ARTIST STATEMENT

Drawing is where my practice began and remains a way of understanding reality. A body, a history, a situation, even an impression: I need to take things apart and reconstruct them through form in order to make sense of them. Over time, this approach has extended beyond drawing into other languages and ways of working. They all involve, in one way or another, thinking through form, structure and organisation — and in that sense, I still think of them as drawing.

I tend to lose interest once I know exactly how to make something. I would rather begin with a question I do not yet know how to answer, especially when answering it means learning something new. The choice of language or medium comes from that process rather than preceding it. More importantly, each question changes the tools I bring to the next one. Learning and making become inseparable: what a project teaches me expands not only what I can do, but also what I am able to question afterwards.

Projects do not need one another to exist. Each can have its own logic and meaning. But bringing separate works together changes how they can be read: one may extend another, contradict it, or shift its meaning. This movement between the individual work and the larger body of work is something I keep returning to.

I use connections, proximities and tensions to trace these relationships. They tend to gather around recurring concerns — construction and deconstruction, the power of images, bodies and configurations, appearance and disappearance, memory and stratification — but I do not treat these as permanent categories. Structures, maps and classifications are useful precisely because they can be temporary. They make relationships visible for a time, without fixing what the work is or how it should be read.

Showing the work is part of making it. Once it reaches others, new connections emerge and sometimes change the way I see it myself. That feeds back into what comes next. So do accidents, failures and unexpected results: they can shift the question and take the work somewhere I hadn’t planned.

— Toufik Medjamia