Wahshani
2019.
82 x 130 x 53 cm.
aluminium sheets, oxidised zinc and steel sheets, copper sheets, fired clay, jesmonite, acrylic and oil paint, chive, screws, washers, nuts, castanets of my childhood.
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"Wahshani" means « I miss you » in egyptian arabic (addressed to a female entity).
This sculpture questions the temporal permeability of our bodies with each other and with their environment. It tells the tension between the different identities of the artist, born in France from Egyptian parents, the plurality of the "home" entities generated a latent lack for one or the other. A mask of Dalida, an icon of femininity of the artist's childhood is found hooded resting in the remains of an armour/body trying to interact with a contemporary architectural object, a bodies abacus.
El bint
2019.
65 x 54,5 x 15 cm.
Jesmonite, aluminium sheets, copper sheets, oxidized steel sheets, coral pearls, brass screws, a safety pin, embroidery threads, buttons, glue, oil paint, acrylic and gouache.
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« El bint » meaning "the daughter" in arabic.
El bint merges different speed of temporalities. From her original image linked to the Fayoum portraits to its contemporary relation to femininity and masculinity, she attempts to stay still in the context of our contemporary hopes and constraints.
Seed my feet, Shield my hands
2018.
100 x 74 x 10 cm.
green lentils growing in cotton, non fired terracotta clay, air dry clay, pink quartz, buttons, aluminium sheets, blind rivets, glue.
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Time gets slowly annulled as preservation techniques are perfected, parallel times are zoomed out to unification. A wish for an alternate universe, the digital and the spiritual still remains in the factual time, both longing for sharper verticalities.
As the virtual and factual are merging forward, some stones and metals still remain steady, voluptuous women and men carrying our buildings, responsible for our roof sturdiness, ornaments and bas-reliefs keep spying on us, the ever changings. New mythologies gets born, ornaments are longing, –an emptied shield refuses to fight and chooses to believe in the power of its rose quartz linked to the electric power of the sky through the sacrum reaching the joined palms by growing the braided rewards of what they seeded, savour of the labor.
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Instructions:
Place cotton then seeds on top with water, watch how they grow and water them, as they gain stronger start a stems' braiding meditation till you can tight them to the palms. Enjoy the presence of the rose quartz, as it absorbs suffer to trade it for love it will need purification, – unplace the stone and run it under flowing water, feel as you are the stone being purified –and to recharge, place it under the moonshines.
Appel enregistré
2018.
177 x 150 x 70 cm.
aluminium sheets, blind rivets, bolts, nuts, washers, automotive wire, sandpaper, anti-slip tape, foam, lighting filter gel, fired terracotta, air dry clay, ribbon, thread, embroidery thread, safety pins, paint, prints, punched pockets, a bobby pin, mirror, performer, video.
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Appel enregistré acts as a shattered body cynically enjoying the thrill and pain of the repetition of a static path. Lying in the wait for an ending materialisation to its own utopia, it develops a normative behaviour towards its own flaws.
Different characters share their responsibility in this quest for achievement :
Utopia :
Realised, finally,
I am matter so I exist,
without this body.
I set myself free,
to please and pleasure me,
grow free.
The Mind :
We are alike,
I mean.. you are me or me are you,
you play me or I play you,
well.. in the end, I don't know,
this is the way I am,
I, it's all I live.
The Spine :
I am alone. Condemned.
Jiggling on their prayers.
They don't hear me anymore.
They all fools think they don't need me.
Five Left Toes :
We have taken a decision,
twenty-seven years ago,
to stick to this ship no matter what!
Our shadows are getting thicker,
they want to get rid of us!
a Human :
waiting
In front of the
elevator's doors
my call flashes
I know all I know
it's coming for me
to take me
to destination
self realisation
impatient I pray
blue to reach red
the moment waits
stretches my passionate impatience
impatient passion
still hoping
for it to come
I dance
Performers: Sarah White, Marie Aimee Fattouche
Photos credit: Alessandra Sormani
Video credit: Paolo Capelli
Metro boulot dodo
2017.
200 x 180 x 180 cm.
aluminium sheets, protection plastic film, coat hanger, blind rivets, bolts, nuts, performer.
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Metro boulot dodo presents a cynical theatrical scene as the artist's response to contemporary urban routine. "Metro boulot dodo", literally meaning "tube work sleep", is a French expression referring to the simpleness of the automatic urban repetition. (This expression was borrowed from the poem Couleurs d'usine by Pierre Bearn, 1951.)
Hanged, disposed and hooked on a coat hanger, three nuclear families of dominoes are stabbed, stuck in their physicality: standing up, sitting or laying down. Only understood through their form and potential performance, the dominoes are associated to feed the physical production and meet the pace expectation of this routine. The dominoes stop existing outside of these three physical positions, any attempt for movement not serving the routine mutes into residue.
In opposition to the sculpture Dominoes’ mektoub (click here to see), the dominoes are here understood for their form and not through their content. As they are not associated with the understanding of their numerical dual singularity, the dominoes lose the need of these points of tension, –only their cast matter to serve the routine logic needs, their individuality disappears as their points suffocate, invaded by black toxic plastic.
