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13/9/2006

Indipendents Biennal

Independents Biennial, Liverpool

Indipendents Artists

On Nadim Karam by Alex Hetherington

In Another Place - The Daily photo

Independents Biennial Liverpool 2006 showcases artwork by over 150 North West, UK and International artists across 62 venues and spaces throughout the city of Liverpool.

The artworld equivalent of a festival fringe the Independents mix of exhibitions, live art, performances, interventions and happenings which emerge and spread across the city into every available space. The Independents are not themed, categorised or curated by the City’s institutions, they exist on their own terms, doing their own thing, looking for attention, dialogue and interaction.

For ten weeks, these artists extend an open invitation to all those curious to seek out the undiscovered. Take a look at the on-line programme, click onto the map to locate where you’re headed and then…be prepared to be surprised, engaged, challenged.

Interviews with artists and Independents news and reviews will be posted weekly. Watch this site.

Only Dream Bombs, Wandering, and the Watercolour War Corres(des)pondent. On Nadim Karam by Alex Hetherington

Sometimes the best way to get to the truth of war is to switch off your `television, stop listening to the radio, dispense with your online connection, drop the RRS feeds and stay away from the abundance of LIVE coverage with six reports simultaneously commentating on an ever unfolding scenario of bombings, brutalized civilians, borders rewritten, missiles not hitting targets, car explosions and picture galleries of dead soldiers and plane crashes, old men and women in dirty pyjamas being carried by dust and rubble infested family members, politicians in hotel suites guiding us through their armoury of ideologies and our democracy rules ok recitals, their at once-removed blissfully unawareness of the agonized, played with a soundtrack with some aplomb on the piano, Condoleeza Rice. In short get away from the technology and the screen and the monitors and the fast flipping between CCN, ITN and the BBC. And just pick up some paper and a palette of watercolour paints and start painting.

Perhaps the worst atrocity in all of up-to-the-minute technology, 24 hour blanket coverage, hot off the press reportage is it’s getting boring; it’s the same story, same shit in Groundhog Day loops. We need another depiction. Otherwise it’s just another spectacle, another sensational Breaking News story that’s not going from TV to brain, from pixel to penetration, from airwaves to apprehending.

Nadim Karam, Beirut-based artist, architect and world traveller has a simple response to the seemingly simple and easy and fast decision to wage a thirty-day war in the Lebanon, filled with agony and atrocity, pain and displacement, in response to the capture of two Israeli soldiers. He paints pictures. It’s this tension of response and retaliation, of question and answer, of big gun, bigger impact, huge explosion, tiny ripple that makes his recent art in reaction to the Middle-East crisis seem so compelling. They are at once beautifully engaging, naively rendered, utterly alluring and describe the worst. Just the worst.

These works were drawn in a way in flight; in pursuit of a real reaction, in need to flee for safety (despite the experience of kidnaps and being shot at, Karam wanted to stay, but he has a wife and children and he didn’t want them to experience too much, too soon), in the need to just state (however much in flux that state maybe) and not intellectualize. They are in memory. In memorial. They are also incredibly generous.

Karam works in this medium often, but is equally often not willing to place them in public. They have an intimacy that exhibits a personal panacea and a public thrall. They have muscle-flexing surfers on wide-winged aircraft catching waves on a festoon of human bodies; dizzy dream bombs falling onto giraffes; big bulbous colourful blimp clouds in clear, hot skies, the exasperated puff breaths of huge explosions; angular people graphics falling out of tower blocks in regimental formation; brown earth cut outs for sheltering under an elephant and a skipping couple; the same couple setting their shadow across a meadow of rupture and chaos. They flicker between hope and its opposite, frustration and wanting to forget, agony and the delicate, the naive and the kind of genuineness that only comes with experience.

I read recently in an article in the Guardian that there is no war art anymore, or what counts for war art now is only the last vestige of a long tradition in Western art to depict hell where no other medium could be made available. Karam isn’t a Western artist; his work blends and melds references from a wider source of visual vocabularies. He’s taken his line for a walk through art history, like a mad adventurer, a mad explorer, reinvesting pieces of Miro, Picasso, Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, Jonathan Borofsky, and an array of other Western artists with a Middle-Eastern sensibility. A sensibility based on a metaphor for Beirut; constant change, new identities, rebuilding, reconstructing, living with weaponary, tearing down, new vistas, new outlooks, sitting on ruins, tearing down symbols so that the extremism might not get a chance to harbour.

