Ammar Khadour, Syrian photographer
Born in Damascus, Syria in 1991
Lives in Graz, Austria
Ammar khadour was born in 1991 in Damascus (Syria) where he has been studying Law at Damascus University until 2017. He began his career as an artist when he started photography six years ago in Damascus. In November 2017, he was invited by Kulturvermittlung Steiermark to reside in Graz as an “artist in exile”. On May 29, 2018, he participated in the event Knafe, Artist talk and Reading in Camera Austria, in Graz. In autumn 2018, Ammar will begin his studies at the Photographic Department of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since then, he lives in Graz, the capital of the province of Styria and the second largest city in Austria after Vienna.
Artist’s Portrait:
Ammar Khadour, a young Damascene photographer, takes us on an atypical photographic adventure through the streets, alleys, and suburbs of the Syrian capital. At every street detours in Damascus, there is always the discovery of a decrepit or cracked wall of unprecedented singularity, a witness of a distant past. Time passed on the walls of Damascus, it breaks down into the abyss of the ephemeral.
The artist photographed the purely abstract parts of walls, age-worn and weather-damaged walls with shades, colors and crackings of old paints, children’s chalk graffiti, ancient inscriptions and remnants of painted signs, remains of death announcements, half torn posters, political slogans, some covered by other slogans, a freehand painted line, erased curse words or covered with different colors, tatty paints on metal, rust stains…
Ammar Khadour’s images open us to a world of unsuspected urban poetry. The walls of public spaces end up loosing tongue and revealing a myriad of stories, secrets and snippets of human lives. These amazing colors, these most diverse forms, these structures and textures on abandoned city walls or metal surfaces end up creating a form of contemporary art, such as abstract paintings, that no one had ever noticed before.
Abstract paintings that seem to have been created with Antoni Tàpies’ materials, a few strokes by Jackson Pollock and CY Twombly, Kazimir Malevich’s forms and surfaces that relate to Mark Rothko, Lucio Fontana, and Günther Uecker.
SYRIA.ART 