84.0 x 59.0 cm
During his studies at The Byam Shaw School of Art in London from 1980–84, Sharif gravitated toward prominent figures in British constructivist and systems art. Inspired by cybernetics, these artistic tendencies privilege obscure shapes, signs, and symbols, and the social relationships they connote. Sharif’s resulting body of work, Semi-Systems, practices an unlearning and dislodging from the iterative principles of systems art, foregrounding the abstract, artistic thinking that occurs while a system performs its supposed function. Derived in part from Sharif’s personal experience of and confrontation with the authority of social systems, his Semi-Systems propose frameworks in which paths and movements operate at the margins, disrupting their intended effects of closure and finality.