The Code Universe

Solo booth by Karim Boumjimar at Frieze London 2026 presented by TINA as part of The Code Universe, a new section of the fair curated by Carol Yinghua Lu, director of Beijing’s Inside-Out Art Museum, and co-curator of the 19th Istanbul Biennial (2027).

Bringing artists together from the mid-1980s to the present, The Code Universe examines how artists respond to societal transformation through the lens of mass culture, from everyday objects and consumer goods to the imagery and information flows of mass media.
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Karim Boumjimar’s solo presentation brings together ceramics and a brand new site-responsive mural to explore the body as a mutable cultural code. The body itself as a vessel shaped by desire, mythology, media imagery, and systems of social inscription. In dialogue with the curatorial impulse of The Code Universe, the presentation considers how contemporary identities are produced and transformed through the circulation of images, symbols, and cultural narratives. Drawing from queer kinship, mythology, and devotional iconography, Boumjimar creates hallucinatory worlds populated by hybrid beings, lovers, sirens, devils, and animal-human figures. Dissolving distinctions between masculine and feminine, human and beast, sacred and grotesque, his works challenge fixed social hierarchies and normative structures of identity.

At the centre of the presentation is a new site-specific expansive mural painted directly onto the booth walls, extending Boumjimar’s fluid visual language into an immersive environment. Ceramic vessels, such as Deep Leopard, 2025, in this context, function as artefacts of bodily and societal transformation. Across media, Boumjimar constructs a visual language of exuberant resistance, positioning the body not only as subject matter, but as a responsive archive of contemporary culture itself; a living vessel shaped by systems of circulation, fantasy, desire, and social change.

Central to Boumjimar’s practice is the representation of individuals and communities, exploring the exuberant defiance of identities as well as the oppression such communities continue to face through themes of identity, intimacy, and resistance. Their work carries an inescapable political undertone that urges viewers to reflect on different forms of social and political marginalization. Boumjimar celebrates the diversity of the human body, frequently referencing underwater environments to connect ideas of fluidity with the fluidity of identity. Through chaotic, intertwined figures, the work poetically addresses resistance against oppressive societal structures, envisioning nature as a space of freedom and transformation.

Press: Frieze, FAD Magazine, Oggusto