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Please be invited to the 2nd Solo Exhibition by Tunesian artist Thameur Mejri at Uitstalling - Location The Villa - Marcel Habetslaan 13 - Genk Belgium. See here a short part out of the Essay Architecture of Errors: Thameur Mejri’s “We Are Made From Mistakes”
Uitstalling Gallery, Genk, Belgium, September 2025
By Dr. Amanda M. Maples
The greatest art always returns you to the vulnerability of the human situation.
–Francis Bacon
“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.
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.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Marcel Habetslaan 13 and 26, Genk, België, Belgium
