About
In Deep Cuts, CFHILL presents artist Karim Boumjimar, who continues his exploration of ceramics as a vessel for memory, desire, and transformation. Known for his performances and drawings, Boumjimar now turns to clay to challenge social hierarchies and explore the intersections of identity, culture, and nature. The installation features monumental vases, their surfaces covered in intricate illustrations that weave together personal encounters, mythology, and the worlds of clubs and nightlife. Through this interplay, Boumjimar transforms earthenware into a living archive of queer experience, where fleeting moments and intimate connections are rendered permanent.
Boumjimar recently exhibited at Overgaden in Copenhagen and Kunsthal Charlottenborg and will be part of an upcoming group exhibition at Liljevalchs Konsthall in Stockholm. Across these presentations, his work expands a growing visual language that is at once bodily and mythological – an ongoing study of transformation through touch, form, and gesture.
Each vessel bears the trace of touch and body, turning solid ceramic into something sensuous and alive. Across their surfaces, figures dance and flirt, unbound by time or category: Laura, a tattooed stranger met in the smoking area at Dalston Superstore, meets Napoleon in his feathered hat; Venus appears beside a friend from a late night in Madrid. Built up through coiling and carved by incision, the works are both constructed and wounded; every cut leaves an imprint, echoing the layered histories of the bodies and spaces they evoke. Deep Cuts speaks of rupture and repair, of histories inscribed in both skin and clay. The act of cutting becomes a metaphor for memory itself: etching, healing, and transforming.
At once tactile and elusive, these works channel a history of ceramic traditions while reframing them through a contemporary queer lexicon, one where touch, texture, and transformation define the language of form. By translating bodily memory into sculptural matter, Boumjimar reimagines clay as a living skin that remembers, holding the imprints of encounters that often exist on the margins.
Karim Boumjimar (b. 1998, Malaga) is an artist whose work spans drawing, performance, and sculpture. His practice explores the intersections of nature, culture, and identity, embracing hybridity, co-evolution, and solidarity between bodies –human and otherwise. Through a visual language of flesh, pigment, and touch, he reimagines humanity as deeply enmeshed within ecological and emotional systems. Boumjimar holds a BFA from Central Saint Martins, London as well as an MFA at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. His work has been exhibited across Europe, reflecting a practice deeply engaged with questions of transformation, intimacy, and the politics of embodiment. Deep Cuts marks his debut at CFHILL.
