and problems.
I saw this name as part of my ongoing work about appropriation, text, image and the way we identify ourselves and others through markers of culture, politics, religion and race. So in some ways, the name at that time of taking it was a prodding of a grey area – to take a problem that could not be solved and make it central to my practice, to be discussed and critical about, which it always has been.
I did not chose that name in order to pass myself off as anything other than what and who I am. I have never hidden my legal name and always answered openly any questions about how it came about and why I chose to take it on as part of my work.
In recent years I’ve also felt that the times we live in are shifting radically and identity has become a rightfully fierce battleground on which we must all play our part. I never changed my name legally (despite my deep discomfort with Vanessa – a name made up by Jonathan Swift for a lover with whom things did not go well – and Hodgkinson – the Son of the Kin of Roger – patriarchy three layers thick) because I felt that I, and the world, would evolve in ways we can not always envisage and that name might rightfully need not just be questioned but also evolve into a different form.
Through many meaningful and constructive conversations with friends and colleagues I’ve understood that in particular Khan is not a name I can continue to live by because for some people it has become something offensive rather than provocative. And so, because ‘offensive’ is not something I want to be, I have chosen to remove it from my professional name.
My choice to retain Navine is because it relates to the Sanskrit word for ‘new’ and for me represented and still represents the new beginning that my name change gave me as I stepped into a new phase of my life. I live by this name day to day and accept it as a gift of possibility that it is my responsibility to be true to.
The G. is for George, the name taken by Georgiana Leonard, who passed herself off as a boy aboard a whaling ship in the mid-19th century, and whom I have made numerous works about.
And Dossos is not strictly a word in any language, although it is close to the Italian for a bump -dosso- like a speed bump in the road, in Greek it can relate to the word ‘to give’, and in Catalan, the plural of two.
A bumpy road, that splits and converges, but is always attempting to be generous and thoughtful where possible, seems not a bad combination of attributes to live by.
Navine G. Dossos
previously Navine G. Khan-Dossos
previously Vanessa Hodgkinson