For Abu Dhabi Art, Paul Hughes Fine Arts and Nadim Karam present an exhibition featuring masterpieces of Pre-Columbian art alongside the results of a dialogue that Nadim has created in conversation with these works.

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 heart of the exhibition, Desert Flowers serves as both a visual and conceptual anchor. Currently installed in larger scale on the Giza Plateau for Forever is Now V, organized by Art D’Egypte, exhibited in smaller size at the fair, the trio of lotus-like sculptures was crafted from twisted metal salvaged from the 2020 Beirut blast, as well as fragments of earlier works. Their stages—closed, opening, and fully bloomed—trace a movement from concealment to revelation. In their unfolding, the sculptures reclaim discarded histories, performing emergence while embodying the endurance of forgotten voices and the reconstitution of space within cultural memory.