10 November, 2015 - 30 November, 2015

Shut off – Inner Dialogue

Hazem Taha

Shut of from my surroundings – that is exactly how I feel and hence, what I express, in this exhibition. I do not need to document the events unfolding in the Arab World today, overwhelming in both intensity and number. The use of the language of abstraction and semi-abstraction emerges from an inner need to form visually my own virtual world. In this world, I am free to criticize, shout or reject without feeling the need to justify myself. For now, it is simply my way of communication.

 

I consider abstraction to be the only freedom I have in this life. I have created a virtual world that I inhabit in a dreamlike state. It is at once emotional and egotistical, with its own logical and imaginative dimensions. All appear in the mixture of semi-representational or non-representational elements like Islamic ornaments.

 

Abstraction, whether geometric or not, gives me a vast space within which I can express myself without boundaries. Simultaneously, it allows my viewers an opportunity to freely imagine and interpret the semi- gurative forms, ornaments, scratches, textures and colors individually. Ultimately, I am inviting my viewers to feel the poetry and music that appear in their own aesthetical norms, traversing the large philosophical questions, and delivering “timeless” and “globally” recognized symbols, with full freedom, without the obstacles of culturally or historically related representational elements.