Massinissa Selmani Algerian, b. 1980

Installation shots

Massinissa Selmani, Installation view of ”Dans quel sens traverser les antipodes”, Le Château de Servières, Marseille, 2025, Curated by Martine Robin, photos by : Jean-Christophe Lett

Biography

Soon No. VII, 2016

Born 1980. Algiers, Algeria

Lives and works between Tours, France and Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria

Selmani’s work addresses contemporary and political issues through drawings that combine a documentary approach with fictional constructions and animations. He constructs situations that confront, juxtapose, and even superposition the elements in a context that has systematically been concealed. Selmani produces exaggerated and enigmatic scenes inconceivable to reality, bearing witness to the absurdity of human behaviour. He balances depictions between the comical and the tragic and introduces architecture as an instrument of power.

He studied computer science in Algeria and graduated from the École supérieure des beaux-arts in Tours.

Selmani’s work has been shown in several international institutions and biennials, including Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; the Dakar Biennial, Senegal; the Lyon Biennial, France; FRAC Centre, Orléans, France; Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK; IVAM, Valencia, Spain; the Museum of African Art of Belgrade, Serbia / Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.

Selmani’s work can be found in several prestigious collections of art, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; MAC, Lyon, France; Frac Centre Val de Loire, Orléans, France; Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh and The British Museum, United Kingdom.

His work has been hailed by a special mention of the jury at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. In 2016, He received the Art Collector Prize and the Sam Art Projects Prize for contemporary art. In 2023, Selmani was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize.

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Works