Pilgrim in the Microworld, 2023, mixed media installation with construction sand, galvanized steel, and pigment dyed water, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
Nadim Abbas’s work invites us to embark on a journey through strange recesses of the imagination. His installations present ambiguous scenarios that challenge the threshold of human cognition, reconfiguring our perception of seemingly familiar surroundings. Technologies of miniaturization, modeling, and play are Abbas’s technical and cognitive instruments. He is also a musician. For the Taipei Biennial 2023, Abbas continues his investigation into the aesthetics of miniature dioramas with the construction of an elaborate “sandbox” terrain.
In Pilgrim in the Microworld (2023), various modules of sand and steel are arranged in a configuration that confuses our everyday sense of scale. From a different perspective, the molded forms also start to resemble clusters of wartime bunkers, or generic remnants of logistical infrastructure that, when viewed from above, recall printed circuit boards or microchip architecture. They are subject to an ongoing process of ruin and regeneration, both within the duration of the exhibition (as the crumbling sand forms are replaced) and in figurative relation to the onward march of technological progress. Such equivalences between microchips and bunkers reveal complex associations that exist in plain view but at very different orders of magnitude.
Abbas has an overarching interest in scalability, the capacity for an entity to be changed in relative size without distorting its fundamental identity. In the worlds of technology, business, and logistics, scalability can denote the need to expand or grow at all costs. Anthropologist Anna Tsing, whose theoretical work informs Abbas’s practice, has observed “the mounting pile of ruins that scalability leaves behind.” What Abbas is after, however, has less to do with the possibilities of infinite expansion, than with the re-introduction of boundaries and new, non-scalable elements.