The artist performs activating the routine as a self-confession of her participation to the urban pace logic. Performing with her own body, she intends to expose the contradiction lying between the fluidity of her own body and the rigidity of her standardised environment.
Video credit: Sarah White
Dominoes' mektoub
2017.
140 x 180 x 100 cm.
aluminium sheets, automotive wire, embroidery, scaffold clamp, blind rivets, bolts, nuts, washers.
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Mektoub literally meaning “written” in Arabic, is often used as a way of saying “it is inscribed” or “it is meant to be”.
Dominoes’ tiles when understood for their content and not their form seek to reach collateral connections by understanding their own dual nature. They construct a community web where each tile is a part of the global structure balance. One tile owns unbalance reach closer to the probability of numeration equilibrium through connections. The fragility of the balanced harmony allows a breach instant of creative tension.
Dominoes could be here understood as humans, forming and shaping the structure of a community, allowing the architecture to support them instead of shaping them.
Surrendering to what is meant to be, — a powerful moment of tension understanding one tile duality, allowing the creation of consequential movement (fan), form (pattern of the embroidery) and colour (red + blue = purple).
Dominoes’ mektoub seeks to question urban segregative architecture and to highlight the creative power of community-based societal structure.
Photo credit: Alessandra Sormani
Looking at
2017.
200 x 80 x 80 cm.
aluminium sheets, blind rivets, bolts, nuts, washers.
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Looking at presents an analysis of social segregation, questioning the essence of our contemporary societal system.
The work is inspired by a text written by the artist Looking at (click to read). It reflects on the origin and the built-up of the artist’s self-segregation in the urban context.
The sculpture presents a systematic construction build on and from an outdated construction, while already reaching to start a new process of construction.
It intents to question the necessity of a systematic structure to build from the destruction of another one.
Photo credit: Alessandra Sormani
I dispose
2016.
200 x 200 x 150 cm.
aluminium sheets, blind rivets, bolts, nuts, washers, metal wire, pulley wheels, performer.
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I dispose is a confession of the consumerist behaviour of the artist herself. As a quest for more collective responsibility, I dispose’s process built up as construction, from a first systematic sculpture to a new system constructed from the ripped off part of the first mechanism. In the performative process of disposing of her own work, the artist wrote the text I dispose (click to read), as an attempt to understand and question the collective understanding of ownership in consumerist physicality.
As one takes the handle to pull, the systematic mechanism built up, mimicking the buyer’s action to bring closer to oneself as an act of ownership.
The sculptural elements are inspired by the supermarket-scape of shelves and escalators, being themselves objects of systematic construction intending to guide a consumerist path.
Photo credit: Alessandra Sormani
Ubuntu
2016.
500 x 500 x 300 cm.
aluminium sheets, steel tubes, fabric, scaffold clamps, blind rivets, bolts, nuts, washers, metal wire, pulley wheels, performers.
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Ubuntu, meaning literally 'human-ness” in Nguni language is a Southern African philosophy relying on the inter-connectedness of the whole.
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By pushing the doors to enter the room, the unconscious viewer chooses without noticing to surrender to the proposed path. As the structure awakes, natural physics' law of gravity and motion operate in synchronicity and exert a balanced tension between polarities. Thrown back in a unified field, the performer contributes involuntarily to the whole.
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The structure arises as an absolute metaphysical intelligence being activated by the unification of the human to the All.
Photo credit: Alessandra Sormani
One
2016.
300 x 500 x 300 cm.
Metal, plastic, video.
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One wishes to let the observer wander through a rhythm of unified dualities. It merges various layers of dual occurrences into a single environment.
Mimicking the shadows of the material presence, the virtual projected video challenges the sculpture's physicality. The metal's rigidity complements the plastic's flexibility. The purple (blue+red, unification of cold+hot) and the green (blue+yellow, the unification of dark+light) of the virtual projection questions the black and white of the dual physical reality.
As the motion starts, the shadows of the physical sculpture blend into the concentric movements of the non-material video, unifying the factual and the metaphysical.
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To achieve a total experience of the one, the viewer is immersed in this dynamic internal back and forth between dualities. Through this cyclic continuous movement, each pole is given an impulse to reach for each other. As the opposites unify, the energy gets intuitively recycled as two complementary colours evolving in a new one.
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Photo credit: Alessandra Sormani
Breath of Brahma
2015.
500 x 120 x 120 cm.
mirror and mixed technics on wood.
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Breath of Brahma presents a theatrical scene where the viewer is invited to step on a soft mirror-topped pedestal.
As the outer's perspective grows to an inner stage, the seeming division among the layers of circles transmutes in a single manifest organism. Physically occurring at the centre and suggested over images at both ends, his energy expands in a universal omnipresence. The physical distance becomes null as the central presence radiates through the reflection of a 3D reality in an infinite unified 2D image.
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The chaotic 'toxic look-alike' textures extend gradually from dark to brightness, revealing the wholeness within the viewer as a stable and balanced yet dynamic internal movement, arising the conscious of his own self.
The perception of depth allows the viewer to get immersed into a spatial experience, at the core of the 'Unified Field'. The passive viewer transfigures and performs as part of the work. Transposed back in the wholeness, the balance between his own conscious and unconsciousness can harmoniously arise.