SOUFIANE ABABRI – HAUNTED LIVES
2018-05-07Ababri was born in Tangiers, a city famous for its verbal jousting which was observed by many a wandering author and immortalised in the works of Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kessel. He brings to bear on Tangiers what Genet called his “magnifying judgements”, in this case an outlook that transforms the reality of East and West and which is asserted in Ababri’s aesthetic and literary choices.
It is easy to imagine the artist giving into the pleasure of simply wandering, catching unposed, candid photos (in moments of Genet-like complicity) of fleeting fragments of desire to inspire his drawings; sketches that portray his favourite themes that are seemingly thrown in the observer’s face without regret. Right from the start, it’s all about virility, but a different kind of virility, an abrupt analysis that goes from dialectic to tragic thoughts. “I think a lot about the role violence has played in the history of forms and the mechanisms of domination and how I can produce work that negates them”, Ababri explains.
Opposite – Bed work, 2017-2018
Exhibition runs through to June 16th, 2018
Praz-Delavallade
5 rue des Haudriettes
75003 Paris
