Exile physically rips people from the sustenance of familiarity, culture, land, language, family, and history. Without allowing for any possibility of returning home, exile becomes a ceaseless misery that only compounds as the days, weeks, months, and years go by. To bear witness to an artist in exile is to observe a unique, horrendous intensity: that exile, unlike death, remains mercilessly visceral, undulating, vivid, and stubbornly present.
As a pertinent example of this pain, Tammam Azzam’s solo exhibition The Road at the Ayyam Gallery highlights the wreckage, the resulting humanitarian crisis, and the strife borne by the 6.6 million (and counting) refugees fleeing the ongoing conflict in Syria. The show presents Azzam’s first body of work since 2012, when he was exiled from his native Damascus. It is his most ambitious and attentive exhibition to date, providing moving fragments of his conception of exile and identity.
