All posts tagged: Nadim Abbas

Household Gods 「駐家寧神」

Published by Aaina Bhargava

Protests and pandemics have relegated us to the domestic sphere, where we’ve been forced to confront the anxiety and fear induced by the past year’s events. In addition to political, economic and social disruptions of unprecedented proportions, we’re experiencing emotional and psychological upheavals specifically reactive to this point in time. Articulating and reflecting on this complex state of being, Hong Kong artists Shane Aspegren, Nadim Abbas, Tap Chan and Wu Jiaru have come together to stage Household Gods, an exhibition curated by Ying Kwok, on view at Hart Hall in H Queens. Lifted from writer and occultist Aleister Crowley’s early 20th-century play Household Gods, the title of the show explicitly outlines its objective: to question our relationship with the supernatural through our “most intimate setting”, the home.  The four artists conceived of the exhibition while working alongside each other at Hart Haus’ sprawling 10,000 sq ft Hart Social Studio in November 2019, before the advent of Covid-19. Despite their seemingly disparate practices, the artists find common ground in using domestic objects, exploring how they serve as channels to activate the unknown or uncanny. Kwok describes this …

Nadim Abbas

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Elliat Albrecht / This June, a photo circulated on social media of a small group Hong Kong-based artists, writers and gallerists standing outside the Congress Center in Basel, Switzerland. Away from Hong Kong for Art Basel and concurrent projects, they showed their support for demonstrators at home with handwritten signs decrying the proposed extradition bill. Nadim Abbas was among them; the artist was in Basel for his solo show Poor Toy at Vitrine (June 11 – August 25), which referenced the horror and banality of domesticity through sculptures including vacuum cleaners and hacked Ikea furniture. We met in July after he’d returned to Hong Kong. Abbas lives and works in a flat not far from the University of Hong Kong, where he earned his MPhil in 2006. He suggested sitting near his computer where it was brighter; the afternoon sun streamed through the windows onto wall-to-wall bookshelves – fitting for an artist who often references methodically researched science fiction, psychology and philosophy in his work – keyboards, several guitars and a piano with the lid closed. We …

Yuk King Tan and Tobias Berger

Published by Artomity Magazine

Artist Yuk King Tan and her husband, head of art at Tai Kwun Tobias Berger, talk about three of their favourite pieces in their collection. All of the art work we have tells stories about countries that we live in, our friends and our shared history. Some of the work makes the audience reconsider its belief structures, opening up different ways of contemplating the world. Art is such a unique and challenging form of communication. It’s important to have pieces that inform the way we work and also shift how we perceive our surroundings and community. Three really interesting, intelligent artists in Hong Kong right now are Ho Sin Tung, Nadim Abbas and Leung Chi Wo. Ho Sin Tung has a lyrical, idiosyncratic illustrative style that uses a sociological perspective to examine the way memory, aesthetics, literature and filmscapes can create and mythologise a changing territory like Hong Kong. Her drawing style, with maps and seating plans, uses a muted colour palette and distorted viewpoints to make work that is suggestive, beautiful and often quietly subversive. Your Name is Ferdinand (2010) is a delicate pencil and …

Tai Kwun

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Elliat Albrecht Hong Kong has a soft spot for crime and police stories. Films about gangs, double agents and bloody conflicts have long been a mainstay of local cinema. There is an underlying psychological reason: a surge of public interest in the genre occurred in the 1980s, coinciding with the UK and China’s negotiations over the 1997 handover. Amid anxiety about the political future, the movies often depicted the goings-on of crime syndicates and their clashes with authority to explore themes of loyalty, heroism and chaos. This blue-coat fascination laid the foundation for some of the most significant pop culture of the 1980s – and continues to provide inspiration today, in the form of the city’s newest cultural institution. While Hong Kong awaits the opening of M+, its much-anticipated major museum of visual culture, the recently opened Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage & Arts is poised to tick the mid-size museum box. Built on a historical site, the 19th-century Central Police Station compound on Hollywood Road, Tai Kwun has an unusual cross-disciplinary remit. The …

Nadim Abbas

Published by Artomity Magazine

Chimera Antenna Space, Shanghai, Nov 9 – Jan 10, 2017 By Nooshfar Afnan For his first solo show at Antenna Space in Shanghai, Nadim Abbas again draws heavily on the space between science and fiction. This time an image of the common cold virus, which has caught his attention for some time, becomes the point of departure. On entering the main exhibition space, Human Rhinovirus 14 (2016) bombards the visitor’s senses with the glow of floating beach balls in the air, and the sound of the centrifugal blower fans that keep them up. Abbas projects a visual mock-up of the common cold virus onto the floating balls, creating something between an image and an object. He wanted to translate his near obsession with this image of the virus into a work of art; after lengthy research he decided to use several 3D molecular visualisation programs, one of which, Chimera, gives the show its title. The work straddles scientific enquiry and fiction, the real and the imagined. In contrast the next work in the exhibition, Chamber 667/668 (2016), is quiet, …

Nadim Abbas

Published by Artomity Magazine

New Directions By Nooshfar Afnan New Directions: Nadim Abbas, the artist’s first solo show in mainland China, at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, consists of a single, new work, The Last Vehicle (2016). Curated by Guo Xi, it combines a mixed-media installation with a durational performance, the latter a first for the artist, who recently returned from a year exploring physical theatre in New York. The name The Last Vehicle comes from Abbas’s reading of Paul Virilio’s essay of the same name.  The French philosopher’s main concern is how technology and the acceleration it causes have altered our perception and experience of the world. “More specifically, the title The Last Vehicle, the way I would read it in relation to Virilio’s text, indicates this historical moment when the traversing of space or distances, to get from one point to the other, changes from actual vehicles to this even faster moment of telecommunications, and that way of overcoming distances,” says Abbas. In The Last Vehicle, Abbas takes over the elongated Long Gallery of the …