Search results for ""Author Nadine Descendre""

Taking up a book on Mohamed El Baz means attempting to better understand how an artist observes the world and learning from this. It is a question of actually breaking into the reality that is explored by an exceptional intelligence and artistic sensibility. The reader allows himself to be swept away with El Baz beyond representation into an adventure involving both the mind and the eye. This artistic process is obsessively poetic and has something of Mallarmé about it that descends into an abyss of complexity only to emerge immediately into the light and a new clarity. This oeuvre marked by tension, in refusing to submit to traditionally accepted ideas, makes accessible to the viewer the need to go beyond the narrative and fully enter that rich area of experience between social reality and emotional intuition, which enables us to produce a thought, and whose mechanisms and aesthetic issues Nadine Descendre reveals in this book. Mohamed El Baz was born in 1967 at El Ksiba, Morocco. He lives in Lille, France.

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The second monograph in the Contemporary Arab Artists series, directed by Brahim Alaoui, previous director of the Museum of the Institute of the Arab World in Paris. Iraqi artist Halim Al-Karim underwent a harrowing experience during the first Gulf War. Opposing Saddam’s regime and its compulsory military service he took to hiding in the desert, living for almost 3 years in a hole in the ground covered by a pile of rocks. He survived only through the assistance of a Bedouin woman who brought him food and water and taught him about gypsy customs and mysticism. Al-Karim has since emigrated to America, however, these events have had a profound effect on his life and form the basis for his art practice. Now he lives and works in Denver, Colorado. Themes of reconciliation are central to Al-Karim’s work, both emotionally and in relation to Sufi tradition, where faith is inwardly focused and strives for unity between consciousness and God. Contradictions and juxtapositions occur within his photos, but rather than creating tension, they have harmonious effect. Al-Karim's approach to image-making is as an outward projection of his innerconsciousness and a visual manifestation of spiritual awakening and serenity. His evasive dream-like images evoke a range of instinctual emotive responses, the ability of true perception existing as a preternatural power within each of us, which can be understood and harnessed through the pursuit of metaphysical enlightenment.

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