Mendes Wood DM is pleased to present eight new works by Neïl Beloufa that blur the line between digital and physical realities. The multi-layered practice of French-Algerian artist, Neïl Beloufa occupies the space between various dichotomies. Reality and fiction, cause and effect, presence and absence are the polarities between which the artist’s work begins to take form. Developing his reflection on these by combining various media, including sculpture, video and painting into single installations, Beloufa masterly manages to deconstruct our contemporary systems of belief by moving between the real and imaginative.

This specific presentation will showcase Beloufa’s new body of sculptures informed by supplemental online interventions throughout and during the days leading to Art Basel OVR: Portals. As demonstrated by his new videos, Beloufa reflects on the transience of the art world and gives voice to commodities at its center. Here the artist has imprinted faces onto his sculptures that in turn respond to their hyper commodification as they are brought into a gallery setting, sold and shipped away.

His work is strongly influenced by the world of the web, video games, reality TV and political propaganda, using the vocabulary of the information age to lift the lid on the value system of a society permeated with digital technology, where everything, from food choices to human relationships is established on the basis of an algorithm. In this process, the artist refers to himself as an editor, an assembler, who puts together information that already exists only to break it down again and show us the outcome without making any moral judgment. His aim is to bring about a short-circuit within normal settings, to throw off track assumptions that are commonly accepted as true, and to restore the viewer’s freedom to create new relationships and personal meanings.