Karim Boumjimar: Pandemonium Paradiso: O-Overgaden

Karim Boumjimar’s painterly motifs spill fluidly, often erotically, from one figure to another—assembling animals, public personas, nightlife, the artist’s friends, cruising, and mythological creatures.

As an all-encompassing installation, the exhibition at O—Overgaden includes a large-scale mural, created on site during the weeks leading up to the opening, letting the artist’s literally fabulous, transgressive, and polyamorous universe take over the institution’s white walls, like a midsummer night’s dream on acid. Growing out of the walls, four 2-meter-tall vases informally pop up, mushrooming around in the spaces, as if constructing a forest to cruise in. Looking closer at the vases, shapes rise from the clay, carved out from its skin—as if cut back to expose secrets or hidden bodies beneath the surface.

The quick, draft-like quality of the lines make Boumjimar’s stable, permanent artworks—drawings and ceramics—feel like living, transient performances. Stemming from an intuitive, “deconditioned,” or unhinged bodily flow of experiments, the works at O—Overgaden have come about largely unplanned, almost like automatic drawings. Chimeric birds, a devilish horn-clad figure flashing his anus, archers, fable-like trans women with flows of hair connecting their collective bodies, erect phalluses, horses, angels of the night, interspecies orgies. Encircled by a colossal headless serpentor garland, Boumjimar’s world is one of hallucinating, queer connectivity. Like a dizzying trance of contemporary clubbing, this is both a place of demons and a chaotic wonderland—pandemonium paradiso.


For more information visit O-Overgaden.