Karim Boumjimar’s painterly motifs spill fluidly, often erotically, from one figure to another—assembling animals, public personas, nightlife, the artist’s friends, cruising, and mythological creatures. As an all-encompassing installation, the exhibition at O— Overgaden includes a large-scale mural, created on site during the weeks leading up to the opening, letting the artist’s literally fabulous, transgressive, and polyamorous universe take over the institution’s white walls, like a midsummer night’s dream on acid.
Growing out of the walls, four 2-meter-tall vases informally pop up, mushrooming around in the spaces, as if constructing a forest to cruise in. Looking closer at the vases, shapes rise from the clay, carved out from its skin—as if cut back to expose secrets or hidden bodies beneath the surface. The quick, draft-like quality of the lines makes Boumjimar’s stable, permanent artworks—drawings and ceramics—feel like living, transient performances. Stemming from an intuitive, “deconditioned,” or unhinged bodily flow of experiments, the works at O—Overgaden have come about largely unplanned, almost like automatic drawings.
The result is a gigantic Dionysian feast or an interspecies orgy in the year 2025, including high heels, chimeric birds, a devilish horn-clad figure flashing his anus, archers, fable-like trans women connected by flows of hair, erect phalluses, horses, and angels of the night. Encircled by a colossal headless serpent or garland, Boumjimar’s world is one of hallucinating, queer connectivity across bodies that transcend binary identities. The fables of the archaic vases merge into our present: Like a dizzying trance of contemporary clubbing, this is both a place of demons and a chaotic present-day wonderland—pandemonium paradiso.
Karim Boumjimar (b. 1998, ES) is a Copenhagen-based visual artist and member of the performance collective Young Boy Dancing Group. Boumjimar graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Spring 2025 and holds a BFA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. He has exhibited and performed at venues including TINA Gallery, London (2025); Liljevalchs, Stockholm (2025); O Days Festival, Copenhagen (2024); Centre d’Art La Panera, Lleida (2023), ARIEL – Feminisms in the Aesthetics & Dag H 42, Copenhagen (2023); and Kunstverein in Hamburg (2021).