I think that’s what Karam is seeking; a way to use these urban shifts, changes, flexibilities, threateningly temporary states, movement, emerging political narratives to tell stories, to tell stories about extremes, about what extremes mean, what terror means and what the inverse of these might look and sound like, how they might take on form. Karam is also an architect. He’s aware of the vocabulary of urban shaping; maybe it’s the utopian shaping that underlies his motivations. It also seems important to him to use creativity as a counter-offensive to the machines and economies of conflict. He’s trying to present a new project in Kabul for instance, that might tell an entirely different story to the one emerging on the one-pixel thick interpretation of current events. It seems in Karam’s arsenal creativity is something to set off dream bombs not real bombs.

Karam is shortly to return to Beirut after a six-week stay in Europe. Stay. I make it sound like a holiday; it’s more like a forced exile. But he seems calm, he’s looking forward to going back, he’s returning to London soon to launch his publication URBAN TOYS, a companion to his previous publication VOYAGE. These titles speak a great deal of his outlook on crisis, on cities, on life, on drawing, on creativity. On being a citizen in the world. We discussed not knowing ‘what its really like’, his travelling, global warming, flexibility in the face of the anti-progressive, the possibilities, amputating terror, the construction of revolt, expression as a force, balance, dreams, Blair and Bush, how we compensate for terror, observation, cultures, his mighty schedule, his reinvention of a sense of home, and what home means when it looks different every day, his past and future projects. That all of this, his experiences, his depictions, creative ideas floating and interchanging, is to him a “learning process" and that in that process is the vehicle for change.

Karam was keen to explain that he’s not criticizing the Blair and Bush regimes, their actions and obvious lack of apprehending, of their extremes, on their catalogue of the repugnant and repulsive, on their reactions to the repugnant and repulsive. He seems to be suggesting that simple responses, simple creative responses are what’s required now.

Nadam Karam's watercolours "The Beirut Series and its Effect on Global Warming"can be seen Upstairs at Editions, 16 Cook Street, Liverpool. From 16th September to 21st October 2006.

Nadim Karam's "Sketch Journal" can be seen at

museumMAN, Parliament Street. From 16th September to 24th November 2006.

info: http://www.independentsbiennial.org/plug/content/content.php?cat.3

In Another Place

As Antony Gormley’s iron men sculptures near the end of their long stay on Crosby Beach more and more people are photographing each other with the life-size statues. Some confront the sculptures; others treat it as a member of the family. The sculptures have been dressed up, occasionally - some poseurs have almost matched their nudity!

The Independents are building a web exhibition of a photograph each day throughout the Biennial period. Today’s picture is by Delia Brady-Jacobs.

Opening: 14 Spetember 2006

All Venues: 5athegallery, St Helens NO 6 Knight Street YES 12 Princes Dock YES 33 - 45 Parr Street, YES 40 Kelvin Grove, L8 YES 59 Powis Street NO Alima Centre YES Almiro Gallery, Waterloo YES Arena House NO Billboard, 48 Seel Street YES Cube noir gallery NO Dot-art YES Editions Gallery NO Gallerie Vogelfrei NO Good Taste Gallery YES Gostin Buildings, YES Ikonography NO Korova Bar YES Liverpool JMU 68 Hope St YES Lewis Department Store YES Microzine YES Museum MAN NO Neko YES Parklands Community Library YES Parr Street Studios YES School of Tropical Medicine YES Static YES St. Nicholas Parish Church YES St. Peters Square YES Tate Liverpool YES The China Pavillion YES The Community Gallery NO The Cornerstone Gallery YES The Glaxo Centre YES The International Gallery YES The Living Gallery NO The Magnet NO The National Wildflower Centre YES The People's Centre Gallery NO The Projection Gallery YES The Re-Evolutionary Art Space NO The Royal Standard YES Two Jordon Street L1 YES Unity Theatre YES University of Liverpool Art Gallery No View Two Gallery NO Williamson Tunnels NO Woodside Ferry Terminal YES

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