Karam Natour
Winner of Kiefer Scholarship in – 2020
The 2020 Ingeborg Bachmann Scholarship, established by Anselm Kiefer, is awarded to the artist Karam Natour for expanding performative practice from the establishment of a subject responding to the effectiveness of pre-organized orders of knowledge to the creation of personal and fictional spatial and temporal dimensions. Natour’s works raise the question of how one can navigate between objective epistemic arguments about specific fields of knowledge and their human and subjective constitution. This question positions art in its ethical role: exposing mechanisms of knowledge and assigning responsibility to viewers in shaping their own worldviews.
Karam Natour (born 1992) is a multidisciplinary creator working in drawing, digital printing, video, and performance. His performative works explore the production of knowledge systems emerging from the tension between mental states, the construction of representational languages, and physical actions. Natour’s works expose prevailing worldviews and images as fragile constructions, reliant on the subject that forms them and on the relationship between the artist and his communities. Thus, our understanding of reality and our participation in the construction of knowledge systems align with two distinct paradigms that Natour presents in an intentionally inconsistent manner. The first is objective, rooted in semiotic and scientific representations; the second is subjective, where our actions and experiences create realities in an unmediated fashion.
Natour uncovers the illusory Natoure of self-perception, which assumes complete alignment between linguistic instructions and their real-world applications, between consciousness and our understanding of it, between rationality and our tendencies toward prejudice, error, and humor, and between the fluid, ever-changing ethical, aesthetic, and political foundations that underpin complex identities.
These explorations highlight the ontological distinction between two modes of existence. The first depends on subjective experiences such as laughter, pain, and embarrassment, as seen in his works Nothing Personal (2017) and Heat in My Head (2018). The second relies on the identification of objects in the world, such as the sun, earth, and moon, as in his work Come Back After Me (2018). This latter work examines the elusive and unstable Natoure of spoken and written language, whose meanings shift within the cultural contexts of Arabic, Hebrew, and English. Natour composes semiotic sentences and “rule-following statements” (as Ludwig Wittgenstein termed them) alongside physical actions and performative speech acts. The first category engages with the depths of a priori laws that govern meaning-making, while the second, lacking prior knowledge, constructs the order of meaning through the singularity of each performance.
From these performances, Natour derives cartographies of imaginative knowledge, inventing cosmologies that reflect a world created by the artist. This is exemplified in his digital prints, including Genesis, Sun, Saturn, Venus (2018), and Water (2020).
