Coma Manifesto 02

mounir fatmi
Coma Manifesto 02 , 2017
Steel
Work: 170 x 90 x 60 cm

The Coma Manifesto, a text which the artist wrote 20 years ago and, which has come to serve as a poetic guide for his artistic practice is made up of ‘very concentrated sentences that function like medicine,’ fatmi says, ‘and started with the poetic and provocative statement: ‘My father has lost all his teeth, I can bite him now’.’ The manifesto has since grown into a series of one-line warnings, remarks, instructions and advice that fatmi draws on in his works. In Coma Manifesto 01, 02 and 03, sculpted three distinct statements from metal plates, letters have fallen out and lie scattered on the floor as an expression of the disillusionment and disorientation brought on by the artist’s traversal between Christian Europe and the North African country it colonised, where Islam dominates.