Videographers, visual artists, photographers, performers…: artists from the Arab world and the diaspora seize anticipation and science fiction to question and transgress today’s societies without detours and dream of tomorrow’s worlds. To introduce the visitor to this marvelous and dynamic laboratory of hypotheses, the contemporary art exhibition ARABOFUTURS brings together works by 18 of these artists and as many experiences, testimonies and views on the world.
The game of reality and fiction
The exhibition begins with an introduction to the pioneering concept of Gulf futurism formulated by Sophia Al-Maria and Fatima Qadiri in 2012: a worried questioning of the accelerated hypermodernization at work in the region and its corollary hyperconsumerism, like the gigantic labyrinthine mall revisited by Sophia Al-Maria.
Another narrative game exploring parallel or amplified worlds, those of Meriem Bennani and Sara Sadik , creators of installations and immersive environments humorously combining references to globalized pop culture and representations of Moroccan culture and history or Maghreb culture in France. The flying cars in Skyseeef ‘s retrofuturistic photographic series participate in this same augmented daily life.
Some artists are subverting and subverting it, in the technoscientific SF aesthetic that appeared in fanzines in the 1930s. This is the case for Ayham Jabr , who became known with a series produced in 2016 in Damascus under siege, and Mounir Ayache with his installation composed of 3D sculptures, digital prints and a video game that immerses visitors in the imaginary journey of Hassan al-Wazzan (Leon the African). As for Gaby Sahhar, he invites us to reflect on the dehumanization of the modern world with his large-format painting of a standardized society, devoted to steel.
Hybrid futures
The “Hybrid Futures” section opens the doors to speculation and new possibilities. Hybridizations, writing myths, new humanities, fantastic and post-human worlds…: these futures are those of radical demands for change, of refusal of current paradigms and patriarchal, capitalist, expansionist models that have organized human societies.
Witches, women with antennas and other flying faces by Neïla Czermak Ichti expose the strange otherness, the desirable monstrosity and its existence in each of us. Tarek Lakhrissi acts as “poetic reparation” with his demons restored to serenity. Transhumanism, here a possible negotiation between the human and the strange, the marvelous, the fantastic, is done in the video work of Ayman Zedani , a new philosophy of animated matter, marrying living and non-living organisms.
Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind?, Aïcha Snoussi or Hicham Berrada offer a poetic reflection at the intersection of science fiction, archaeology and politics. By implementing a myth – political for Sansour and Lind, queer for Snoussi, technological for Berrada – their work becomes a historical intervention, between invention of the past and critique of the present.?
It is on the essential motif of ecology that the exhibition closes. Organic Worlds by Berrada , which applies the bilateral symmetry specific to animals to mineral forms, playing with the terrestrial limits between organic and inorganic matter. Worlds to Come by Zahrah Al Ghamdi, whose assemblages of hundreds of pieces of leather nibble at floors and walls, like a new living organism whose proliferation would testify to a successful adaptation. A vision of the resilience of a post-human earth?
Curator: Élodie Bouffard – Associate curator: Nawel Dehina
Exhibited artists: Zahrah Al Ghamdi, Sophia Al-Maria & Fatima Qadiri with Lyndsy Welgos, Mounir Ayache, Meriem Bennani, Hicham Berrada, Neila Czermak Ichti, Souraya Haddad Credoz, Ayham Jabr, Tarek Lakhrissi, Sara Sadik, Gaby Sahhar, Larissa Sansour, Hala Schoukair, Aïcha Snoussi, Skyseeef, Ayman Zedani.
ARABOFUTURS Science-fiction et nouveaux imaginaires – October 27th, 2024,
Institut du monde arabe
