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/