Zoulikha Bouabdellah: Entre Zouleikha et Antiope, j’ai perçu un fil

The gallery presents "Entre Zouleikha et Antiope, j’ai perçu un fil" (Between Zouleikha and Antiope, I Perceived a Thread), a solo exhibition by Zoulikha Bouabdellah, who here continues her exploration of power dynamics and the traces they leave on bodies, narratives, and emotions. This exhibition opens a new layer of reflection by focusing on the figure of illegitimate desire—embodied notably by Zouleikha, the woman who pursues Joseph in Jewish and Quranic traditions—and by invoking other marginalized presences throughout history and mythology.

 

Zouleikha embodies both the force of the female gaze and its exclusion; she is the desiring body turned into fault, the active presence reduced to silence. This act of reactivation summons other relegated figures: Antiope, exiled and erased despite her foundational role; and Venus, whose displayed adultery becomes both spectacle and instrument of control over bodies and intimacy. All embody a structural violence rooted in the idea of natural domination, an idea that today is being deconstructed with increasing urgency.

 

In the exhibition, drawings, collages, photographs, and knives with vegetal blades become gestures of reactivation. For Zoulikha Bouabdellah, the aim is not to illustrate myths, but to traverse them, to divert them, moving between the offensive and the fragile, between the sharp and the fertile. Her knives, inspired as much by flora as by ritual weapons, evoke an inverted hunt: not to kill, but to reveal—to resurface what has been repressed. She continues here a gesture initiated in some of her paintings, where lace, deliberately torn, becomes an act of unveiling: delicacy turns political, and the wound becomes a language.

 

Like this lacework, the forms she creates open a breach in the visible surface, allowing other narratives and other forces to emerge. By reactivating figures rendered invisible or humiliated, Zoulikha Bouabdellah refuses imposed roles and questions the place granted—or denied—to marginalized subjectivities. Antiope, Venus, and Zouleikha: names that speak of exclusion, but also of the promise of reclaimed meaning.