SLIMEN ELKAMEL (B.1983)

Visual artist Slimen Elkamel was born in 1983 in Mezzouna in the Sidi Bouzid region of Tunisia. His childhood was nourished by popular tales, shaped by the imagination of a rural environment where the tradition of storytelling and poetry flourished.

His studies at the Institut supérieur des beaux-arts de Tunis allowed him to crystallize this literary and intellectual heritage into a singular visual practice. A practice whose genesis opens through writing and which draws its resources from texts, whether poetic or literary, memorial or improvised.

The daily writing exercise, as much as it circumscribes, expands the horizons of Slimen Elkamel's visual universe. Not far from free figuration, the artist questions the relationship between the real and the imaginary through the theatricalization of the constellated image.

The figure of a reality levitates in the space of an imagination and a prolific profusion where the transfiguration of social and popular realities into a surrealist vision takes place.

Images of memory and images of a reality, taken from the supports of everyday life, intersect in a pictorial field where, on the surface of the painting, the rustling of a dialogue begins endlessly, not for the narration of a fact, but for a celebration of narratives.

Since 2011, Slimen Elkamel has participated in several solo exhibitions (Tunis, London) and group shows (France, Dubai, Senegal, Morocco, England), and he has also been regularly represented since 2016 in various international contemporary art fairs. His works feature in the collections of numerous institutions including the Fondation Blachère (France), the Alain Servais Collection (Belgium), the Fondation Gandur (Switzerland), and the Musée d’Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden (Morocco). His most recent works will be shown in the solo exhibition he is preparing at the Institut du Monde Arabe in 2022.


︎ @slimenelkamel