Sem Lala’s practice begins with found materials, engaging in a series of gestures that disrupt and destabilize meaning at both formal and conceptual levels — often through repetition. He frequently employs replicable and automated mediums such as printmaking, screen printing, and recorded sound, using processes of reproduction, cutting, looping, and editioning to reconstruct the ideological structures that shape an artwork. Form acts as both a constraint and a point of resistance, as he navigates self-imposed limits on authorship and subjectivity.

At the core of his work is an interest in exposing meaning as interdependent, unsettling what might have once seemed fixed or closed. Through his handling, meaning fractures and shifts, embedding itself in the cracks and margins of his chosen form — disrupting its original referent without fully severing ties to it. Strategies of accumulation, displacement, appropriation, and ultimately, slippage form the foundation of a practice that reworks what’s there, often to reveal what wasn’t.