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, …