Hammzat Tahabsim: Spectral Arrangment

Make Room is proud to present Spectral Arrangement, a new collection of paintings and drawings by Hammzat Tahabsim that calls on the powerful force of the unknown. They are the realization of ruptured narratives, woven from the torn threads of our larger societal fabric and Tahabsim’s own story. These are not depictions of events, but rather speculations of a psychological and spiritual world that is separate from our own. This place is not a fiction; these figures exist in a limbo between reality and fabrication. Not of our world, faintly familiar, remaining unrecognizable.

In Figure Facing Away, the artist found the beauty of these liminal spaces and the bodies that linger there. The figures, reclining, cloaked in cloth, foliage, or flesh, are suspended in haunted terrain. Swimming in a fluid of life and earth, the warm ochres, bruised reds, and smoke-laced violets bleed into forms of eerie macabre. In this suspended place and time, continuity ceases. The bodies begin to transmute; what was once flesh becomes bone, what was building becomes earth, and what was skin becomes canvas.

They stand on the edge between life and death. Their bodies are sickly and deteriorating, but their souls are retained even in their reserved expressions. Is this world a dream? Is it a purgatorial afterlife? Or is it just a transitory unknown that is entangled with our own past? These figures (keep arriving) exist here regardless; in prayer, in mourning, in waiting. There is a lingering spirit even in what seems to be Godless.

These pieces dig into a modernist aspect of painting but deny the avant-garde. Tahabsim conceives of art history not as a sequence of styles, but as a reliquary of wisdom; fragile, fragmented, and passed down through acts of devotion. These pieces borrow forms from modern works, a funeral procession, a townscape, or a nude figure. He distorts these figures, but allows them to remain aged. The bygone era is present and tangible in every aspect of the work. The paintings themselves come together as living objects, crafted out of the carcasses of found material. These are the remnants of transformation, as the found object becomes art.

The paintings emerge as intimate accumulations of found material and layered memory. They are relics of transformation, where discarded objects take on new forms. Instead of conjuring answers, these works suggest presence and persistence—what remains after the rupture, after the mourning, and after the wait. “Paintings surface as sorrowing palimpsests: found cloth, discarded wood, rust-bitten pigment,” as Tahabsim states; then the paintings will reveal who they are.