Tammam Azzam

Bio

Born in Damascus in 1980, Tammam Azzam lives and works in Dubai. Mr. Azzam, who was born in Damascus, has been living in Dubai since he and his family fled Syria with the help of his gallery in September 2011, seven months after the start of the uprising there. He is one of about two dozen artists who have escaped Syria with the help of the Ayyam Gallery, a contemporary-art gallery devoted to emerging Middle Eastern talent.

It has now become a conduit for Syrian artists to express their responses to the devastation of their country.

Selected solo and group exhibitions include Ayyam Gallery Al Quoz, Dubai (2012, 2009); Ayyam Gallery DIFC, Dubai (2011); Ayyam Gallery Beirut (2010); Ayyam Gallery Damascus (2010).

Type of work

The canvases of Syrian artist Tammam Azzam are experiments in the application of various media.  Unusual components such a rope, clothes pins and other found objects are employed to create depth, texture and space, achieving a striking balance between the ordinary objects the artist portrays and the grand terrain that he evokes. For Azzam, such a methodology facilitates the creation of an artwork as a “hybrid form,” one that is capable of borrowing and multiplying as it evolves.

Recent works have used digital media to examine the ongoing political and social upheaval in Syria, and the cycles of violence and destruction tearing his country apart. Each artwork coincides with a particular event of the Uprising, depicting a variety of fractured and wounded maps of Syria, fallen chess pawns and other symbols reconfigured in powerful reflections of the turmoil facing his countrymen.

Why choosing him?

I really like the type of his work which are simple in composition and the material used but with depth. Thanks to the Arab Spring, the human rights are advocated louder and louder in the Arab world. As a Syrian himself, his work is his form of protest. Most of the work is irony to show that how failure his country’s government is. People are living in terror. Most of them cannot lead a normal life and what children know is only bombs and tanks. Besides mocking the existing government, Tammam also shows a different side of the country, a side which is other than wars and that is creativity. Talented artists and prominent artworks can be produced from this country. He is quite a special artist who is not using mainly as artistic side, but more for expressing his discontent towards violence and wars his country.

Tammam Azzam superimposed Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss on to an image of a Syrian bomb site.

According to the United Nations, more than 60,000 people have been killed so far in Syria’s devastating civil war. The thousands of photographs that have come out of this conflict are a powerful visual record of the violence being committed. And now, one digitally-manipulated image by a Syrian artist is capturing the Internet’s imagination.

Source

http://www.ayyamgallery.com/artists/tammam-azzam/bio

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/world/middleeast/haunted-by-war-syrian-artists-put-raw-emotions-on-view.html?_r=0

http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/02/06/syrian-artist-pays-homage-to-gustav-klimts-the-kiss/

Otodate —listening exercise by Akio Suzuki

Q: Why is pier a suitable place to perform sound art?

A: That’s because sound assembles there.

  I have never thought that sound could be a form of art. I know music is one of the kinds but when it comes to sound, I really have no idea. Kwun Tong Ferry Pier is a spacious place where we could hear a lot of echo from the sea and from the road. We headed to the second floor to watch the performance of a Japanese artist called Akio Suzuki and his partner, Hiromi Miyakita.

  I was very confused at the beginning of the performance as I was not sure who Mr. Suzuki was. He did not dress up and was carrying his backpack. Later, I realized it was him the artist until he started to build the wood sticks. He connected ten sets of wood sticks in a row with a rope putting underneath as a mark. Soon, nails were hammered on the sticks one by one and sound was produced. The nails were hammered in regular time slot and therefore the sound produced was monotonous and dull. Hiromi started to ‘move’ her body according to the sound. Her movement was slow and not graceful. I wonder what would happen next.

  

Then Mr. Suzuki hammered the nails more quickly and lively. He concentrated very much on his work. It seemed that he picked up the nails from the bucket then hammered them without thinking. Hiromi started to dance instead of ‘moving her body’. Her movement was more coherent and with elegance. However, I don’t think her dancing is widely accepted by the public because we can’t tell which type of dancing she was doing. It was a bit weird although it followed the sound well.

  

After Mr. Suzuki had hammered all the nails (there were almost 300 nails!), he suddenly took out a pair of chopsticks from the bucket. He used the chopsticks to sweep through all the nails. The sound produced was like xylophone. It was clear and had different pitch. He swept through the nails in different pace and his partner danced with bigger movements. I think this was quite a nice piece of music. Some of our students said Hiromi was like a caterpillar struggles to become a butterfly. I think this is true because she just sat down and did some hand gestures. But later, she stood up and danced and ran with energy. However, you really had to get into the show to see this or else you would have no idea what they were doing.

