Faire peau neuve: Zoulikha Bouabdellah

lilia ben salah is pleased to present Faire peau neuve (Turning a new leaf), a solo exhibition by Franco-Algerian artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah, on view from February 8th to March 18th, 2023. The exhibition brings together a body of new pieces gathered around concepts of curation and desire, incorporating drawing into the artist's practice for the first time.

The œuvre of Zoulikha Bouabdellah (1977, b. Moscow, lives and works in Casablanca and Montréal-du-Gers) unfolds across multiple mediums (collages, photography, films, installations, texts). A graduate of the Ecole de Paris-Cergy, the artist has developed a powerful practice probing social-cultural archetypes and prevailing representations, notably that of the female body within patriarchal culture. Attempting to deconstruct these standards, her practice interrogates the construction of images, desire and the conflicts that it incites, as well as the establishment of contemporary icons. For Faire peau neuve, the artist kept in mind the writings of Gaston Bachelard and his “The Poetics of Space,” in which the body is both inhabitant and compartment. Beyond all binarity or essentialization of the other, it’s about taking place. 

Faire peau neuvepresents a series of twelve drawings entitled Sang d’encre (Worried sick) in which the artist explores the properties of ink on rice paper. The exhibition articulates the impoverishing violence of a hedonistic society that cultivates perpetual pleasure, forestalling the independence of bodies. The space of gender on which Zoulikha Bouabdellah works is that of non-binary, of transness. That of “and,” that of the type of liminality that Deleuze enunciates when describing Godard and his editing, such as in the collages of the series Fil rouge (Red thread), which become a site of a possible decolonization of the gaze. By the means of a restorative aesthetic, the exhibition is more a site of repair than mere social surface. 

The works of Zoulikha Bouabdellah offer the possibility of leaving behind invisibility as a survival strategy. In proposing a new geography of desire, her practice invites us to extricate ourselves from the prevailing framework in order to build a shared construction, a new barbary* as a site of attainable dreams. 

By Agnès Violeau, January 2023.

Excerpts from the exhibition essay. Translated from the French.

*Barbarian from the Greek “barbaroi,” they who live elsewhere.