Syrian artist-in-exile Tammam Azzam, whose romantic yet uncompromising body of work forces us to see the crumbling devastation and despair of today’s world. Born in 1980 in Damascus, he is presently one of Syria's rising young artists. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus focusing in oil painting, and also obtained a Fine Arts Certificate in 2001 from Darat al Funun’s Al Kharif Academy. After joining the Shabab Ayyam Young Artists Program in 2008, he has been featured in several significant events including the group show, ‘Stories from the Levant’, Scope Art Fair, Basel, in 2009, and Art Miami 2010, and has held solo exhibitions at Ayyam Gallery, Damascus in 2010 and Dubai in 2011 and 2012. He now lives and works in Dubai, UAE. Upon losing his studio in Damascus and needing new ways to express himself and his sadness with the events that were unfolding in his homeland of Syria, Azzam began working with digital art. In his solo exhibition held in November 2012 in Ayyam Gallery Dubai, digital artworks representing each location where the Syrian Uprising took place were overlaid with the text, ‘In the revolution’, followed by the name of the area that witnessed the revolution. Other examples of his work took the form of fractured and wounded maps of his country, stop signs covered with bullet holes, bleeding apples, fallen chess pawns and puzzle pieces, and symbols of peace reconfigured into targets, all symbolizing the violence the Syrians are facing. Displaced Syrians feel a deep connection and sadness with the events unfolding in their country. As each day brings word of another friend or family member perishing, they feel silenced and immobile, unable to take any action, to cause any change or provide assistance. Tammam's work presents an overall sentiment of longing, echoing a distant past which no longer exists amidst the present turmoil. It is his way of reaching out, of sounding his pain and protest and extending a political commentary on the upheavals in his homeland that have led to the Syrian Uprising and the subsequent destruction and violence. Witty, smart and certainly a major part of today's world when everything gets played digitally or via social media, Tammam Azzam has used his artistic abilities to reflect on the worsening situation in Syria. He has also cleverly referenced street art, recognizing both of these mediums as powerful, difficult to suppress, direct tools for protest. In early 2013, Azzam made headlines world wide when one of his works, 'Freedom Graffiti' went viral on social media. He enlisted one of the most iconic kisses in art – Gustav Klimt’s 'The Kiss' - to protest his country's suffering, superimposing this image of love over the walls of a war-torn building in Damascus. The work was from his ‘Syrian Museum’ series in which he placed images taken from Western Art History by such masters as da Vinci, Matisse, Goya, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Dali and Warhol.... paralleling some of the greatest achievements of humanity with the destruction of Syria’s cultural heritage. The canvases of Tammam Azzam are experiments in the application of various media. Unusual components such a rope, clothes pins and other found objects are employed to create depth, texture and space, achieving a striking balance between the ordinary objects the artist portrays and the grand terrain that he evokes. For Azzam, such a methodology facilitates the creation of an artwork as a “hybrid form,” one that is capable of borrowing and multiplying as it evolves.

• published: 08 Oct 2014
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