Born in 1975 and having studied at the Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 2000s, Abdelkader Benchamma very quickly dedicated himself to the practice of drawing, which he increasingly mixes with other mediums. He talks about the survival of myths and beliefs within our contemporary societies, sometimes lacking direction, and the weight of the invisible… In ink, pen or charcoal, his lively line creates links between the past and future, questioning our modes of perception and understanding of the world.
How did you prepare for the 2024 Marcel Duchamp Prize?
As I knew that we each had a space of 100 m2, I quickly thought of making a large installation bringing together different themes and ways of producing. Drawing remains the basis of my work, but explores forms which also go towards engraving, scientific inspiration or even fresco, installation, animation and video.
Born in 1975, Abdelkader Benchamma studied at the Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 2000s. © Hugues Lawson Body
These movements are accompanied by micro-narratives that the installation can develop without beginning or end. I have designed an overall work that will partly disappear with the exhibition, because some drawings are made directly on the walls, with others irregularly shaped and unframed. They interact with animated videos, evoking a dreamlike cave or a celestial space populated by mysterious creatures. I like being outside of time and exploring the myths of the past as much as the stories of the future.
At the edge of the worlds by Abdelkader Benchamma, presented in 2024 in the Marcel Duchamp Prize exhibition at the Center Pompidou in Paris. © Tanguy Beurdeley
Can these stories be part of a more global reflection on uchrony, which you seem to have been working on for several years?
I like, in fact, to imagine other possibilities or temporalities. Here, these are views of the earth taken from space, evoking a cell attacked by billions of points which are the debris of satellites, as well as a reflection on the time of origins. It is also linked to what remains and what disappears in the exhibition… of the order of the sacred or the profane. I created an immersive installation, revealing itself in the darkness and giving a slightly special texture to the place… something real and dreamlike. In my work, I am very interested in myths, some of which continue to be present today at the heart of a humanity which is always looking for signs, beliefs, proofs, links… even more so in periods of worry. This talks about vision, retinal persistence, hallucinatory forms and pareidolia.
View of Abdelkader’s “Cosma” exhibition
Benchamma at Templon in Paris in 2023 © Tanguy Beurdeley
Why is the question of how we look at things based on our own cultural heritage so important?
This is one of the central reflections in my work, even if I am also caught up in my own heritage and my perspective… Jean Clottes had written about cave paintings from a fairly shamanic vision. He mentioned the possibility of being in second states via music, trance or by hallucinogenic substances during their realizations. I also carry out this reflection on images. How do they get to us? For this exhibition, I particularly integrated figurative scenes from reproductions that I collect, such as 16th century comets, which were seen as fantastic or harbinger creatures. Or these descriptions of “ghost” airships from the beginning of the 20th century, in the United States, when they did not yet exist. Newspapers of the time talk about it, but were they hallucinations, an optical phenomenon or a transcription from the European press where the first balloons were tested? It is an example of the stuttering of reality, a crack in science fiction, testifying to our conception or simplification of the world.
View of Abdelkader’s “Geology of Floods” exhibition
Benchamma at the François Schneide Foundation in Wattwiller in 2023 © Isabelle Arthuis
You have also worked a lot on the codes of representation, particularly on the marbles when you were in residence at the Villa Medici last April. How did you begin this research?
I had previously begun to be interested in what we call cosmatesque, but it was in Rome that I was able to expand this research by discovering the possible link with the iconoclastic crisis. Because the proliferation of these marbles corresponds to the ban on representing saints in Europe or even in the Orient. As if the marbles were a sort of intermediate path playing with perception. The believer or the viewer would see the Virgin Mary, the face of Christ or a devil, but the craftsman who made them could say that it was just the pattern of the stone, like a test of Rorschach.
Abdelkader Benchamma, Engramme – Souterrain , 2023 © Courtesy of the artists and TEMPLON, Paris – Brussels – New York. Photo © Charles Roussel
There is very little written on this subject, even if Georges Didi-Huberman talks about it in Fra Angelico: Dissimilarity and figuration. He insists on this notion of the absent body which haunts Christianity. This body which suffered but evaporated from the veins of the marble… In Rome, certain marbles are like symmetrical bodies, both very carnal and anatomical. It’s quite disturbing…
Can you also slip hidden messages into your drawings?
As with the marbles, when I draw I try to be in-between, neither figurative nor abstract. I like the idea that the viewer sees something while remembering having seen it elsewhere… I try to go beyond vision and create a drawing that we see, but that we feel at the same time, a place of physical, psychological and mental resonance.
During your studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, you became passionate about the technique of drawing. Why did it particularly resonate with you?
I graduated with an installation combining drawings, texts and sculptures, which was already interested in parallel universes. My black and white drawing appeared at that moment. I also painted a lot and admired, for example, the paintings of Marlène Dumas but also the Fayoum portraits and other somewhat mysterious funerary effigies. Then, I read a lot, writers of the absurd, like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett or William Burroughs, particularly his work on language. A black and white drawing, close to the world of comics, was born from his readings and which I saw as a kind of writing. Scenarios came to me and I tried to transcribe them as simply as possible, in black pen on white paper, sometimes adding text. Little by little, I created ramifications and the drawing developed outside its framework. The question of space has always been present in my work.
View of the exhibition “Signes” by Abdelkader Benchamma at Templon in Brussels in 2020 © Isabelle Arthuis
Would you define it, moreover, solely by the medium of drawing?
Quite generally, what I like is to give a materiality to something and drawing has this capacity to always maintain a slightly mysterious, non-real character. For me, drawing is linked to the imagination, because this play with white spaces, voids and reserve is also with the invisible. This relationship to what exists without us seeing it and, more generally, to the question of belief and the deconstruction of myths is at the heart of forms of new philosophies, of which Mohamed Amer Meziane speaks in particular. It’s from his book At the edge of worlds. Towards a metaphysical anthropology from which the title of my exhibition came. Part of my family, in Algeria, lived with a form of magic completely integrated into life, so I also grew up with this conception of the world.
Interview with Abdelkader Benchamma | Marcel Duchamp Prize 2024 | Pompidou Center
