My Artistic Approach

Hamed Ouattara — multidisciplinary artist and designer represented by Friedman Benda, New York — has developed over two decades a practice at the intersection of West African craft heritage and contemporary design. Works held in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Centre Pompidou, Vitra Design Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Denver Art Museum.

I do not simply build furniture. I construct forms that carry meaning, memory, and at times, silence. My approach is grounded in a direct relationship with raw material often metal shaped by fire, cuts, and welding. This physical, instinctive engagement connects my process to that of African blacksmiths not through imitation, but through the energy and symbolic charge they infused into each object. Each piece becomes a kind of contemporary offering, a ritual object stripped of ornament but not of power.

I aim to create furniture that questions the gaze, slows the gesture, and anchors presence. My formal language is minimal yet loaded: Sahelian architecture, protective geometries, frontal or suspended masses… Each structure holds a tension between stability and vibration. Furniture becomes here a space for identity projection, a site of gentle resistance, a way to occupy the world differently.
Based between Ouagadougou and Atlanta, my practice engages in dialogue with the global contemporary scene while remaining deeply rooted in African worldviews, gestures, and values. It is a radical yet livable form of creation somewhere between sculpture and design, memory and function.