Thameur Mejri: Humanity resides in the crack

Thameur Mejri, Architecture of Error 1, 2025, Uitstalling Villa

Sometimes it is not the completed gesture that touches us, but rather the misstep, the line that goes astray and therefore carries more truth than a perfect form ever could. Thameur Mejri knows this better than anyone. He does not draw, paint or scratch to smooth out the image, but to make the crack visible, the misstep tangible. Amanda M. Maples, art historian and curator of African Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art, who wrote the exhibition text for We Are Made From Mistakes in Uitstalling Art Gallery, once described Mejri’s oeuvre as an ‘architecture of errors’, a house full of cracks, sloping floors and windows that do not quite close. It is an image that fits this exhibition remarkably well. After all, in We Are Made From Mistakes, flaws become not failures, but foundations on which meaning rests.

This article was published earlier on Gallery Viewer. You can read the full story here.