Fatima Moallim Draws Outside the Lines

The Swedish expression att kasta sig, meaning ‘to throw oneself into something’, is a fitting choice of title for one of the six drawings currently on display in Fatima Moallim’s solo exhibition at [tart vienna], the project space of Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman. The self-taught, Moscow-born, Paris- and Stockholm-based artist works quickly, without making preliminary sketches. The largest piece on show, Untitled (all works 2024) – in which black and blue lines swoop across a 2 × 2.5-metre linoleum support – is one of several the artist made directly in the exhibition space shortly before the opening.

This sense of urgency is present throughout. In Frånvarande närvaro (Absent Attendance), for instance, the artist has pressed down so hard while drawing circles with a red pen that it has sometimes stopped working, leaving only an inkless groove in the thick paper. Similarly, Lector in Fabula is dominated by a patch of navy-blue oil crayon into which the artist’s fingers have dug deep indentations with churned up edges – an image of material being pushed to its limits. In several places, the letter ‘E’ appears. Moallim’s works often allude to writing, but without being legible. What remains is not the sign but the action.

Moallim began her practice making site-specific drawings in front of a live audience. In her performance series ‘Flyktinglandet’ (Refugee Land), for instance – first presented at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 2018 – she drew directly onto a large wall or a glass facade. There is a similar, event-like quality to this exhibition: each work is unframed and attached directly to the walls with nails or screws – as if it could be moved or removed at any time. There is a nonchalance to the way that Moallim has allowed the heavyweight watercolour paper and linoleum to curl upwards at the edges, as though signalling that, despite her work now being held in numerous museum collections, she still prioritizes free and direct expression.

Moallim’s palette is defined by her sole use of permanent markers, oil crayons and BIC ballpoint pens in blue, green, red and black. For the artist, there is a nostalgic dimension to this choice. We learn from the exhibition text that she sees the ballpoint pens as a throwback to the 1990s, much like her use of linoleum, which references the floor she would draw on in her childhood home. In the past, Moallim has made clear biographical references in her works: ‘Flyktinglandet’, for instance, addresses her parents’ flight from Mogadishu to Moscow then, eventually, Sweden. Here, however, the works are more abstract while still retaining a psychological charge that makes them feel like seismographs of the artist’s thoughts and feelings.

There is an intoxicating quality to Moallim’s sometimes calm, sometimes obsessive repetition of lines and shapes, which appears to be driven by a force that is less about virtuosity than about insisting on presence. Despite their large formats and impetuous gestures, her works seem far removed from pathos or grandiosity. Instead, the artist has developed a visual vocabulary of mark-making that connects expression with sometimes clumsy and awkward gestures. The thin BIC pen lines on linoleum in Untitled, for instance, seem like faint echoes of the powerful black formations in permanent marker, while in Att kasta sig, there is a rather lackadaisical quality to the way that the artist fills BIC pen outlines with oil crayon. Yet, it is precisely by embracing this element of chance that Moallim is able to creates works that offer us a glimpse of freedom.

Fatima Moallim’s exhibition at [tart vienna] is on view until 1 June

_{Main image: Fatima Moallim, Folders, 2024, oil crayon, pencil on paper, 1.2 × 1.6 m}