Karim Boumjimar: Mouths, Vessels, Portals

Karim Boumjimar works through performance, drawings and ceramics. Each medium enriches the other in a symbiotic expression. The focus is on understanding different sexual, racial and natural identities and challenging the prevailing social hierarchies and norms. He creates spaces where all individuals are celebrated, and tries to evoke empathy and provoke societal change in line with a romantic vision of a just and compassionate society.

Porous Vessels and Leaky Holes
Exhibition text by João Florêncio

In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, his seminar delivered in 1959–60, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan dedicated some time to thinking about subjectivity by thinking with vases. The vase, he claimed, “creates the void and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it.…It is on the basis of this fabricated signifier, this vase, that emptiness and fullness as such enter the world, neither more nor less, and with the same sense. ” He continues:

Now, if you consider the vase from the point of view I first proposed, as an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at the center of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as represented in the representation presents itself as nihil, as nothing. And that is why the potter, just like you to whom I am speaking, creates the vase with his hands around this emptiness, creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole. (1)

Reading Lacan almost five decades later, Mari Ruti notes how Lacan uses the vase as a metaphor for the simultaneous co-emergence of the self-alienation that defines us and of the creative ways we all develop to cope with it—the ways in which we all build vases around our ungraspability to ourselves in order to make ourselves perceptible, readable, communicable, definable(2). Yet those vases, those identities, can never neatly contain our inner multitude, an unnameable excess always ends up leaking, and a new vase has to be created to replace the old over and over again. It is that excess that propels us forwards, that makes it possible that we keep living towards a future.

I remember when we first spoke. Leipzig, last Summer. We had both been waiting for the bus to take us to that lake by those woods. You eventually sat across the aisle from me.
We got there. The sun was shining.

Over those three days, we kept on bumping into each other, on the beach, in the woods, among the crowd dancing, among the crowd fucking. Yet we didn’t fuck… at least not immediately.

Built temporarily structures, house-like. Benches, gloryholes, cages, slings, sofas, stages. Psychedelics and uppers. Ephemeral homes pulling us both in. Safe ports. The familiarity of vessels. Domesticity of the wild.

A home is where desire is.

We didn’t immediately fuck but we talked quite a lot. Short chats often fitted between house tracks, techno tracks, water fountains and hard dicks.

We didn’t immediately fuck partly because I didn’t know myself fuckable to you. Familiar, hardened walls, they governed the space between self and other, between me and you. Yet the walls were made of clay… Porous, they breathed. Panting, they eventually broke and leaked.

Because the world is filled with marvelous objects that entice our desire — because the world, while certainly full of limitations and deprivations, is also brimming with possibilities—we are compelled to reach beyond out solipsistic universe(3).

I still remember it as if it happened yesterday. We were sat chatting like we had done before. But this time it was diaerent—we leaked. You grabbed my hand and placed it on your dick. We kissed as I grabbed the thick metal chain around your neck. I held on to it so as to not get lost. The next thing I remember, we were a few metres down by the trees, leaning against the fences that prevented us from drowning. You tore down the walls broke the vase. I remember your warm breath trying to hold on to the moist sweaty skin on my back. You too were breaking. We leaked.

Precisely because eros entails the incorporation of the other within the self, it allows the self to overstep its normal boundaries, and to access facets and potentialities of its being that ordinarily remain hidden or inactive.… it allows the self to momentarily “lose” itself so as to be able to resurface altered, with its parameters renegotiated(4).

We got up and put ourselves together. We hugged and kissed goodbye, as I learned myself fuckable to you. Later that night some other guy came over to me:

“I saw you getting fucked earlier, in the woods… It was hot…”

João Florêncio is Professor of Gender Studies (Sex Media and Sex Cultures) at Linköping University, Sweden. He is the author of Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of
Becoming-Pig (2020) and, with Liz Rosenfeld, of Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising (2025), among numerous journal articles and chapters in edited collections.

(1) Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII (Routledge, 2010), 120.
(2) Mari Ruti, “Why There is Always a Future in the Future,” Angelaki 13, no. 1 (2008): 118–19.
(3), Ruti, “Why is There Always a Future in the Future,” 118.
(4) Ruti, “Why is There Always a Future in the Future,” 121.

Kilde: Alice Folker Gallery

Karim Boumjimar: Mouths, Vessels, Portals

Karim Boumjimar creates spaces where all individuals are celebrated, and tries to evoke empathy and provoke societal change in line with a romantic vision of a just and compassionate society.