Zineb Sedira What do you have in store for us at Frieze London?
Massinissa Selmani I think it will be recent and new drawings, probably a sculpture and an animation.
ZS And will there be a specific theme?
MS No, but there will be a bit of a dreamlike dimension and some humour. The violent backdrop that has been a constant in my drawings is still there. I’ve returned to a process where I create scenes that are unlikely to happen, using press cuttings from different dates, countries, etc. In some of the work, there’s a fine line between comedy and tragedy.
ZS When you say sculpture, is it in the traditional sense of the word?
MS No. For me, they are more like objects; they are details taken from drawings that I’ve materialized. One is a traffic cone with binoculars on top. On the stand, there will be cross references, little details that move back and forth between a drawing and a real-life object, and so on.
ZS Did you think of these new works as being for sale, or did you approach the fair project like a museums how?
MS I like to forget the context and think more in terms of the project, and how things resonate with each other. The idea for the fair is that people who are just discovering my work can immerse themselves in my universe.
ZS What other projects have you got coming up?
MS I have a solo show at the FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine MECA in Bordeaux planned for the end of the year. I’m making a piece based on four photos my father took on 4 July 1962, of the celebrations in Tizi Ouzou following Algeria’s independence.
ZS This is the first time you are making work that is autobiographical, isn’t it?
MS Yes. I’ve been talking to my father about these photos for years. He told me about the day he took them and I asked him to write it down because he has beautiful handwriting. He walked 13 kilometres from his village to the centre of Tizi Ouzou. There are plenty of images of independence celebrations in Algiers or Oran, but very few taking place in small towns.
ZS I have never seen a picture of Independence Day in Tizi Ouzou. It’s pretty amazing that your father had a camera in 1962 living in a small village in Kabylia.
MS He was living in Algiers at that time, and he bought a secondhand automatic Minolta from someone. He was an ordinary 21 year old who happened to capture an extraordinary event. I asked my whole family to describe the four photos and I’m going to show their descriptions.
ZS I can’t wait to see it. I’ve got photos of us together dating back ten or 12 years, but I can’t pinpoint when we met. In one, a bunch of us are in Paris; Kader Attia, Abdelkader Benchamma and Mohamed Bourouissa are there and, since then, they’ve all gone on to achieve great artistic success. Is that when we met?
MS No. I think the first time we were briefly introduced was at your exhibition at Palais de Tokyo in 2010. And then at ‘Intervening Space’ at The Mosaic Rooms in London in 2014, which I was in. A group of us spent some fun times together.
ZS Yes! Our Algerian community. It’s the love we have for Algeria! We have many friends in common and we know the contemporary art scene in Algiers well. You were born, raised and studied there, while I was born and grew up in France. You often visit and exhibit in the country but only some of your work is about Algeria, while I, on the other hand, work a lot on Algeria, with the exception of a few works. Can you expand on that?
MS My work isn’t centred on Algeria, it’s mainly about drawing, both in terms of formal considerations and its qualities as a documentary form. Algeria is present in all our work in very different ways. In some of my drawing series, even if the reference isn’t direct, there is an underlying violence that comes from what we experienced in the 1990s. I see the same latent threat in a lot of work by artists of my generation who grew up there. One day, someone should look at what contemporary artists have done to uncover things from Algerian history. Many of us have opened doors that no one else has ever even attempted to open.
ZS I agree. Algerian artists do a lot of that, but it’s not the only thing we do. I also think about all the conversations we had when I was working on the Algerian ’90s jokes and humour project, which I showed in 2019–20 at the Jeu de Paume. My work was archival and fairly exhaustive, but you have also used a lot of humour and addressed terrorism.
MS Growing up in a popular neighbourhood amid terrorism, when something unlikely or serious happens, you don’t know whether to laugh or be scared. In a place with so much conflict, humour becomes part of people’s mentality.
ZS Who have been important figures for your practice?
MS That’s a difficult one. I often mention Saul Steinberg, the newspaper cartoonist for The New Yorker. Also, the Belgian surrealist Paul Nougé. From time to time, I’ve been asked, ‘What inspired you in Algerian art?’ I’ve found very few models in Algerian painting. I really love Mohammed Khadda’s work, but I can’t say it’s been an inspiration. Instead, I’ve looked to literature and poetry.
ZS When it comes to Algerian art, I also admire Khadda and I’m fond of Choukri Mesli and Baya, but I’m not influenced by them. Internationally, there are many artists who have inspired me, yet it varies depending on where I am with my work. And sometimes I look to my artist friends.
MS Yes. I love that kind of energy. Right now, I have a friend who’s working on his family history, too. It’s totally different, but it’s exciting, and we get together and talk about it. We motivate each other to move forward.
This article first appeared in Frieze Week London 2024 under the title ‘Among Friends’.
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Main image: Massinissa Selmani, Échappées, 2020. Graphite and coloured pencil on paper 50 x 65 cm. Images Courtesy of Selma Feriani Gallery and the artist.
