Massinissa Selmani, drawings

I encountered Massinissa Selmani’s fine, precise, often political, and in certain ways humorous drawings for the first time at the Venice Biennale 2015. When I met them again at the Sharjah Biennale two years later, I felt, I would like to know more about this artist. Perhaps I should invite him to teach in Salzburg? I asked Ralph Rugoff , who had worked with him at the Lyon Biennale 2017, if he could recommend Massinissa as a teacher for the summeracademy as Ralph knows the summeracademy from a lecture he gave here some years ago. You can imagine the rest of the story … I’m excited that Massinissa agreed to teach.

In his artist talk he will present two recent projects: The series of drawings dealing with the lectures of the French anarchist Louise Michel held in Algeria in 1904. As well as the project of the construction of 1000 socialist villages in Algeria during the 1970s. Although Massinissa researches historical facts his drawings are not entirely documentary. He often mixes fact and fiction and he deals with memory, which should not be a contradiction. At the same time he “corrects” the false histories of Algeria, those which are still told from the perspective of the former colonisers .