"The Traveling Elephant" - A collaboration between Louis Vuitton & Nadim Karam
Description
Ayyam Gallery artist Nadim Karam was recently invited to conduct a workshop with Dubai school children at the reopening of the city’s Louis Vuitton outpost. The Travelling Elephant, a large painting that is the result of a collective effort between Karam and a dozen young participants will be on view in the luxury brand’s Mall of the Emirates location for three months, after which it will be donated to START, a non-profit arts organization that reaches out to impoverished and special needs children across the region and is a joint project of Art
Dubai and Al Madad Foundation.
Ayyam Gallery artist Nadim Karam was recently invited to conduct a workshop with Dubai school children at the reopening of the city’s Louis Vuitton outpost. The Travelling Elephant, a large painting that is the result of a collective effort between Karam and a dozen young participants will be on view in the luxury brand’s Mall of the Emirates location for three months, after which it will be donated to START, a non-profit arts organization that reaches out to impoverished and special needs children across the region and is a joint project of Art Dubai and Al Madad Foundation. Working with children from diverse backgrounds, Karam guided the execution of twelve individual canvases that were then brought together to form a singular artwork.
Of the project Louis Vuitton Middle East issued the following statement:
The children and Karam have one very strong bond in common: their visas may be wide and varied but together in an art studio their feet are to be firmly rooted in the language of dreams and imagination. Collaborating on this charity project with Karam, Louis Vuitton has connected with a master of imagination, who by his own admission “works on creating dreams for cities” by transcending boundaries. It is playful, childlike, dreamlike and oftentimes “absurd” with a borderless message. Nadim Karam was the perfect choice for a children’s art project that was to be rooted in a city that thrives on the diversity and cultural mix of its
residents, and mirrors the international spirit of Louis Vuitton. Continuing the theme of his effervescent elephant sculptures, which were on display at the
inaugural exhibition of Ayyam Gallery Beirut in 2009 and were featured at the 2011 edition of ArtDubai, Karam encouraged workshop attendees to step outside of the everyday, to reach beyond what is familiar to them, into the depths of their imaginations. “The collaboration with Louis Vuitton was very interesting for me,” the Beirut-based artist recently explained. “When I knew that it will be a workshop with the children around it, I was thinking of how can we involve all the kids and get them to work in the way that they forget about the first instant of thinking and go beyond that to another stage, which is creativity and imagination.”
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