Alex Ayed

Alex Ayed’s itinerant practice, in which he often combs places, highlighting the symbology of the localities in which he is working and developing on the imaginaries present therein, draws from these places in order to produce new bodies of work, narratives that involve a wide range of media, including sculpture, painting, photography, and sound. His practice also often involved smuggling objects into the gallery space, not with the goal of transmuting them and fetishizing them within the white cube, but in order to draw from them local and global histories, and to draw them together into a web of association with others. Writing in 2018, the curator Myriam Ben Salah likens Ayed’s objects to “the physical incarnations of an oral tradition”. The artistic gesture in this case may be quite subtle but the stories in most cases are manifold and develop along multiple levels, examining the patterns of transit and migration of objects and people through space and historical time.

Alex Ayed (b. 1989, Strasbourg, France) currently lives and works on a boat, sailing across oceans and the Mediterranean as part of an artistic and scientific research project. He graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2015, and Balice Hertling presented his first solo show in 2017. Ayed has recently presented solo exhibitions at venues including the Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris, 2023); Balice Hertling (Paris, 2023, 2021, 2017); The Intermission x Balice Hertling (Athens, 2022); Kunstverein Freiburg (Freiburg, 2022); Renaissance Society (with Lydia Ourahmane) (Chicago, 2021); B7L9 Art Station (Tunis, 2019); and the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art (New York, 2018). His recent group exhibitions span institutions around the world, such as the Astrup Fearnley Museet (Oslo, 2024); Julia Stoschek Foundation (Düsseldorf, 2024); Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial (Abu Dhabi, 2024); Biennale Gherdëina 9 (Ortisei, 2024); Prix Reiffers Art Initiatives at Acacias Art Center (Paris, 2024); Tag Art Museum (Qingdao, 2024); Frac Île-de-France (Paris, 2024); Biennale Internationale Saint-Paul de Vence (Saint-Paul de Vence, 2023); MAMbo (Bologna, 2022); New Museum Triennial (New York, 2021); and WIELS (Brussels, 2020), amongst many others.