Appropriating Appropriation: artist Meryem Meg

By day, Meryem Meg is a designer for Nike, but on evenings and weekends she can be found in her studio creating multi-disciplinary artworks which “[aim] to explore indigenous methods of mark making through a diasporic lens”.

Meryem is Algerian, Bulgarian, and grew up in France (Paris) and the UK. Her dual African and European heritage is conveyed in themes of fertility and birth across video, painting, printing and book making.

Meryem’s 2015 – 2016, 20-piece series Fertility considers “birth, life, beauty, suffering, strength and rhythm” in repetitious black and white patterns which replicate female reproduction, while her colour work is more symmetric and angular, but equally suggestive of “tribal” art. Through her work, Meryem hopes, as in the title of her upcoming exhibition, to appropriate appropriation and in doing so “[reclaim] a visual heritage and counterbalancing cultural appropriation and commodification of ‘tribal patterns’”.

Meryem Meg’s Appropriating Appropriation opens on Wednesday 9 November at AKQA’S artlyst gallery.