Rafik Greiss’ studio is located within an industrial campus on the outskirts of Paris, called POUSH: an ensemble of former office buildings now housing some 250 artist studios. He moved in in October and shares a space—divided into ample sections—with fellow artist Pol Tabouret. At the time of our meeting, on a brisk February afternoon, his studio was surprisingly austere, although Greiss explained he was waiting on a shipment of items he’d collected from public space from two separate countries—his native Egypt, and Georgia, where he recently did a residency.
Greiss grew up in Cairo, moved to the UK for high school and went to university in New York City to study photography and art history. When Covid-19 hit, he had just graduated and there was no work, so he moved to Paris.
In his practice, Greiss works with photography (often as a series) and sculpture (mostly using unembellished found objects). He’s attracted to possessions and what people throw away. “I feel that the act of possession itself is…” He paused. “You can see it through migration and how people move and through hints of colonisation.” He noted: “It can also be shown in a really positive light—in terms of how people’s cultures are shown through their objects,” adding: “I’ve moved around so much in my life that it’s kind of this identity, figuring out where I stand.”
He has no day-to-day studio rituals. “It’s pretty erratic, honestly,” he said. “Some days, I’ll be in research holes. Then, some days I’ll be really hands-on.” He recently was inspired by the Musée de la Contrefaçon (Counterfeiting Museum): “It’s got all these stories of object migration and copying these received ideas of luxury.”
For his first solo exhibition in September 2021, ‘Closer,’ he was guided by the experience of sitting on a train seat and feeling the previous person’s presence. It was a way to “ignite this energy transfer I had with someone who I’d never met before.” He loosely recreated a train setting—installing suspended handles ordered from China, floor-mounted braille, and a metal wall to nod at train doors (he left keys around for gallery-goers to scratch graffiti into them—“by the end of it, it was these traces of people going through”). The good thing about an exhibition space is that “it’s a blank space, and you can decapitate objects from their original function—that way, viewers can be forced to question their immediate surroundings,” he said. Nearby was a wall lined with inkjet prints of close-ups of ears to illustrate “the backfire effect,” a concept through which beliefs are strengthened even after others present evidence to debunk them. He took these pictures during a protest he attended: “I was hearing more people wanting to have their voices heard instead of listening to one another.”
A more recent career highlight was his inclusion in the Regards du Louvre programme in January 2023, in which 20 young artists were given carte blanche to make a 3:30-minute video within the Louvre. His work was shown alongside that of Mykki Blanco, Eliza Douglas, Miles Greenberg and Marine Serre. His video was composed of found and archival footage from Cairo, mixed in with video of Louvre sculptures from Antiquity flashing under red and blue strobe lights.
For his newer work, he’s distilling items from his residency in Georgia, where he found lots of scrap metal, a beautiful interior of a piano, as well as tyres slashed into what looked like flower petals. “I’m a hoarder at heart,” he joked (though he himself does not live with clutter, just meaningful trinkets). He operates by the maxim ‘one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.’ “I’m quite attracted to weathered objects; I find beauty in them because I feel like they’ve lived through many lives. Also, the act of care is something I’ve been thinking about through these objects and how different cultures perceive different things.”
The Georgia residency was followed by two months spent back in Cairo, where he collected wooden mats and attended moulids in celebration of Sufi saints. He plans to spend a lot more time there, collecting local objects and bringing them back to Paris. “It’s finding a migratory path in how these objects are packaged and how they are then disassembled… how they’ve gone through people’s homes… how they’ve survived. I find that very charged.” Recently, he’s started to really appreciate where he’s from: “…seeing how people live and hold on to things… the signs in the street, even if they’re broken, they find a way to fix them because they have no other means. It’s just holding on to something, and not letting go. I find that really touching.”
He has collaborated with his friend and fellow artist Ser Serpas, both of whom are object gatherers—she included his photographs at her Swiss Institute show in New York last year, “Hall”, and the two went to the outskirts of Paris collecting things for her exhibition at Bourse de Commerce.
He’s working towards a group show in Brussels in September that will implement towers of tyres and a wall built from metal sheets found in Georgia. In 2025, he will participate in a group exhibition inspired by Japanese architect Togo Murano, hosted in Arles in which each artist is allowed to interpret Murano’s practice however they wish. “I like this idea of architecture bleeding into art,” he noted. “As I’m moving on more in my practice, I am more focused on the architecture of the space and how that’s in conversation with my photographs.”
When we left his studio, Greiss stopped abruptly to examine a folded dusty panel splayed in the middle of Avenue Jean Jaurès. He fingered it and considered it, ultimately deeming it “too plastic-y,” before continuing on to the metro. The eye never stops.
