French artists Ymane Fakhir, Faycal Baghriche and Katia Kameli are of North African origin. And their work reflects their experiences of living between European and Arab cultures. Their debut show in Dubai features photographic artworks that explore notions of displacement, belonging, transience and hybrid identities. The exhibition is curated by Julia Marchand, and its title, “Pierre qui Roule ...” which means “rolling stone”, refers to movement across different territories and cultures. While Baghriche and Kameli’s work dwells on contrasting spaces to explore the “third space” in between, Fakhir examines objects that have been uprooted from their original context. Each artist challenges viewers to look at familiar places and traditions from a fresh perspective. And by investigating what is lost and gained through journeys between different places and cultures, the three artists both support and contest the adage, “a rolling stone gathers no moss”.
Fakhir was born in Casablanca, Morocco, and lives in Marseille. She is interested in looking at social rituals in a new context. Her latest series, titled “Socle (Pedestal)”, focuses on wedding rituals through photographs of traditional Moroccan wedding cake stands. Because the wedding cakes are missing from the pictures, the decorative, multitiered, white cake stands, photographed against a white background, simply look like sculptural forms. By decontextualising these pedestals from their functional and ritualistic associations, the artist has uprooted them from tradition and cultural specificity and transformed them into abstract forms that are open to a universal interpretation. The barely visible, colourless, empty pedestals speak about absence, displacement, the need to blend in with the environment, and the consequent loss of identity.
Paris-based Baghriche, who was born in Algeria, is exhibiting a series titled “Musallat”, featuring images of office spaces in Montreal, Canada, that have been converted to Muslim prayer rooms. The rooms in his pictures are empty, but the artist involves his viewers in the narrative by orienting his camera so that viewers face the same direction that Muslims turn towards during prayer. By juxtaposing Western architecture with Islamic tradition, commerce with spirituality and familiar rituals with an unfamiliar space, the artist creates an unsettled feeling of an “in between” space. The theme of replicating a certain culture and tradition in a new environment is further highlighted by a striking image of an abandoned film set recreating Makkah in the Moroccan desert.
As an Algerian, who was born in France and lives in Paris, Kameli wants to investigate a hybrid “third space” where identities and cultures overlap. In a work titled “NeoWestern”, the artist has used a building in Algeria, with a strange blend of traditional North African, French colonial and modern-day-Dubai-influenced architecture, as a metaphor for cultures in transition and her own hybrid identity. Similarly, in “Friday” you see a seaside locality in Algeria, with a smart new modern house next to a crumbling French colonial style home. In the foreground, two groups of people are enjoying a day out on the beach. “I am quite comfortable with the idea of belonging to both places as well as not belonging to either of them. I know I have to build a ‘third space’ in between for myself. The empty chair on the beach in the centre of this picture represents that space,” Kameli says.
In other pictures, she plays with the idea of how two diverse things connect and relate with each other through images of a home being built next to a nuclear reactor and a circus tent pitched in the city with a zebra and a camel grazing nearby. Kameli is also displaying a video titled “Dissolution”, dealing with the desire of Algerians to escape to the West, movement between places and cultures, and the space in between.
“Pierre qui Roule ...” will run at Etemad gallery until May 30.
Jyoti Kalsi is an arts enthusiast based in Dubai.
