Monday 30 November 2009

Hobb, Zoulikha Bouabdellah at La Bank Galerie, Paris

I was nervous, upon entering the gallery showing Zoulikha Bouabdellah’s new work, that I would not like it - perhaps because I admire the artist herself as well as her previous work. In fact, Hobb, Bouabdellah’s second solo show at la Bank, demonstrated an aesthetic refinement and artistic maturity worthy of the complex themes the work purports to explore and represent.
In the upper level of the gallery hang enlarged Arabic letters rendered in glossy and stark black and red paint. Red unequivocally suggests passion. The black and coarse volcanic texture of the few large canvases on which bleed red letters, on the other hand, suggests tragedy and brutality. Plexiglass sheets depict an unusual, ambiguous couple, a blond bikini clad woman and a dark shadow-like man.
The slideshow showing in the lower level of the gallery brings to the fore the subtle and convoluted narratives of romance at play in the Arabic writing exhibited in the upper gallery that unfortunately remain unreadable to much of the public. Black and white images taken from the Kama Sutra are projected onto the wall of the gallery. Superimposed on the grainy soft toned images, Arabic letters espouse the lines of the interlaced bodies of two lovers. The lines of the letters and that of the bodies meet up approximately. The fusing of the two therefore seems accidental rather than calculated. Hobb, or love, is what they read.
That the Arabic letters form a language of love is only clear upon reading the translation. Once understood, Zoulikha’s work therefore works towards confounding the usual associations between the Arabic language and that of terrorism and religious extremism that together flood the web, television, airwaves and the printed news. Instead, Arabic is portrayed as a language of incredible poetic depth, like it becomes over and over under the hand of its many gifted writers, poets and lyricists. A poetic heritage that influences the daily life of many an Arabic speaker but that nonetheless, is often condoned by the regimes of Arabic speaking countries in association with carnal or human love - rather than in its pious and mystical form.