For Abu Dhabi Art, Paul Hughes Fine Arts and Nadim Karam will present a unique project featuring masterpieces of Pre-Columbian art alongside the results of a dialogue that Nadim has created in conversation with these works, in the spirit of his predecessors Henry Moore, and Josef and Anni Albers.
Karam’s figures belong to an archaic visual language, one that resonates with the symbolic forms of arcane traditions across time and place, including those of Pre-Columbian civilizations.
They echo rituals, myths, and the impulse to monumentalize 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, and the ordering of society.
Karam’s own processions, part dream and part story, offer a contemporary ritual of remembrance and survival. He has long been building a personal universe populated by recurring characters — animals, hybrid creatures, and human forms that speak in silence.
Through the exhibited works, we witness the shaping, erasure, and resurgence of memory. Fragments of the past re-enact their weight in the present, each piece drawing from and feeding back into the same symbolic reservoir, reinforcing the exhibition’s continuity.
At the centre of the exhibit, Desert Flowers forms a visual and conceptual axis. First installed on the Giza Plateau for Forever is Now V, the trio of lotus-like sculptures was forged from mangled metal salvaged from the 2020 Beirut blast and remnants of earlier works. Closed, opening, and in full bloom, their sequence mirrors a movement from concealment to revelation. Their blooms reclaim discarded histories as they perform emergence, embodying the persistence of forgotten voices and the restoration of space within cultural memory.
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.