Nadim Asfar
Experience de la montagne / Leporello «Théorème, 2015/2017»
2018 -
Inkjet prints on Awagami KOZO 70Gr
15 images, 42.5x61 cm (closed) - 85x61 cm (open) - 12m8 (spread). Ed. 2/3 +2 AP
Prints are folded into a leporello, slided in a handmade case and box
"The idea of the fold and points of assembly.
I can’t imagine photographing anything other than the mountain. Its self-evidence, its discretion, its indifference to everything—to us, and to me. The mountain is both absolute emptiness and absolute fullness. I want to print the mountain. These leporellos are traced lines, a stratification of images, an impossibility of separating places, of separating images, which build themselves within one another: there is always one image inside another. It’s about folding and creating points of assembly: hiding, revealing, covering, forgetting, returning, displacing, accumulating. It’s a path that outlines the contours of a spine, a crossing of one, two, three days. Photography helps me avoid falling into the mountain. There is nothing more mobile than a landscape.”
Reference NA-PH-2018-A
About the artist
Born in Beirut 1976
Works and Lives in Paris
Nadim Asfar is a French-Lebanese photographer and video artist. Born in Beirut, in 1976, he lives and works in Paris and Beirut.
His work has been shown at many international institutions and events, including Paris Photo, the New Museum in New York, the Kunst-Werk Institute in Berlin, and the International Documentary Festival in Marseille.
He was appointed the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres distinction by French Ministry of Culture in 2014. His work is part of major international public and private collections.
Nadim Asfar’s early work is characterized by an engagement with the technical and experimental origins of image-making. Whether through the use of techniques such as the photogram—a camera-less technique of inscription on a photo-sensitive surface—or the capturing of the movements of anonymous passers-by, over several years, from the same balcony in Beirut, the artist records the traces that bodies leave in space.
Since 2015, Asfar has been working on an ongoing project entitled Experiencing the Mountain. The project presents a shift from an engagement with the technical potentialities of the photographic apparatus as such, to a more thematic engagement with landscape as medium and subject. The work approaches the mountainous Lebanese mountains with the meticulousness a of a land surveyor and the sensibility of a Romantic landscape painter. ( HISHAM AWAD)
Other works by this artist
