Memories of a Solitary Cruise : Soufiane Ababri

Communiqué de presse
Memories of a solitary cruise is an immersive journey into fantasy, western representations and projections about what the Orient is. The exhibition’s starting point is a public policy polling survey made in the United States in 2015 which found that 30% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats said they support ‘bombing Agrabah’ – the fictional nation of Disney’s Aladdin – the pool emphasis a whopping 41% of Donald Trump voters favor bombing Agrabah adding to the evidence indicating that his support is disproportionately drawn from the least knowledgeable parts of the electorate.
 

This tragi-comic news suddenly reveals the strength of collective belief mechanisms and in this case raises the question of how exoticism influences the way the ‘exotic subject’ is perceived and how he is determined as other. Soufiane Ababri uses parodic tools to deconstruct the multiple layered construction of what exoticism should be in the eyes of a Western viewer.

 

He will wander among Edward Said’s writings such as Orientalism and known as one of the most influential scholarly books of the 20th century. In that essay, Said examines Western scholarship of the “Orient,” specifically of the ArabIslamic world argues that early scholarship by Westerners in that region was biased and projected a false and stereotyped vision of “otherness” on the Islamic published in 1978 world that facilitated and supported Western colonial policy.

 

Ababri has been fascinated by the ancestral Turkish wrestling tradition which is devoid of any form of ambiguity in the Turkish context assured by a strong stance of virility and a highly hetero-normative social structure. What if the archetypical figure of the wrestler could be a window to reexamine queer theories within the Turkish context...? Moreover, the playful dialog between these references intends to reveal the complexity of domination mechanisms and beyond that the long existing frictions between Northern and Southern countries. The exhibition will gather a body of new bedworks, including previously unseen scales, a performative video as well as a new body of

sculptural works in ceramics.
Vues de l'exposition
Œuvres
Exhibition Text