by DEBORAH VANKIN
Abdulnasser Gharem’s rubber stamp painting “Hemisphere” on view at LACMA PHOTO/Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times
The evening of Sept. 11, 2001, had been like any other for Abdulnasser Gharem — until it wasn’t.
A self-taught artist and a young officer in the Saudi Arabian army, Gharem was relaxing at home in the city of Khamis Mushait, where he’d grown up with 11 siblings, when the yelling began. “Come here!” “Watch.” “Look at this!” The family anxiously crowded around the living room TV. The images of the World Trade Center collapsing were devastating to watch, the shock matched only by the news that eventually followed: Two of the hijackers were Gharem’s friends from high school.
“I was shocked, how could this be? It was like someone stopped the world for a while. Everything paused,” Gharem says, sitting at an outdoor café at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the exhibition “Abdulnasser Gharem: Pause,” recently opened. “We used to roam around the city listening to music. We’d just drive around looking for fun in the car. I thought: ‘We grew up in the same city, in the same environment, we had the same knowledge — it could have been me.’ But we’d taken very different paths.”
Shortly after, Gharem began work on “The Path (Siraat),” a three-minute performative video and subsequent silkscreened photograph of a broken bridge in his hometown with Arabic text spray-painted across the concrete. It read, “The Path,” repeatedly, along a damaged road headed into darkness. Those pieces, like all of Gharem’s work in the LACMA exhibition — his first solo show in the U.S., featuring mixed media stamp paintings, prints, sculptures and film — address the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks as well as the artist’s life experiences.
“I’m trying to say what the people couldn’t say in my country,” Gharem says. “It’s hard because the media in all Arab countries has been controlled by the government. So I think the role of the artist is to bring these issues, through the artworks, to the people.”
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