A significant challenge as human beings is whether or not this metaphorical house, the culture that we all swim in on a daily basis, is visible, and whether or not we see our mistakes for what they are: character growth that makes sense of the chaos we struggle to organize and navigate each and every day. Artist Thameur Mejri is able to reveal this world to us in his new series “We Are Made From Mistakes,” which emphatically reminds us of the truth: Being human is hard, but we should embrace our flaws as part of an ongoing process of becoming. In fact, for the first time in his career, Mejri started with the title before rendering in acrylic, pastel, and charcoal the six drawings and two paintings featured for this solo exhibition. In a world of Instagram filters, self-care products and relentless advertisements that subtly (or not so subtly) pressure us to re-package and re-brand our bodies into an unrealistic perfection, Mejri began with mistakes, human fallibility, and errors. The surface of the canvases and drawings are smaller; the lines thicker, more energetic and almost violent than in previous series; allowing himself to make mistakes as he went, to follow the drive and pulsing energy of his hand as an extension of his mind. Indeed, Mejri submerged into his subconscious through music and a messier studio setting (noting Francis Bacon as a cue/influence), allowing an opportunity for his hand to be faster than his brain, to become an instrument that does not differentiate between right and wrong. “It becomes a conduit for a cleaner, more pure and raw energy that draws from personal and collective memories.” In letting go, he urges us to release ego and make peace with ourselves. Accordingly, in “We Are Made From Mistakes,” I see a mirror held up to a broadening trend: makeup-free actresses, “plus”-sized models, greater visibility of gender and sexual identities, increased diversity and equity practices, and less stigmatized mental health treatment. We are messy. We are our flaws. We are fallible, and we are beautiful (even if tragically so). Beyond the personal, Mejri also pushes us to reflect on societal and political mistakes, which are perhaps less beautiful, less worthy of praise yet no less didactic. As he stated: “When you acknowledge your mistakes, that you are made from them, you are embracing humility, on a personal level, on a societal level, and on a political level as well. You don’t see it often that political parties admit wrongs, or change, try new things, tell the truth if they fail…it’s rare to see leaders own up to mistakes.” Change and growth are necessary and to some degree inevitable, even with its growing pains, but it leads me to wonder (and in light of the intensity of this series): is violence—so often a byproduct or catalyst of change—also necessary and inevitable? In this sense the series functions like an ellipsis rather than a definitive punctuation mark. Mejri has explored related topics of cultural and religious dogma, surveillance, and the creep of Western capitalism in previous series through signature iconographic tropes, but their return in this series is more focused. Where children’s toys, mythological creatures, flies, cameras, birds, Nikes and Chuck Taylors previously battled for attention on the same canvas in an honest rendering of life’s desires and sociocultural freneticisms, “We Are Made From Mistakes” hones in on just two: light bulbs and flies. Engorged, they inhabit a good bit of the frame, brought to the fore with monochromatic swatches of color that stand out from the chaotic, frenzied lines of black charcoal, yet do not interfere. Here, the prevalence of the light bulb references the revolutionary ideas necessary for technological advances while conversely recognizing its pitfalls. Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project dramatically changed the world, but it had disastrous consequences, prompting moral conflict and regret. Our fragility in the face of such conflicting narratives of progress, and the absoluteness of death, emerges in Mejri’s flies. The fly—immune to drama—takes an objective stance and will perhaps outlive us all as the ubiquitous and omni-present witness to human fallacy. People will continue to make the same mistakes, cycling through the noise in an endless feedback loop of becoming and unraveling…and the objects we covet and fight so vociferously for are still just accessories, not real life, and not reality itself. Working more predominantly in charcoal on a white ground, a development during the last two years of the artist’s career, helped crystallize this idea. The disembodied human fragments also reappear and are similarly more focused. Where legs, heads, or the occasional full body emerged, hands and feet now hold court—particularly the tender arch of the inner foot. Mejri links this to a “Christ complex” of sorts, wherein the artist publicly lays themselves bare, rips hands and feet raw to reveal truths. Such vulnerability regardless of outcome breeds trust, humanity, and humility. As Mejri noted, “our relationship with sickness, pain, suffering, our body, nudity—it’s related to our image of the Christ” and we are “a society built on the confession.” Yet, while noble, such confession is veiled within a rhetoric of the “good consumer-citizen,” making one easier prey for surveillance, exploitation, and the deprivation of freedom. At the same time, complete freedom is a fiction. There are always-already constraints to human movement, whether intellectual, political, or physical. To combat this, one must be in constant motion; adapting to move forward while testing the boundaries and expanding the space to avoid suffocation. Creation and adaptation are thus their own form of acknowledgement, and ultimately, resistance. The two paintings of the current series attest to this: Mejri has bound himself in the polarities of blue and red to explore the oscillations in-between. These primary colors universally connect to dualities: of cold and hot; water and fire; life and death; the oasis of green and the starvation of the desert; night, mystery, ambiguity vs certainty; safety, reward, and regeneration against the burning abyss of war, guns, conflict, and punishment. These are timeless concepts that have branded into our collective psyches, and Mejri articulates its echoes and palimpsests. “We Are Made From Mistakes” speaks to the maturation of an artist who was already prescient, proficient, prophetic. The anger or frustration we all feel, sensitively matured through an artist’s lens, is projected in more restrained and controlled bursts—just as we learn from childhood on how to control ourselves; control our bodies, our emotions, our words within constraints that feel self-fulfilling and unerring. At a surface level it is about the personal mistakes we make as we grow into fully capable (or incapable) human beings, but it also points to the fallacy in our political and public or culturally-structured lives. “After all, what is art about?” if it isn’t about making “something out of the chaos of existence” as Francis Bacon instructs both artist and author. And out of this chaos is born a certain kind of perfection—an embraced perfectly-imperfect that accepts who “we” are: errors, messiness, and all. Text by Dr. Amanda M. Maples Architecture of Errors: Thameur Mejri’s “We Are Made From Mistakes” Uitstalling Gallery, Genk, Belgium, September 2025 
Amanda M. Maples is Françoise Billion Richardson Curator of African Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art. She has taught university courses in African arts and served in curatorial and scholarly capacities at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, the Yale University Art Gallery, the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, the High Desert Museum, and UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Maples has served as the Dialogues editor for the journal African Arts since 2020, and has curated a range of exhibitions on historical and contemporary African arts. Her scholarship explores urban and contemporary masquerade, decoloniality, jewelry and self-fashioning, museum policies, collecting practices, and restitutions. Maples holds a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.