  

When it came to the second part of the performance, the two artists shifted to the other side of the pier area to start another performance. There were ten glass bottles which were filled with water on the floor and Hiromi took up the bottles and danced. The water splashed out according to her movement. Some beautiful patterns which were in circle form were made on the floor. The only sound we could hear was the breeze. Later, Mr. Suzuki joined. He blew on the mouth of the bottles. People who stood beside me seemed to have some giggles. I think that’s because we all played this when we were small! It was really fun and actually, the sound was pleasant to listen to. It was like the whistle of the boat. They were not looking at each other but they were like having a conversation, a casual conversation using sound. Hiromi danced without remembering the steps. She just danced randomly with what she heard.

  Is this mean by freeing the sound? Using sound to communicate (instead of talking)? Maybe this is a way for human to communicate with the environment. We were masked by many ‘man-made’ sounds nowadays: phones, machines, transports etc. There are fewer and fewer chances for us to listen to birds whistle, water flow and breeze. I don’t think human can communicate only by using sound as we have language. We are all used to talking as our communication channel. You can do so unless you are Mr. Suzuki, having such a familiar partner who practises lots and lots to communicate with you in this way!

Wah Luen Industrial Centre Block A Visit

Wah Luen Industrial Centre Block A Visit

Overall feelings and comments

I have never been to any art gallery in industrial buildings. This is my first time and I think this is an eye-opening experience. ‘Art is hard to make a living’ people always mention this but I don’t think this is true although I could see that some artists are leading a hard life. Most of them combined their studios and their living areas together. 

I understand that they may get inspired anytime so that they can immediately transfer their ideas into creation. Yet, inside the industrial buildings the environment was dirty and dark. Unpleasant raw pork smell came into my nose time by time and the floor was soaked with water in upper levels. 

Interestingly, most of the artists did sell their creation directly but I don’t agree that art is hard to make a living at all. That’s because I saw few business cards were thrown inside the cards collecting box in some studios. If the company is willing to drop the business card, I think the artist is willing to cooperate with them. Some flats were rented by non-artists. They sold homemade food or organic food and visitors can enjoy the food in a small dinning room besides. Live cooking was shown in front and this attracted people to squeeze in the studio continuously. This was surely a wise way to earn profit.

Impressive Studio

The studio which impressed me most was ‘Out of Place’ ran by an artist called Cath Brophy. It was located in Unit 3, 16/F, Block A, Wah Luen. All the creations by Cath were large-scale collage drawings which were inspired by the contrasting styles of modern housing blocks and traditional houses in Hong Kong. 

The drawings were mainly painted with Charcoal, pastel and pencil only but they could still come out with excellent effect. I found the way she collages several characteristics of different architecture together into one creation interesting. Although all of the creations were only in black and white, the effect of three-dimension was very strong. I extremely like grids and parallel stuffs so when the parts were bound together, which were the different parts of different architectures in different directions, I still thought that they were parallel.

Besides, when I looked into the parts separately, I could recognize which type of buildings they are from. For instant in the work below, the window in the left are definitely from traditional temples with small circles and a cross lies on it.  It was enjoyable to look at the creation no matter you were seeing it in macro or digesting it in detail. I also like the scale of the creations. They were all huge like around 400x500 cm in size. The work seemed to enclose me and each part were nearly in their real sizes.

Different parts of different buildings were compressed into one creation yet there were enough spaces between each part. They ‘lived’ together very well and balanced each other. 

This is similar to the living environment in Hong Kong. It is crowd to live in Hong Kong without a doubt. However, each of us still has our own space, regardless of the size. We do not disturb people living around us yet we meet sometimes. It is just like different parts of different buildings overlap at some points but we can still trace the patterns clearly and will not feel dizzy. Can’t imagine a foreign artist can observe the buildings and living environment in Hong Kong that detailed. The creations match the real situation well. I appreciate this series of work.

Feelings towards Hong Kong Artists

I don’t think that art is dying in Hong Kong as I can see that many artists are still contributing tones of efforts to what they fond of. They paint with passion and willing to share their creations and foster the movement of art. 

The work I saw that day was in large variety even though I have just visited one of the fifteen industrial buildings! There must be more and more to see! Most of them were fascinating in which some of types really strike against me. That’s because I have never seen a similar type of work before. However, I nearly dropped after I have visited Wah Luen Industrial Centre Block A. Hope I can sleep more before the day I visit next time!