Continuities, exhibition with Paul Hughes Fine Arts, Abu Dhabi Art | 19-23 November 2025

For Abu Dhabi Art, Nadim Karam reveals a new series shaped through reflection on ancient forms, set in dialogue with Pre-Columbian masterpieces presented by Paul Hughes Fine Arts. Rather than separating historical objects from contemporary responses, the exhibition positions both within a dynamic field of exchange, allowing Karam’s sculptural language to engage the ritual, symbolic, and metaphysical dimensions of Pre-Columbian aesthetics.

Karam’s practice has long drawn on an archaic, universal visual vocabulary, resonating with the symbolic structures of diverse mythologies and ancestral traditions. Encountering Pre-Columbian art revealed a mirroring of the impulses driving his own figures— the urge to monumentalize memory, embody cosmological cycles, and translate human experience into emblematic forms.

Here, Karam constructs a speculative dialogue across distance, guided by echoes and confluences rather than influence. The motif of the procession becomes a key point of resonance. In many Pre-Columbian traditions, processions served as performative cosmologies, marking transitions between worlds and structuring communal and spiritual order. Karam’s processions— part dream, part narrative— offer a contemporary ritual of remembrance and perseverance, animated by a universe of recurring characters: animals, hybrid creatures, and silent human figures.