Nadim Karam’s Archaic Procession unfolds as a surreal alignment of totemic figures in transmutation of becoming — forms caught mid-gesture, walking not toward a destination but through memory itself.
While rooted in the trauma and surrealism of postwar Lebanon, the work also reflects the influence of Karam’s architectural training in Japan, where philosophies of Eastern thought and spatial perception deeply shaped his visual approach.
Yet, Karam’s figures belong to a far older visual language; one that resonates with symbolic forms of archaic traditions across time and place, including those of Pre-Columbian civilisations. They echo rituals, myths, and the impulse to monumentalise the human condition through figurative
art. Karam’s work engages in a speculative conversation across distances — not a narrative of direct influence, but one of resonance. It gestures toward a shared symbolic intuition, a horizontal axis of cultural memory that links distant geographies through common archetypes, ritual forms, and the desire to make meaning through the body in motion.
The procession itself is a shared motif. In many Pre-Columbian traditions, processions marked the movements of the cosmos, the passage between life and death, the ordering of society. Karam’s own processions — part dream, part stories — offer a contemporary ritual of remembrance and survival. Karam has long been building a personal universe populated by recurring characters — animals, hybrid creatures, human-forms that speak in silence.
Karam calls his work Archaic Procession — a deliberate gesture toward the pre-modern, the symbolic. While historical and cultural contexts greatly differ, both Karam’s work and Pre Columbian art operate within a visual logic that privileges myth, abstraction, and collective memory over realism and/ or individualism. Nadim Karam’s instinctive visual language is one shaped by his being born into the landscapes of the Levant and deeply attuned to the symbolic and mythic residues embedded in the region.
Without directly referencing any specific tradition, the sculptural forms resonate with the ancient petroglyphs and rock carvings found across the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula — markings left by early humans who etched animals, spirits, and ritual figures into stone to connect with their world. These visual traces, scattered across desert surfaces, reflect a deep symbolic relationship between people and their environment.
These echoes surface not through imitation, but through an intuitive alignment: both Karam’s abstracted figures and the ancient carvings embody a primal urge to monumentalise the unseen, to turn flora, fauna, and fleeting gestures into lasting signs. His characters — enlarged, fantastical, sometimes hybrid — feel like contemporary descendants of those early symbols, bridging time through form. The forms reference the creatures and symbols that once roamed and were revered in these regions — gazelles, ibexes, birds, hybrid figures.
At the same time, the work is rooted in the biodiversity of the Arabian desert itself. Home to thousands of plant and animal species, this environment is far from empty — it is a living archive. In Karam’s vision, the figures become witnesses to this richness, embodiments of its fragility and wonder.
The curatorial approach draws upon a text developed by the Curatorial Team at Nadim Karam Studio.